Visual Discourse Analysis Research Articles

Representations of ‘progressive fatherhood’ in postcolonial Zimbabwe: binaries, ambivalences and ambiguities

The aim of this article is to explore how the Swedish ideal of ‘progressive fatherhood’ is represented in the context of a photo competition and exhibition organised by the Swedish Embassy in postcolonial Zimbabwe. Drawing on Rose’s (2016) method of visual discourse analysis (VDA), the article examines how Zimbabwean fathers are represented as being progressive through both image and text, and the extent to which these representations could be seen to challenge or ‘mimic’ (Bhabha, 1984) the Swedish ideal of ‘progressive fatherhood’. While some of these representations reproduced certain binaries, they also presented the kind of ambivalent, ‘postfeminist’ relationship with gender equality that has been identified in other contexts. Overall, these representations were found to go beyond colonial mimicry by challenging and extending the Swedish ideal of ‘progressive fatherhood’ beyond the context of the middle-class, nuclear family.

The visual international politics of the European refugee crisis: Tragedy, humanitarianism, borders

The European refugee crisis has been communicated visually through images such as those of Alan Kurdi lying dead on the beach, by body bags on the harbor front of Lampedusa, by people walking through Europe and by border guards and fences. This article examines the broader visual environment within which EU policy-making took place from October 2013 to October 2015. It identifies ‘tragedy’ as the key term used by the EU to explain its actions and decisions and points out that discourses of humanitarianism and border control were both in place. The article provides a theoretical account of how humanitarianism and border control might be visualized by news photography. Adopting a multi-method design and analyzing a dataset of more than 1000 photos, the article presents a visual discourse analysis of five generic iconic motifs and a quantitative visual content analysis of shifts and continuity across four moments in time. The article connects these visual analyses to the policies and discourses of the EU holding that the ambiguity of the EU’s discourse was mirrored by the wider visual environment.

Gender conversations in Zimbabwe: A precursor of male gaze in visual art practices

Masculine hegemonic predisposition dominates the gender culture in Zimbabwe. From this perspective, the notion of the male gaze entails that visual interpretation, amongst other things, at encoding and decoding levels is consequently performed with a specific hegemonic ‘lens’. It follows that much of visual art, films and advertisements are created to please and reinforce a male-biased perspective which renders women powerless and subordinate. In the visual arts, this is particularly evident in the manner that the representation of space reflect this bias. Guided by critical phenomenology, this study adopted an interpretive methodology informed by decolonial views to explore and challenge gender identity constructions in visual culture. Engagement with gender literature and visual discourse analysis revealed the demeaning effects of patriarchy and also coloniality on women in much of Zimbabwean art. The discourse of decolonial activist art opposes the male gaze and aims to disrupt the power dynamics which position women to be inferior or less visible in the public art space. This type of activist art is concerned with the possible critical transformative impact of the visual arts in contesting and resisting gender dichotomy, imbalances and inequality.

Wayumi: Ficciones sobre el Otro

New Tribes Mission (NTM) is a transnational group of Christian missionaries that have the main goal to evangelize and contact indigenous people isolated in América, Asia, and Africa. This essay is a case study of the video “Wayumi-Your adventure into tribal missions // New Tribes Mission” produced by NTM (2009). The audiovisual circulating and is on the web. The article problematizes indigenous peoples representation through the name that the missionaries give them such as “unreached ethnic groups” and works conceptual discussions debates such as authenticity, exotism, the noble savage and colonialism. Methodologically, the paper focuses on visual discourse analysis and semiotic analysis.

WHAT DO YOU WEIGH? POPULAR FEMINISM AND BODY POSITIVITY AS MEDIATED DISEMBODIMENT

This study analyzes the Instagram page, @i_weigh, and its relation to body positivity discourses. Drawing on a visual discourse analysis of 300 Instagram posts from the @i_weigh account, this study suggests that body positivity movements may be increasingly disembodied in a self-representational era hallmarked by popular feminism. On 16 March 2018, actress and activist Jameela Jamil posted a photo to Instagram, obscuring her body with textual identifiers like “great friends” and “I laugh every day.” This post marked the launch of the Instagram account @i_weigh. This page, founded and maintained by Jamil, posts submissions from Instagram users answering the call to “weigh” themselves beyond the corporeal. This movement, now millions in reach, signals a departure from the conventions of body positivity. Rather than discovering empowerment through the body, @i_weigh encourages its participants to publicly privilege external relationships, social identities, and economic opportunities in an effort to look past the body. @i_weigh discursively constructs a mediated disembodiment, characterized by its liminal visual representation and categorization of the self through narratives of resilience and strength, claiming marginalized identities, and extra-self connection. The interaction of liminality and mediated disembodiment is reflective of self-representation in an age of popular feminism, placing the responsibility back on women for their own empowerment and production of selfhood while ignoring the socio-cultural frameworks that create a need for empowerment in the first place.

