Visual Discourse Analysis Research Articles

When pictures aren’t pretty: Deconstructing punitive literacy practices

Young children frequently tell visual stories, drawing pictures to record and share their thoughts, feelings and understanding. How and what young children describe through art, especially when written language is not an option, is the focus of this interpretive analysis. A series of pictures by John, a 6-year-old boy, were drawn across the academic year at challenging moments when he exhibited distressing and/or alienating behaviour. We studied John’s drawings of his misbehaviour, as depicted in these action plans, over the course of 8 months, how they appeared and evolved over the year, and what we learned by doing a close analysis of these visual texts. Specifically, as teacher educators thinking back upon our own experiences as novice teachers, we wanted to know what kinds of practices, such as this discipline action plan, implemented in schools and in our classrooms use literacy practices in a punitive way? Drawing from visual discourse analysis which includes visual design, we attended to how John used colours, the intensity with which they were applied; how he used shape and line (curved, sharp), the size and volume of objects, the relationship among and between objects in the pictures, and the discourses around which he identified. We also looked across these pictures to see how certain objects (teacher, himself, other students) shifted and were retranslated across images and time, and how, collectively, these pictures wrote an ongoing narrative, one that tells a not-so-pretty story of John’s representation of self in these moments. This analysis forces us to problematize the use of multi-modal literacy practices as a punitive endeavour. Encouraging teachers to evaluate critically what ‘behaviour interventions’ actually do to and for students can provide a powerful platform for meaningful change.

Fashionable (dis-)order in politics: Gender, power and the dilemma of the suit

Abstract Women in political leadership are imprisoned in a double-bind communication: when they perform and dress along feminine patterns, they might be looked as deficient actors in the hard field of politics. When they refuse typical female looks and submit to male dress code, their performance is commented as conspicuous. The global visual political communication in media sends clear signals: nothing changes. Women are still the exception, ‘the other’. The visualized lose-lose situation for female politicians is conceived as symbolical violence. In this article the central piece of clothing - the dark suit – is discussed under cultural perspective, along macro-structural principles of the gender order, as instrument in the repetitive practice of exclusion in politics and within the distribution of media pictures. A visual discourse analysis - a ‘vis-course analysis’ - of international group photos from political events like summits traces fashion practices marking the fields of masculinity and power.

Polar geopolitics: new researchers on the Polar Regions

This introduction to this issue of The Polar Journal champions the work of early career researchers working in the humanities and social sciences addressing themes and topics pertaining to the Polar Regions. Mindful that no collection of essays can be comprehensive, the 10 essays presented here are interdisciplinary and geographically varied, involving writers hailing from institutions based in Australia, Europe and North America. Theoretically and methodologically, the essays presented here use textual and visual analysis, ethnography, discourse analysis, and draw upon theorising pertaining to identity politics, institutional analysis, security studies, cultural nationalism, regimes and governance and futures-based research. While clearly drawing upon the existing scholarship of established scholars, the collection as a whole points to the importance of ongoing capacity building in the social sciences and humanities with regard to the Polar Regions.

Selling Nature In a Resource-based Economy: Romantic/Extractive Gazes and Alberta's Bituminous Sands

Recent literature has explored the interplay between the Romantic gaze and the extractive gaze to conclude that in separating people from nature, both gazes function similarly to subordinate the land to human purposes. Such representations may be seen as part of a wider trend in which media visualizations of nature are based on an implicit ideology, tending to perpetuate and justify existing power relations; those visualizations use images which are increasingly abstract or iconic, and which by force of repetition, replace alternative representations and obscure connections to societal processes such as globalism and consumerism. This article takes up and extends that argument to a critical visual discourse analysis of an official place-branding slideshow produced by the Province of Alberta (Canada), which boasts an economy based significantly on producing non-renewable fossil fuels. In examining that slideshow in terms of Romantic/extractive gazes, this study situates Alberta's rebranding on Corbett's continuum of anthropocentric–ecocentric values; interrogates connections among Alberta's rebranding and invisible flows of power at work in broader, underlying societal processes like globalization, Neoliberalism and consumerism; and tests the commonality of the relationship between extractive and Romantic gazes in light of those processes.

