The impact of visual racism: Visual arguments in political leaflets of Austrian and British far-right parties
Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: In this paper, we apply the Discourse Historical Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (DHA; see Wodak 2001, 2004, 2008b) combined with argumentation theory and visual grammar (Kress & Van Leeuwen 1996, 2001) to visual texts. Specifically we examine election posters and brochures to investigate the explicit and indirect persuasive rhetorical and argumentative devices employed to construct fear of foreigners, migrants, and asylum seekers, and to convince voters of their potential danger. Our texts are drawn from recent election materials produced by Austrian and British right-wing parties with an explicit xenophobic agenda. Our analysis seeks to detect similarities and differences in these new-old ‘law and order’ campaigns. We claim that the methodology, which we first present, is adequate to deconstruct the implied racist visual meanings.
Authors: JE Richardson, R Wodak
Language: English
Subfield: Linguistics and Language
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W648167456