Ballerina with PTSD: imagining Russia in contemporary Black Widow comics

ABSTRACT This article offers a visual discourse analysis of the Marvel comic superheroine Black Widow in the 2010 miniseries Black Widow–Deadly Origins, the 2016 Black Widow–S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Most Wanted series and issues 103 and 104 of Tales of Suspense from2018. Focusing on issues of gender and cultural representation, it identifies the Widow as a figuration of Russia through the tropes of the ballerina and the trauma patient. It shows how the comic books deploy the comic form to create visual narratives on the intersection of gender and trauma. Furthermore, it analyzes how the images of the Widow bring forward trauma and at the same time confirms symbols, images and ideas about Russia. To argue that the meaning of trauma embodied by the Black Widow is a symbol for Russia as such, the article contextualises the individual visual and textual narratives of current Black Widow iterations within the long history of the Black Widow figure as point to negotiate the relationship between the USA and Russia within the Marvel comic universe. Thereafter, it relates contemporary imaginations about Russia through the figure of the Black Widow to current and long-standing cultural ideas about the Russian country, history and its people.

Radical vulnerability: selfies as a Femme-inine mode of resistance

ABSTRACT In Western philosophy, vulnerability and femininity have been positioned as subordinate and weak. Reparative readings of selfies can offer a way to reclaim both vulnerability and femininity as generative, connective, and political. In this paper, I examine femme selfies collected during an online ethnography of femme Internet culture on Instagram. I draw from critical feminist scholarship on vulnerability and reparative readings of selfies to argue that selfies are a practice in vulnerability, and therefore a mode of embracing the feminine and feminine resistance. Using visual discourse analysis to read the selected selfies, I argue that femmes strategically mobilise vulnerability via selfies to (re)shape femme identity, create femme communities, and to make political claims about femme lives.

Shifting surface

This research explores how satellite images of Arctic sea ice contribute to climate change discourse. Different discourses require distinct responses. Policy measures are contingent upon representation, be it i.e. a threat or opportunity. The representations discussed are by the NSIDC and NASA, which hold a visual hegemony. First, the introduction discusses visual studies in policy research and identifies a simplified dichotomy of a threat discourse and environmental citizenship. Moreover, the methodology of visual discourse analysis based on poststructuralism is described. The delineated images portray a vertical, planar view allowing for spatial reference. Arctic sea ice is a visible climate change effect and the absence of boundaries, intervisuality with the Earthrise icon and focus on environmental effects support a discourse of citizenship.

Why do soldiers swap illicit pictures? How a visual discourse analysis illuminates military band of brother culture

Military service members have been taking and circulating illicit images for decades, and soldier-produced illicit images are a regular and coherent category of international images. Focusing on two case studies – Abu Ghraib images and images of hazing – the argument put forward in this article is that soldier-generated illicit images are not simply photographic evidence, or accidental by-products, of exceptional military activities; rather, these images – and the practices associated with these images – are central to, and reinforce aspects of, military band of brother culture. Soldier-produced illicit images establish a visual vernacular that normalizes particular practices within military communities. Moreover, the practices of producing, circulating and consuming these images convey explicit messages to service members about acceptable behaviour and norms around loyalty and secrecy. A method of visual discourse analysis is developed and employed to examine the acts captured in soldier-generated illicit images as well as the practices linked to the production, circulation and consumption of images. Building on existing work on military culture and images and international relations, this article makes a unique contribution by systematically analysing soldier-produced illicit images in order to gain insights about internal military culture and group dynamics.

Symbolic significance of newspaper titles: analysis of patterns in print newspaper titles in the digital age

The titles of print newspapers around the world are culturally and politically diverse but have somecommon themes and patterns of logic. While the words Post, Times, Evening, Daily, News, Truth, andIndependent are among the most popular, creative variations of elements in titles reflect each newspaper’srecognizable identity on the global news map. Some titles refer to a unique historical legacy, somerepresent cultural values, others highlight specific geographic cities, states or areas, some titles signifythe concept of “freshness” of the news. This exploratory study aims to investigate the range of printnewspaper titles of seven representative countries – the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia,Kazakhstan, India, and South Africa. Using grounded theory and textual and visual discourse analysis asmethods of newspaper titles, this study deliberately excluded all digitally born news outlets and focusedonly on titles that have originated from legacy news brands. By compiling and analyzing the online andprint slogans of approximately the top 50 newspapers from each country, this paper identifies certaintrends and distinctions among title and slogan choices.Key words: newspaper titles, google slogans, patterns of newspaper titles, Kazakhstan, USA, France,Russia, Great Britain, cultural meaning, symbolic significance.

