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This article is an invitation to engage with the small 'p' politics of visual political communication by highlighting the importance of both culture and history, in order to gain greater understanding of how images and the visual more broadly may 'work' on us and contribute to our imaginaries as well as our understanding of political messages and political life as a whole. Specifically, the article aims to encourage scholars in this field to engage less with strategy and tactics or persuasion and effects to delve more deeply into why and how visual meanings become politically powerful over time and in particular contexts. In doing so, the article foregrounds the work of two major scholars of the visual, Stuart Hall and Michel Pastoureau, and promotes an approach focusing on the more seemingly mundane, taken-for-granted and everyday meanings and practices underlying visual political communication. To demonstrate this approach, the article offers an in-depth discussion of the photograph used in the 'Breaking Point' poster at the centre of the political campaign which was launched by UKIP leader Nigel Farage in the run-up to the 2016 Brexit referendum.

While stock photographs have come to saturate media and have been mocked for their clichéd nature, for example where women are pictured laughing alone with salad, a powerful corporation like Getty Images that disseminates commercial imagery globally has sought to challenge these stereotypes by making more politicized images. This article examines one such case, that is, Getty's Genderblend visual trend, which claims to portray gender identities and relations in ways that are both more inclusive and diverse, harnessing feminist theory as part of its promotion. Taking a multimodal discourse and visual design approach, the article looks at how corporate imagery can be styled as political and, in turn, how a politics of difference itself is shaped in the interests of the ideologies of consumer capitalism.

How human meanings, practices and interactions produce and are produced by urban space is the focus of this timely and exciting addition to the study of urban communication.Challenging notions of the 'urban' as physically, economically or technologically determined, this book explores key intersections of discourse, materiality, technology, mobility, identity and inequality in acts of communication across urban and urbanizing contexts. From leisure and media consumption among Chinese migrant workers in a Guangdong village to the diverse networks and communication infrastructures of global cities like London and Los Angeles, this collection combines a range of perspectives to ask fundamental questions about the significance and status of cities in times of intensified mediation and connectivity.With case studies from Italy, Britain, Ireland, Russia, the United States and China, this international collection demonstrates that both empirical and critical knowledge on the relationship between communication and urban life has become vital across the humanities and social sciences.Communicating the City will be essential reading for all scholars and students who desire to gain an in-depth understanding of the multiple roles that media and communication have in lived experiences of the city

Previous research on verbal representations shows how the news media consistently depicts young people's uses of digital media in a narrow, negative light. In this article, we present an innovative methodology for demonstrating how young people and their digital practices are visually depicted. We focus on stock photography produced by the commercial image banks which source the news media with much of its imagery. Following an indicative analysis of news media images, we present a social semiotic analysis (grounded also in a descriptive content analysis) of a dataset of 600 stock photos top-sliced from three major image banks. By pinpointing dominant representational, compositional and interpersonal meanings, we show how image banks and, in turn, the news media produce a rather pessimistic metadiscursive framing of 'teens and technology'. These influential visualizations are often reductionistic – consistently centering technologies over relationships; they are also problematic in, for example, their inexplicably gendered and classist assumptions.

This article examines how political cartoons reflected and mobilized resistance to growing authoritarianism and the personalization of power in contemporary Serbia. The focus is on the work of Dušan Petričić, the most influential political cartoonist in Serbia, which was published in daily Politika and weekly NIN between 2012 and 2017. Petričić's cartoons offer interesting insights into a dramatic decline of press freedom and the rise of authoritarian personalist rule in terms of both their content and political impact. The authors draw on quantitative content analysis and qualitative multimodal analysis to examine the key representational and stylistic features of Petričić's cartoons, both as a way to understand the relationship between his aesthetics and his political statements, and in order to critically assess some of the ways in which democratization conflicts may be expressed visually. Their analysis also draws on evidence from an in-depth interview with the author. In combining a systematic analysis of key visual patterns across a sample of cartoons with a comprehensive evaluation of how both visual and linguistic features work together to promote anti-authoritarian ideals and resistance, the article offers a framework to understand the political import of aesthetics in Serbia's democratization process.