Out now — Special issue: Difference and Globalization, Visual Communication 13(3), August 2014
Guest editors: Giorgia Aiello (University of Leeds) and Luc Pauwels (University of Antwerp)
This special issue investigates the nexus of globalization and visual communication through a rich discussion of the significance of national, racial, ethnic, gender, class, embodied and emplaced differences. While globalization does entail the ever-growing significance of deterritorialized practices and transcultural flows, these connections, movements and exchanges still largely occur across specific locales and identities, and through appeals to various dimensions of cultural and social difference. The visual is an especially privileged and in fact crucial mode of communication in contexts of globalization thanks to its perceptual availability and cross-cultural potential.
Taken together, the seven contributions included in this special issue address questions related to the integration and deployment of major dimensions of social and cultural difference in visual communication materials; the perspectives and practices of designers, image-makers and media producers in relation to the work involved in the planning and creation of such materials; and both the dominant ways of seeing and unique experiences that impact on the visual ‘reading’ of globalization.
A combination of well-known and emerging scholars makes for an unusually energetic take on concepts and concerns that underlie several of the major frameworks that have become established in the inherently interdisciplinary field of visual communication, including multimodal and critical discourse analysis, social semiotics, rhetorical criticism, visual anthropology and visual sociology.
Table of contents
*Guest Editorial: Giorgia Aiello and Luc Pauwels
*Ariel Chen and David Machin: The local and the global in the visual design of a Chinese women’s lifestyle magazine: a multimodal critical discourse approach
*Giorgia Aiello and Greg Dickinson: Beyond authenticity: a visual-material analysis of locality in the
global redesign of Starbucks stores
*Toussaint Nothias: ‘Rising’, ‘hopeful’, ‘new’: visualizing Africa in the age of globalization
*Arjun Shankar: Towards a critical visual pedagogy: a response to the ‘end of poverty’ narrative
*Melissa A Johnson and Larissa Carneiro: Communicating visual identities on ethnic museum websites
*Helene Pristed Nielsen and Stine Thidemann Faber: A strange familiarity? Place perceptions among the globally mobile
*Luc Pauwels: World cities reframed: a visual take on globalization
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 