White Women Smiling? Media Representations of Women at the 2018 Commonwealth Games

In this article we analyze images of sportswomen from four media outlets over the course of the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games in Australia. Through visual discourse analysis we find that despite structural changes to increase gender equality at the Commonwealth Games—which for the first time ensured equal opportunities for men and women to win medals—sportswomen were still depicted in a very narrow way, and intersectional representations were mainly excluded. Though the quantity of images of women had increased, the ‘quality’ of these images was poor in terms of representing sportswomen in their diversity. We still have far to go if we are to embrace women in their multiplicity—and to recognize that women can be strong, capable, butch, femme, and varied in their range of expressions of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity.

Encouraging Activism Through Art: Preservice Teachers Challenge Censorship

According to the American Library Association, book censorship is on the rise. While many censored books are adolescent novels, some titles for younger children are challenged as well. Books dealing with difficult social issues have been targets for censors historically, but recent attacks have focused on books portraying members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and other sexual identities (LGBTQ+) community. The goal of this qualitative study was to build prospective teachers’ (PTs’) knowledge of censorship while also providing an opportunity for them to take a sociopolitical stance. Students in a children’s literature course read source materials and reacted by creating a transmediation that used some form of art. Lenses for data analysis included qualitative research, critical discourse analysis, and visual discourse analysis. The first major theme focused on freedom and democracy and the threat censorship poses. Within this category, two subthemes were identified: (1) children having freedom to learn about real-world issues and (2) children having freedom to read books that meet their personal needs. A second major theme focused on how PTs thought people should respond to censorship. Responses expressing fear and/or confusion about censorship were coded as demonstrating a teacher dilemma, while examples showing a challenge to censorship were coded as demonstrating resistance. Findings indicate that PTs were shocked by what they learned about censorship, and many of them engaged in culture jamming, which involves using the arts to challenge oppressive systems. Many used art to critique censorship and advocate for children’s rights. This study challenges the common cultural assumption that teaching is an apolitical or neutral activity.

Illustrating Political Discourse: Comics and the Rohingya Refugee Crisis

This article explores the possibility of examining a storytelling platform, which has largely been ignored by scholars of visual politics about Southeast Asia: comics. It particularly describes how comics can serve as a discursive mechanism for visual representation within the purview of the Rohingya refugee crisis in the region. Drawing from post-structuralism and visual discourse analysis as the theoretical and methodological basis of the research, the article considers a case of a long-form online comic’s engagement withthe refugee crisis,with particular attention to the criticisms about Aung San Suu Kyi and the bloody military campaign against the Rohingya minorities in Myanmar. By specifically looking into the text-image discourses and inter-textual components of the comics, this article attempts to demonstrate that the ability of comics to “speak” politics is still dependent on international news sources and wider debates, which shape the ways in which the comic artists are able to frame their work. In this case, the use of comics as a story-telling platform, however, also suggests the agency of refugees to be portrayed as political-security actors. Although the article generally focuses on the case of the Rohingya refugee crisis, it also draws attention to the contention that scholars of Southeast Asian visual politics can most profitably engage with other regional issues by turning their attention to the dynamic role of comics as an alternative medium and source of data towards the analysis of threat construction and political-security discourse about Southeast Asia.

Visualization, participation and rhetoric: The discursive power of landscape design representations in participatory processes

Visual landscape design representations facilitate communication and knowledge exchange during participatory planning and design processes. The production of representations is considered to be a discursive act: actors and institutions construct knowledge with a certain authority and credibility through the use of visual expression. We aim to study the context in which the production of representations is embedded and how this context manifests itself in the communicative qualities of design representations. We present a visual discourse analysis of landscape design representations, employing empirical examples from the transdisciplinary design competition Rebuild by Design. The analysis uncovers interdependencies among three components of the visual discourse: the arrangement of participatory processes, media interactivity and the visual rhetoric embedded in the composition and style of the image. A conscious use of these discursive components could help prevent miscommunication, manage participant expectations and increase the validity of participatory design process outcomes.

The Birth of Petroleum Path Dependence: Oil Narratives and Development in the North

ABSTRACT This article focuses on three moments in Alaskan history that were mediated through southern visual narratives in the 1970s: the discovery of oil; the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act; and the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. First, the article introduces the media context of the time and the news sources used in the visual discourse analysis that follows. It offers a description of the introduction of television nightly news and discusses the sources chosen for analysis: NBC Evening News and CBS Evening News. Second, the article discusses the print photojournalism of National Geographic magazine and the New York Times. Visuals published in these outlets from 1967 through to the completion of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in 1977 are then analyzed as discursive negotiations between Native paternalism, extermination, and self-determination for Native rights, and between environmentalism and development. The article argues that there were visual tensions between Native activists and negotiators and the strong legacies of American settler colonialism present in American reporting of 1970s Alaska. Finally, the article deconstructs the metanarrative of oil in Alaska during the 1973 oil crisis—namely, the essentiality of producing domestic oil during the 1973 oil crisis to secure the independence of the United States.

