Research Handbook on Visual Politics (original) (raw)
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Routledge, 2018
We live in a visual age. Images and visual artefacts shape international events and our understanding of them. Photographs, film and television influence how we view and approach phenomena as diverse as war, diplomacy, financial crises and election campaigns. Other visual fields, from art and cartoons to maps, monuments and videogames, frame how politics is perceived and enacted. Drones, satellites and surveillance cameras watch us around the clock and deliver images that are then put to political use. Add to this that new technologies now allow for a rapid distribution of still and moving images around the world. Digital media platforms, such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, play an important role across the political spectrum, from terrorist recruitment drives to social justice campaigns. This book offers the first comprehensive engagement with visual global politics. Written by leading experts in numerous scholarly disciplines and presented in accessible and engaging language, Visual Global Politics is a one-stop source for students, scholars and practitioners interested in understanding the crucial and persistent role of images in today’s world.
Persuasion and visual imagery in politics ( SYNERGY volume 10, no. 1/2014, www.synergy.ase.ro)
The present paper provides insight into ways of crafting powerful political campaign images to convey specific messages to the electors. Essentially, there are two main reasons for studying visual imagery in the political field. First, we need to know what visual images are constructed while delivering the political message, and second we need to determine the effects of the images. Taken these aspects into consideration we will focus our attention on two important elements of visual images when political images are under scrutiny: production techniques and politicians’ nonverbal behavior cues (with emphasis on affect displays).
Visual Culture of the 2016 US Elections Construction, Manipulation and Reception in the Public.
This thesis was presented in part fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts at University College Dublin. The following is an examination of the visual culture of the 2016 American Elections, looking explicitly at how the Republican and Democratic parties utilised their visual culture to construct and communicate a certain image of their respective candidates to voters throughout the campaign period. This thesis will explore the visual culture of both the Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns to compile a fully realised study of the 2016 U.S. elections through visual culture. As political campaigns usually aspire to emulate the successes of their predecessors, a portion of this thesis will be devoted to the discussion of one of the most successful visual political campaigns of recent years- Barack Obama 2008. This campaign is seen as the 'gold standard' for political imagery and indeed this legacy often eclipsed the visual culture of the 2016 elections. By looking at the Obama 2008 campaign, one can get a sense of how good graphic design can be a valuable aspect of a successful political campaign. To balance the propagandistic bias of examining solely the official imagery of the Republican and Democratic parties, this thesis will also examine how unofficial imagery challenged and ridiculed the carefully constructed personas of the candidates. Assessing political cartoons produced in 2016, which deal with manipulating and adapting the official visual culture, will demonstrate the more critical sides of both campaign's imagery and beliefs. By looking at the way in which both the Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns chose to portray their candidates through visual means, one can assess how effective good graphic design was on the overall campaign and whether both candidates effectively projected their political message across to the voting public. This thesis will primarily look at the ways in which visual political propaganda can influence voters and challenge perceptions of a candidate.