Transcending gender dichotomy through art teacher education in Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe is a patriarchal society characterized by gender dichotomy and male domination that permeates through social, educational and domestic spheres resulting in numerous challenges for art teacher education students. Expanding critical consciousness within art teacher education programmes is an imperative step towards developing art teachers who are self-aware and reflexive concerning the intersections of gender, art and education. This study investigated how engagement with visual art can provoke a heightened critical awareness about gender bias, stereotyping and equity among Zimbabwean art teacher education students. Sixteen selected art teacher education students (eight males and females) at the Great Zimbabwe University participated in the study. Participants were guided by researcher-constructed prompts for purposes of image making, interpretation and dialogue. Visual discourse analysis of the students’ visual narratives and discourse analysis of focus group transcriptions revealed several themes as well as evidence of critical reflection and expanded critical awareness related to gender issues. Visual and dialogic methods offer promise for critical engagement and reconciliation of tensions surrounding issues of gender amongst art teacher education candidates.

The language of lace and embroidery from the court of Louis XIV through to contemporary haute couture

<p>The history of thread work is a story of practicality and functionality, but it is also a tale of power, fashion, virtuosity, decorum, art and culture. Thread work has played a role as a visual language in France for many centuries, continually evolving in its techniques and range of expressive and stylistic possibilities and thus in its significance as a communicative medium. In more recent times, thread work has come to be considered as a form of social and cultural discourse in its own right that is consequently referred to as ‘visual rhetoric’. Following this unique form of visual discourse through the history of fashion allows consideration of the development of identity and gender roles in French society as well as the interrelated narratives of the creative processes involved in the production of lace and embroidery. These reflections lead in turn to consideration of the ways processes of production and consumption were disrupted and transformed by major events, by sumptuary laws and political edicts. The language of thread work has been encoded and decoded by all socio-economic classes, and is underwritten by tensions between power and dependency, rich and poor, light and dark, public show and private domesticity. It has the capacity to express identities and to enhance communities. In more recent times the reconsideration of the value of thread work in the design concepts of haute couture has seen a revitalisation of the appreciation of this medium in an industry associated with luxury, exclusivity and creativity. The language of thread-work remains ambivalent and complex in France today, signifying an innocuous ‘feminine’ pastime on the one hand, and a valued professional skill and cultural heritage on the other.</p>

The language of lace and embroidery from the court of Louis XIV through to contemporary haute couture

<p>The history of thread work is a story of practicality and functionality, but it is also a tale of power, fashion, virtuosity, decorum, art and culture. Thread work has played a role as a visual language in France for many centuries, continually evolving in its techniques and range of expressive and stylistic possibilities and thus in its significance as a communicative medium. In more recent times, thread work has come to be considered as a form of social and cultural discourse in its own right that is consequently referred to as ‘visual rhetoric’. Following this unique form of visual discourse through the history of fashion allows consideration of the development of identity and gender roles in French society as well as the interrelated narratives of the creative processes involved in the production of lace and embroidery. These reflections lead in turn to consideration of the ways processes of production and consumption were disrupted and transformed by major events, by sumptuary laws and political edicts. The language of thread work has been encoded and decoded by all socio-economic classes, and is underwritten by tensions between power and dependency, rich and poor, light and dark, public show and private domesticity. It has the capacity to express identities and to enhance communities. In more recent times the reconsideration of the value of thread work in the design concepts of haute couture has seen a revitalisation of the appreciation of this medium in an industry associated with luxury, exclusivity and creativity. The language of thread-work remains ambivalent and complex in France today, signifying an innocuous ‘feminine’ pastime on the one hand, and a valued professional skill and cultural heritage on the other.</p>

Image Schemas in Diasporic Visual Discourse: Peripheral Voices in the Selected Photographs of Afghan Migrants Living in Pakistan

