Visual Communication

Giorgia Aiello is an Associate Professor in Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on the politics and potentials of visual, multimodal, and material communication. Giorgia is interested in how aesthetics shape and are shaped by political, economic, and cultural agendas. Her work aims to uncover how identities are formed, how both difference and diversity are negotiated, and how inequalities are maintained or overcome through media and communication. She is a co-editor of Communicating the City: Meanings, Practices and Interactions (Peter Lang, 2017) and the author of many journal articles, book chapters, and short publications about branding, photography, data visualization, political imagery, and cities.Katy Parry is an Associate Professor in Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. Her work focuses on visual politics and activism, images of war and representations of contemporary soldiering. She is a co-author of Political Culture and Media Genre: Beyond the News (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) with Kay Richardson and John Corner, and a co-editor of Can the Media Serve Democracy? Essays in Honour of Jay G. Blumler (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), with Stephen Coleman and Giles Moss. Her current research interests include the visual expressions of political solidarity shared in response to the murder of Jo Cox MP during the Brexit referendum campaign, and the representational politics of the war veteran in contemporary media.

This smart and engaging book introduces readers to some of the most pressing debates in visual communications studies. Effective in making often-opaque theories accessible, Aiello and Parry situate these debates in relation to a diverse toolkit of current research methods. Eighteen thickly-contextualized case studies skillfully illustrate the various steps students need to design their own projects.

• Chapter 1: IntroductionChapter 2: Understanding images in media culture: methodological considerationsChapter 3: Envisioning the self in digital mediaChapter 4: Communicating visions of collective identityChapter 5: Ways of seeing difference beyond stereotypesChapter 6: Images of politicians in the public sphereChapter 7: The visual spectacles of protest and activismChapter 8: Picturing international conflict and warChapter 9: The visual attractions of advertising and promotional cultureChapter 10: Visualizing lifestyles as commoditiesChapter 11: Brands as visual experiencesChapter 12: Conclusion