Staging a new South Sudan in the USA: men, masculinities and nationalist performance at a diasporic beauty pageant

This article explores the gendering of cultural nationalism at a South Sudanese beauty pageant with a focus on the promotional work, organizing efforts and performances of men. Through a visual and textual discourse analysis of materials related to the event, as well as a series of interviews with participants, promoters, judges and audience members, I argue that these male participants articulate a distinctly masculinized form of South Sudanese nationalism. They do so by promoting notions of both a shared, militarized and oppressive past and a peaceful, proud and celebratory future. Central to the production of this nationalist imaginary is an emphasis on the healing of past ethnic-regional conflicts within the South and an image of South Sudanese unity and brotherly, non-violent masculinity. However, whilst pageantry emcees, speakers and musicians call on men to build and nurture the ‘New South Sudan’, the event itself emerges as a site for conflict both online and in incidences of physical violence amongst young male attendees. Members of the community understand this conflict to be bound up with a sense of ethnic-regional allegiance as well as a collective crisis experienced by many young men following the war and amidst the challenges of life in the diaspora. In this way, the pageant works to promote South Sudanese nationalism through the efforts, performances and bodies of young men and the scripting of peaceful nationalist masculinities – even as these are contested and contradicted behind the scenes.

“I'm Riskin' It”: Teachers Take On Consumerism

AbstractThis qualitative study investigates how 90 teachers explored critical curriculum through their reading, analysis and creation of counter advertisements. Located in visual discourse analysis, we designed a study to investigate the question “To what extent can teachers engaged in a critical literacy curriculum talk back to messages of consumerism, especially through construction of counter ads? More specifically, we wanted to know: What messages do teachers talk back to when they read and analyze advertisements? How do they critically repackage their advertisement through counter ads they create? and What do teachers' interpretations of advertisements and their counter ads offer educators as insight for creating curriculum?We found that teachers did develop a language of critique for visual and written messages of consumerism, and found that knowing how to analyze visual texts enabled them to understand how to integrate this work into their own critical literacy curriculum.

"What Do Eva and Anna Have to Do with Cervical Cancer?" Constructing Adolescent Girl Subjectivities in Swedish Gardasil Advertisements

This article investigates direct-to-consumer advertising in Sweden for Gardasil, the HPV vaccine, as a contemporary gendered technology of the adolescent girl body. It explores how, by constructing girls as ideal users of the vaccine, advertising campaigns encourage adolescent girls to vaccinate themselves. Using a feminist visual discourse analysis, the article examines how different girl subjectivities are constructed through advertising, and presented as fit for Gardasil use and consumption. It highlights how, along with their parents, adolescent girls in Sweden are encouraged to assume responsibility for managing the risks of cervical cancer in order to help secure their future health, sexuality and normality. It argues that the Gardasil campaign, in being addressed to individual members of the population, serves to articulate global and national discourses of girlhood, sexuality, (sexual) health responsibility, risk management and consumption.

“Ah My Brownin' Dat!”: A Visual Discourse Analysis of the Performance of Vybz Kartel's Masculinity in the Cartoons of the Jamaica Observer