Visual analysis of information world maps: An exploration of four methods

Information researchers increasingly use participatory, arts-based methods to better understand the social contexts of individuals and populations. However, it remains rare to engage in qualitative analysis of the resulting visual artefacts. This article explores approaches to analysing visual media generated through a specific arts-based method, information world mapping (IWM), an interdisciplinary draw-and-talk technique that elicits data about individuals’ social information worlds. Here, we test four approaches to analysing visual media generated through IWM: directed qualitative content analysis (QCA), compositional interpretation, conceptual analysis and visual discourse analysis using situational analysis (SA). QCA was effective in creating an overview of participants’ information practices, yet raised concern regarding interpretive bias. Using an inductive taxonomy for compositional interpretation, we identified genre conventions for IWMs. Conceptual analysis resulted primarily in a reflection of the research procedures and epistemology. SA, while time-consuming, generated a large amount of rich data, including discourses and power relations that were not identified in previous analysis of textual data. In a reversal of our previous stance that cautioned against IWM analysis, we encourage other researchers to consider integrated or secondary visual analysis of IWMs.

Visibilities and the Analysis of Interdiscourse: The Case of Digital Health Practices

This contribution examines the study of interdiscourses in visual discourse analysis. An expanded theory of interdiscursivity considers the integration, plausibility, and popularization of meanings, offering a perspective on ways of legitimating interventions and instructions or guidelines for action. Based on the reconstruction of meaning assignments, the expanded interdiscourse theory presented here opens up the possibility of tracing how power is exercised through the occupation of particular discourse positions, whether these are of a linguistic or of a pictorial/visual nature. With reference to poststructuralist theories, assignments of meaning are seen as inherently temporary and unstable. Whatever social reality is, it remains at least partially ambiguous and is determined anew in conflicts or tensions surrounding hegemonic negotiations. Visual discourse analysis thus focuses on the precarious nature of hegemony-building processes. How such adjustments of meaning through visualizations can be investigated within the framework of interdiscursive analysis is discussed using the example of the digitalization of body data via wearables.

Be Still, Be Present: Black Girl Yoga and Digital Counter Spaces

Controlling images of Black womanhood and the exclusivity of mainstream wellness spaces complicate Black women’s relationship to yoga. The purpose of this study is to explore how a popular Instagram page, Black Girl Yoga, engages Black women with the spiritual practice. A combined Visual Discourse Analysis (VDA) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) revealed that BGY engages Black women with yoga by a) constructing a culture of inclusivity, b) affirming the individuality of Black women, c) intertextualizing African American cultural discourse and yogic principles, d) decentering Black women’s oppression, and e) creating continuity with physical yoga counter spaces. Implications for theory and praxis are discussed.

Genome-wide search of nucleosome patterns using visual analytics.

MotivationThe Burrows-Wheeler transform (BWT) is widely used for the fast alignment of high-throughput sequence data. This method also has potential applications in other areas of bioinformatics, and it can be specially useful for the fast searching of patterns on coverage data from different sources.ResultsWe present a nucleosome pattern search method that converts levels of nucleosomal occupancy to a sequence-like format to which BWT searches can be applied. The method is embedded in a nucleosome map browser, ‘Nucleosee‘, an interactive visual tool specifically designed to enhance BWT searches, giving them context and making them suitable for visual discourse analysis of the results. The proposed method is fast, flexible and sufficiently generic for the exploration of data in a broad and interactive way.Availability and implementationThe proposed algorithm and visual browser are available for testing at http://cpg3.der.usal.es/nucleosee. The source code and installation packages are also available at https://github.com/rodrigoSantamaria/nucleosee.Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Understanding OECD representations of teachers and teaching: a visual discourse analysis of covers in OECD documents

ABSTRACTOECD dominance in the international educational policy discourse in the developed regions of the world, particularly in promoting teaching policy, has been long acknowledged. While many works have explored the organisation’s verbal discourse, no study has considered exploring its visual discourse. To close that gap, we employed a visual discourse analysis on the covers of OECD documents pertaining to teachers and teaching (i.e., TALIS and ISTP). The analysis found that OECD’s covers drew on two discourses, a conservative discourse and a liberal diversity discourse. However, the latter was entangled with constructions which serve to maintain a conservative order.