This study explores the socio-cognitive dynamics of the photographic representation of Afghan Refugees residing in Pakistan. It aims to reveal counter discursivity present in the images of Afghan refugees and accentuate the visual nature of this counter discourse. Data sets taken for analysis consist of five photographs of Afghan refugees retrieved from the album collection of an international photographer Muhammad Muheisen. By adopting an interdisciplinary perspective based on three schools, i.e. Critical Discourse Studies, Social Semiotics and Cognitive Linguistics, the study proposed a Cognitive Grammar approach to traditional Transitivity Analysis. Cognitive transitivity analysis explored the discursive strategy of Structural Configuration by highlighting the cognitive systems such as image schemas, narrative structures and processes in both visual representations and textual taglines assigned to the images by the photographer. The findings of the study revealed the employment of CONTAINER, FORCE, SPACE, and SOURCE- PATH Schemas and dominant presence of agentive and transactional roles of Afghan refugees. The taglines of photographs revealed material processes dominating the discourse, thus, coinciding with agentive representation of Afghan refugees. The findings revealed that image schemas, narrative structures and processes, being embodied sources, preconceptual and mimetic structures, project Afghan photographic discourse as marginalized in the face of Pakistan’s Refugee Policies.

Graphic Communities: Comics as Visual and Virtual Resources for Self- and Collective Care

Note: this commentary is intended for the special issue, "Comics in and of The Moment." Abstract:&nbsp;This essay discusses the ways in which print and web comics are used to represent the lived experiences of mental illness. Beginning with a brief overview of mental health-focused comic strips and graphic memoirs and turning to a discussion of the mental illness comics of Instagram, the article outlines how comics are being used as platforms for self- and collective care. Instead of prioritizing a visual/discourse analysis of each web comic, this piece focuses on the comment threads of each Instagram post and examines the conversations which develop amongst users. By doing so, this essay begins a critical discussion of the ways in which comics may be used as mental health resources. While grounded in a discussion of Covid-19-related increases to mental illness symptoms, this piece is also interested in how comics may be used as therapeutic supports in a post-pandemic world.

Politics of visual discourse in China: the corruption cartoon

This article investigates single-panel cartoons portraying official corruption in China’s longest- running state-owned cartoon newspaper Cartoon Weekly ( Fengci yu youmo). A total of 433 cartoons are identified as relating to corrupt officialdom between 2012 and 2019 in the wake of Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption signature policy. In contrast with the individualizing critique of political cartooning in liberal democracies, the corpus of corruption cartoons investigated in this article is argued as a didactic form of visual schematization in a pseudo-self-critical discourse typically buttressed by verbal reading instructions. To support this claim, the article addresses its politics of visual discourse by employing Peircean hypoiconicity, consisting of direct resemblance, diagrammatic schematization and metaphoric displacement. Accordingly, the article identifies three major features of corruption cartoons as anonymization of direct resemblance, visual schematization of policy and metaphoric displacement of conventional symbols.

The city and the war

The article focuses on the city as a visual discourse. This topic was previously studied in the article “Invisible Moscow” (Salmin, 2018). The impact of the war on the concepts of visibility / invisibility of the city and their relationship is analyzed from the point of view of mytho-ritual practices. Inversions of the visible and invisible are considered in the context of evolution of the city's symbolism under the influence of the military threats.

Pandemic, censorship and creative protests via grassroots visual mobilization

In early 2020, Chinese people engaged in several rounds of extraordinary online campaigns in response to the government’s handling of the outbreak of coronavirus. During these campaigns, visual images played a crucial role in facilitating netizens to inform each other, escape official censoring machinery, express anger and frustration, excavate truth, document reality and mobilize online support and protest. In particular, images related with Dr Li Wenliang, one of whistle-blowers of the soon-to-be pandemic who himself died of the virus, and Dr Ai Fen, the first doctor to share information about a possible coronavirus diagnose among her colleagues, became the focal points of the unprecedented online mobilization successively. Millions of netizens participated in the effort to circulate these images (and stories behind them) and invented ingenious ways to continue the endeavour when confronted by the heightened censorship. Various art communities and individuals have done their share to fuel in this momentum of visual mobilization and there was a surge of call for public participation in responding to the pandemic through participatory public artworks. Maskbook, initiated by artist Wen Fang, and One More Day led by MeDoc, are two exemplary cases. Through analysing these images, this article discusses China’s grassroots visual mobilization to claim for freedom of speech and access to truth in the wake of the massive health crisis and articulates its contribution to the formation of a bottom-up visual discourse that challenges the state’s media discourse in interpreting the pandemic as a victory of government leadership.