Jamaican deejay vybz KARTEL, Adijah Palmer, can be considered the biggest provocateur and enfant terrible in contemporary Jamaican dancehall. Enjoying the media attention, he is never too shy to confront Jamaican taboo topics in the dancehall. The entertainer is known for crossing the traditional borders of dancehall in categories like space, race, body, genre of music and gender. Apart from this, he is famous for the adaptation of hip-hop codes and styles in his songs. In October 2011, Vybz Kartel's provocative and transgressive lifestyle reached a new scandalous dimension, when he was arrested by the Jamaican police and charged for murder.In this essay I look at the changing images of Vybz Kartei in the cartoons of the Jamaica Observer during 2010-2011. The Jamaica Observer is a daily newspaper in Jamaica with circulation second only to the Jamaica Gleaner. I would like to demonstrate how the deejay's heterosexual masculinity disappears in visual depictions found in the cartoons of the Observer. Through these editorial cartoons, we see the borders between the image of the 'badman' and the homosexual man becoming blurred.In March 2011 Kartei was invited by Professor Carolyn Cooper to give a speech at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, where he admitted that he bleaches his skin.1 There and elsewhere the artiste has spoken about using his body and his tattoos as a medium for communication. Kartei talks about his body as a colouring book.2 His tattoos mention his children, and friends he has lost during his life, as well as drawing a transcultural line between American hip-hop culture and dancehall by using the term 'thug life', an expression which became famous through the late Californian rapper Tupac Shakur, who used the term to describe the circumstances of his life and his work.3 Tupac had a tattoo with this phrase emblazoned on his belly. Kartei, who has mentioned the rapper as a source of his inspiration, has a copy of the tattoo on his forearm.4 Another tattoo on Kartel's fingers visualises his function as the leader of his crew called Gaza. The name Gaza refers to Kartel's community in Portmore.5 Inner-city communities in Kingston often have informal names, which are chosen to underline the violence and the 'badness' of the place and its artistes. The name Gaza is a reference to the Gaza Strip in Israel, a region known for the bloody warfare between rebellious Palestinians and the Israel Defence Forces. Carolyn Cooper describes badmanism as a theatrical pose and relates it to the influence of movie heroes on the Jamaican young men.6 The glorification of aggression and gun violence ensures also patriarchal and hegemonic spaces within which marginalised men in Jamaica can negotiate higher status and more powerful masculine identities.7Kartei further functions as the spearhead of a phenomenon which dancehall scholar Donna P. Hope describes as fashion ova style.8 The term describes what might be called metrosexual clothing and behaviour among males in dancehall mixed with a strong emphasis on heterosexual masculinity. Dancehall masculinity glorifies violence and polygamy and rejects homosexuality. In his performances and songs like Straight Jeans and Fitted, Cake Soap or Freaky Gyal, Kartei promotes feminine or even homosexual-connoted styles and behaviour, such as tight jeans, bleached skin and oral sex:Freaky gyal ah dem gyal deh me luvfreaky woman ah dem gyal deh me luvneva eva see somethin weh me luv suheverytime me f- my c - get suck . . .9Hope suggests that this transgression made it necessary to emphasise in the songs his rejection of male homosexuality.10 Nadia Ellis looks at these statements from a queer positionality. In her essay Out and Bad: Toward a Queer Performance Hermeneu tic in Jamaican Dancehall, she notes that the deejay opens ironically a space for queer masculine free expression through homophobic lyrics.11After Vybz Kartei publicly confessed that he bleaches his skin, his detractors started questioning his sexual orientation. …

Visual discourse of the clove: An analysis on the Ottoman tile decoration art


 
 
 In tile art, one of the world-famous Turkish Handicrafts, a wide variety of patterns are used on tile objects. The most common of these, after the tulip pattern, is the naturalist clove pattern. Different meanings were assigned to this pattern within the boundaries of form, color and design. Identification and perception of these meanings have a special place within the frame of the culture that they relay. In this present study the fields of meaning of the clove pattern frequently used in tile decoration arts among Turkish handicrafts were tried to be determined. By taking Greimas' Actantial Model as the theoretical model, in the study visual discourse analysis of the clove pattern will be made.
 
