Anne Cranny-Francis
Sculpture as deconstruction: the aesthetic practice of Ron Mueck :
This article analyses recent (2009) work of Australian-born, British-based hyperrealist sculptor, Ron Mueck, in order to show how it not only engages with a range of specific contemporary concerns and debates, but also operates as a visual deconstruction of Cartesian subjectivity. In order to identify Mueck’s deconstructive practice, the article uses a combination of multimodal, sensory and discourse analyses to situate Mueck’s work discursively and institutionally, and to explore the ways in which it provokes reader engagement. As the author identifies, each of the works – Youth, Still life and Drift – addresses specific issues and they all provoke a self-reflexive engagement that brings together all aspects of viewer engagement (sensory, emotional, intellectual, spiritual), challenging the mind/body dichotomy that characterizes the Cartesian subject.
Sean P Connors
Weaving multimodal meaning in a graphic novel reading group :
Despite the interest that literacy educators in the United States have expressed in graphic novels as a pedagogical tool, few empirical studies have asked how readers interact with their multimodal design to interpret them. To account for a gap in the literature, this case study asked how six high school students read and talked about four graphic novels in the context of a voluntary after-school reading group. In doing so, it sought to identify semiotic resources the students drew on as readers, and understand how they used them to construct literary meaning. Contrary to arguments that have traditionally characterized works written in the medium of comics as rendering readers passive, the findings indicate that the participants actively drew on an available visual and linguistic design to construct meaning and interpret the graphic novels they read.
Scott Koga-Browes
Social distance portrayed: television news in Japan and the UK :
The potential of the camera framing, or shot-size, semiotic resource to encode meanings related to social distance has been recognized for some time. This study seeks to bring this resource into the remit of systematic analysis. Data are taken from screen measurements of portrayals of social actors in news programming produced by two national broadcasters, NHK in Japan and the BBC in the UK. Results for these two media outlets are compared and an attempt made to place the results in a meaningful cultural context. Analysis focuses on NHK’s images and the less familiar Japanese media system.
Jennifer Rowsell, Gunther Kress, and Brian Street
Visual optics: interpreting body art, three ways :
Research methodology using visual narrative techniques opens up conceptual views for interpreting a wide range of visuals. In this article, the authors analyse tattoos on a subject’s body and approach the task from what they term three ‘optics’: social semiotics; sedimented identity in texts; and New Literacy Studies in relation to multimodality, drawing on ethnographic perspectives. Each optic illustrates how a woman constructs her identity through her body art. The article serves to illustrate that, whilst the use of visual methods in a small-scale study does not aim to be generalizable, the contribution to visual methodology has to do more with how varied conceptual views can work in conjunction to excavate deeper, more textured meanings in visual narratives.
Anne Maxwell
Modern anthropology and the problem of the racial type: the photographs of Franz Boas :
Franz Boas is best known for his pioneering work in the area of cultural anthropology. However in the 1890s, Boas created hundreds of anthropometric photographs as part of a vast study aimed at documenting the physical characteristics of Native Americans. The primary purpose of the Jesup Expedition, as the study was called, was to discover the racial origins of America’s Native peoples, but the data collected and the knowledge gained were also later used by Boas to report on the physical changes occurring to migrant children in the USA, and to mount an attack on the scientific credibility of the racial theories being used to hound and discriminate against Jewish and other racial minorities in Germany and Europe.