Walking through the city soundscape: an audio-visual analysis of sensory experience for people with psychosis

This article discusses how an aspect of urban environments – sound and noise – is experienced by people walking in the city; it particularly focuses on atypical populations such as people diagnosed with psychosis, who are reported to be particularly sensitive to noisy environments. Through an analysis of video-recordings of naturalistic activities in an urban context and of video-elicitations based on these recordings, the study details the way participants orient to sound and noise in naturalistic settings, and how sound and noise are reported and reexperienced during interviews. By bringing together urban context, psychosis and social interaction, this study shows that, thanks to video recordings and conversation analysis, it is possible to analyse in detail the multimodal organization of action (talk, gesture, gaze, walking bodies) and of the sensory experience(s) of aural factors, as well as the way this organization is affected by the ecology of the situation.

Self-presentation strategies and the visual framing of political leaders on Instagram: evidence from the eventful 2019 Istanbul mayoral elections

This study aims to explore how political leaders used Instagram to execute self-presentation strategies in mayoral elections, including the dominant use of personalized tactics. The article reports findings of a visual framing analysis of 2,776 images featuring 2019 Istanbul mayoral election candidates Ekrem İmamoğlu (the Republican People’s Party, CHP) and Binali Yıldırım (the Justice and Development Party, AKP). The case is unusual because the initial election, which had resulted in İmamoğlu’s victory, was cancelled and a re-run was subsequently held. After many events, İmamoğlu succeeded again, becoming the first opposition politician to take control of Istanbul from the ruling AKP. In this study, we adapt Grabe and Bucy’s (2009) quantitative visual framing analysis to examine Instagram posts, from candidacy announcements until the election re-run. The results show that both candidates used the Ideal Candidate frame, with occasional increases in the frequency of the application of the Populist Campaigner frame. Self-frames in different time periods during this election are discussed, as well the frames that voters engaged with most frequently.

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 operation of différance in a student-produced digital video: insights into differing and deferring signifier operations and relations in multimodal discourse

In this article, the author presents a multimodal discourse analysis of a student-produced video, drawing upon Jacques Derrida’s theorization of différance. He analyzes the film as a signifying chain, drawing specifically upon the differing and deferring aspects of différance in order to conceptualize the movement of signification in the video. The focus of his analysis is on how différance, as a constitutive force, splits and divides attempts to discursively construct a present through coordination of signifiers from across multiple modes. His application of différance illustrates how the present, as constructed in the focal video, is ill-defined and always blurred since presently occurring, visible, and audible signifiers in the video do not signify in and of themselves, but rather refer to past signifiers and anticipate future signifiers for their constitution as they engage the dynamic and complex operations of différance. This analysis adds to approaches to multimodal discourse analysis of student-produced videos by accounting for the interaction of visual, actional, bodily, and spoken signifiers, as well as the pedagogical implications for understanding how discursive agencies act upon student video-composers.

‘Seeing’ music from manga: visualizing music with embodied mechanisms of musical experience

This study investigates how music is represented in musical-themed manga by visual components referred to as ‘visualized music’, and how embodied mechanisms of musical experience conceive these visual manifestations. Using Šorm and Steen’s (2018) Visual Metaphor Identification Procedure (VISMIP), the authors discovered four metaphors, and seven metonymies and ‘manpu’ (i.e. iconic signs used in manga) that are widely applied in visualizing music. In addition, they incorporated Juslin and Västfjäll’s (2008) framework and further proposed five major embodied mechanisms of musical experience: (1) brain stem reflex, (2) emotional contagion, (3) visual imagery, (4) emotional memory related to music, and (5) musical expectancy. Their results showed that these embodied mechanisms are the foundations of visualized music. The brain stem reflex, the underlying structure of most metonymies and manpu, triggers us to represent some acoustic characteristics by using sound symbolic components. These include emotional contagion-inducing metaphors representing emotional responses, such as ‘ MUSIC/EMOTION IS WEATHER’, which further entails their acoustic characteristics and visual imagery, the most important mechanism, basing our overall comprehension of music and metaphorical mapping between music and image-schemata. Readers also use emotional simulations to understand the visual imagery that further constructs their impressions toward music, emotional memory grounding manifestations related to music used to build background stories and intensify reader empathy, and lastly, musical expectancy, involving the ability of prediction and consciousness, usually associated with ‘ MUSIC IS LIGHT’. In this way, this study sheds light on our overall understanding of audio-visual cross-modality, musical experience, metaphor and embodied experience.

Saudi women driving: images, stereotyping and digital media

This article examines the representations of Saudi women driving that circulated shortly after the lifting of the ban and considers the social, commercial and technological forces that helped to shape those representations . A corpus of images was collected from two international image banks – Getty and Shutterstock – as well as from a Google Image search. The images use Van Leeuwen’s (2008) visual representation framework in Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Analysis, paying particular attention to the similarities and differences between the images available in the image banks and those that were made prominent in the Google search. In addition, semantic metadata accompanying these images were also analysed in order to understand the linguistic constraints that had been put on searches for these images and the ontologies of the issue that they promoted. Finally, a more detailed analysis was performed on images that had been appropriated into different contexts such as news stories and advertisements to investigate how these images were adapted to support different political, cultural and commercial agendas. Findings suggest that images of Saudi women that circulated online internationally shortly after the lifting of the ban were mostly generic and decontextualized, creating simplified and trivialized depictions of gender relations and social change in the Kingdom. The analysis shows how commercial concerns which influence both the creation of stock images and the way they are taken up by news organizations and advertisers can sometimes have the effect of erasing the complexity of political events and reinforcing the very stereotypes they seem to be challenging.