 

Double exposure: a critical study of preservice teachers’ multimodal public service announcements

AbstractAlthough a great deal of work has been done on the significance of new literacies in ELA teaching and learning, much less has been done on the area of analyzing critically the media that comprise digital projects created by textmakers. Composing with new literacies in mind requires that textmakers locate relevant information, design with particular media in mind that will convey their message, as well as anticipate what the viewer may want to see. However, with nearly unlimited access to images through various search engines, textmakers may be choosing images of convenience rather than content. In her work with preservice teachers, Albers invited them to create Public Service Announcements (PSAs) in response to social issues they saw at play in contemporary and classic literature. Framed in critical multimodal theory, Albers draws upon visual grammar and visual discourse analysis to analyze PSAs to understand how modal choices make visible stable and commonplace assumptions about adolescents, the intended audience for these PSAs.

Territorio, familia y héroe: un análisis de textos escolares chilenos

The findings of a study to identify the imagery of citizenship portrayed in history and geography textbooks in Chile during the transition to democracy are presented in this article. A visual analysis was done of four different textbooks published between 1984 and 2000 for eighth graders in primary school. The method used combined the model of socio-semiotic and visual discourse analysis outlined in the work of Gunter Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen with the model for critical discourse analysis proposed by Norman Fairclough and the analysis of visual elements suggested by Justo Villafane and Norberto Minguez. Qualitative analysis software (Atlas-ti) was used to classify the images. The data initially yielded three categories for analysis: Country, Family and Hero. It was concluded these texts sought to ensure the democratic institutional process without discarding the nationalist and patriotic formula instituted during the military dictatorship.

Captain Britain And The Narration Of Nation*

Captain Britain Weekly (1976–1977) was the first comic book specially created for the British market by New York‐based Marvel Comics. The title character was created as an analogue to Captain America, the legendary American nationalist hero of the so‐named comic book, but with key differences meant to resonate in the British context. I utilize visual and textual discourse analysis to study the narrative and imagery used to introduce this character to British comics fans, and I discuss readers' letters to the editor to evaluate audience response to the character and story lines. Attention is drawn to the hero's origin, which fuses science and magic to construct a paradoxically primordial, yet modern, British identity. Villains in these story lines provide hints about “un‐British” behavior and provide lessons for young readers, with direct moral connections to, and contrasts with, the narratives found in Captain America.

Fostering a hunger for health: Food and the self in ‘The Australian Women’s Weekly’

Over the past decade, consumers in Australia and elsewhere have increasingly been confronted with a fast growing number of health food products. This profusion of health foods is accompanied by a proliferation in popular culture of professional nutritional advice on ‘what is good to eat’. The genre of lifestyle magazines is one popular medium via which healthy eating practices and health foods are frequently reported. In this paper we use a visual discourse analysis of food-related editorial and advertorial content sourced from the long running and popular The Australian Women’s Weekly to investigate how lifestyle magazines have been one important locus for constituting health conscious consumers. Taking up a Foucauldian governmentality perspective we trace how this active, responsible conceptualisation of the consumer, which we refer to as ‘healthy food consumer’, has increased in prevalence in the pages of The Australian Women’s Weekly over time. Based on our analysis we suggest that the editorial and advertorial content offers models of conduct to individuals about what possible preventative activities in which to engage, and plays an important role in shaping how we think about taking care of our health through eating.

Hortus Conclusus: a Visual Discourse Analysis Based on a Critical Literacy Approach to Education

Hortus Conclusus: a Visual Discourse Analysis Based on a Critical Literacy Approach to Education

Features of gender: An analysis of the visual texts of third grade children

How do primary students construct understandings of the opposite sex? In what ways do these constructions manifest in the visual texts created in literacy and language arts classrooms? Using visual discourse analysis (Albers, 2007) and scheme analysis (Sonesson, 1988) as interpretive methods, we analyzed the visual texts created by 23 third grade students created at the end of a unit of study in which students explored gender stereotypes. Findings suggest the need for close readings of the graphic, structural, and semantic information conveyed by visual texts that children create in literacy and language arts classes.