Danila Tkachenko  is just 25 but has already won a World Press Photo first-place prize for a series called “Escape,” about men who have withdrawn from society to live as hermits, and a LensCulture Exposure award. Now work from his recent series “Restricted areas” has been shortlisted in both the Magnum 30 Under 30  awards and the 2015 Sony World Photography Awards. The series documents Russia’s “secret cities”—once important buildings and machinery now abandoned as relics of the past. “I feel like I am an archeologist encountering the traces of a past civilization,” he tells the British Journal of Photography.

With no notice, Islam Yaken slipped away from his middle-class home in Egypt to join the Islamic State in Syria, and his family and close friends have not seen him since, except in propaganda and training videos. New York Times video journalist Mona El-Naggar’s short film Three Friends, One Jihadi explores Yaken’s story by talking with people who knew him in Egypt. The film offers insights on why ISIS has been able to lure  young people to its fight. “It is a phenomenon that is as much a threat to Muslim nations as to the West, if not more so, as thousands of young men volunteer as foot soldiers, ready to kill and willing to die,” writes El-Naggar.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series of presentations made at ICON8 in Portland. The ICON8 Educator's Symposium celebrated new and innovative methodologies for teaching illustration in the 21st Century.  This two-part event at the Pacific Northwest College of Art as part of the ICON8 pre-conferneceworkshops, July 9-10, 2014, featured a presentation of papers by a global selection of noted educators, and a round-table discussion on traditional and online learning. ...