Journal Description
Visual Communication provides an international forum for the growing body of work in numerous interrelated disciplines.
The journal’s definition of the visual is broad and includes:
- still and moving images
- graphic design and typography
- visual phenomena such as fashion, professional vision, posture and interaction
- the built and landscaped environment
- the role of the visual in relation to language, music, sound and action
Visual Communication is interdisciplinary bringing together articles from a range of subjects, including:
- anthropology
- communication studies
- human and cultural geography
- multimodal studies and semiotics
- media and cultural studies
- sociology
- disciplines dealing with history, theory and practice of visual design.
Members of the Visual Communication Studies division of the ICA can subscribe to the journal with a 50% discount. Interested members should email SAGE Customer Services at subscriptions@sagepub.co.uk
The worthiness and necessity of these [essays] sharply remind us how rare it is for a mainstream academic journal to do its duty for the future by reaching beyond the complacencies and hysteria of the present.” Times Higher Education Supplement
“Visual Communication offers a high-quality forum of publication for articles on the crucial visual dimension of language and communication. I am sure that for scholars and students in many disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, this new journal will be an indispensable resource for learning, teaching and research.” Teun van Dijk
Electronic Access:
Visual Communication is available to browse online.
Journal Feed
- by Foluke Olayinka UnuabonahVisual Communication, Ahead of Print. In October 2022, the Central Bank of Nigeria declared that the three highest denominations of the Nigerian currency would be redesigned in order to strengthen the country’s cashless policy. This led to several protests involving loss of lives, due to scarcity of cash and limited access to electronic payment. This study examines WhatsApp memes that were circulated during the enforcement of the Naira redesign policy, with a view to investigating the ideological representations of the effect of the policy on Nigerians. The purposively selected data are analysed qualitatively from a multimodal critical discourse analytical framework. […]
- by Tuomo HiippalaVisual Communication, Ahead of Print. This article examines football fan choreographies as multimodal performances. Fan choreographies, which are regularly organized by supporter groups at football stadia around the world, combine collective embodied actions with diverse media such as banners and flags. Choreographies serve multiple communicative purposes ranging from celebrating a team to commemorating events or protesting against unwanted developments. The article proposes a novel approach to analysing fan choreographies, building on previous research on linguistic, communicative and semiotic aspects of football, which are combined with recent theories of multimodal semiotics. By employing a methodology that uses the notion of materiality […]
- by Zhigang YuVisual Communication, Ahead of Print. This article explores how chemical images in school chemistry realize knowledge from a social semiotics perspective. Drawing on Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2021[1996]) visual grammar framework (Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design) and Doran and Martin’s (2021) field model (Field Relations: Understanding Scientific Explanation), this study reveals that these chemical images are characterized by employing recursive embeddings of analytical structures to realize multiple levels of compositional taxonomies of matter and multi-levelled taxonomy structures to expand the depth and breadth of classificational taxonomies of matter. These images employ a special narrative structure, referred to as […]
- by Kun YangVisual Communication, Ahead of Print. Previous studies on smiling face emojis mainly focus on how they are employed by the addresser for rapport management, with limited attention given to exploring the addressee’s interpretation of smiling face emojis. This study aims to explore whether smiling face emojis are interpreted as (im)polite in a virtual communication context and what factors might influence the interpretation. When carrying out the research, the author designed stimuli with 10 commonly used smiling face emojis in WeChat and then recruited 192 participants to take part in an experimental study. The results indicate that smiling face emojis enhance […]
- by Johanna MeyerVisual Communication, Ahead of Print. Maps are a unique means of combining visual and textual communication, and have been ubiquitous in Covid-19 reporting. This article presents a framing analysis of 4,398 coronavirus-related news maps published across six UK news outlets during the early stages of the pandemic. The authors identified 10 frames: coronavirus was characterized as (1) a national problem; (2) a regional problem; (3) associated with China; (4) an undefined threat; (5) medical; (6) containable; (7) an economic problem; (8) an environmental problem; (9) datafiable; and (10) identifiable. Maps drawing on national boundaries for organizing space were common, often […]
- by Arianna MaioraniVisual Communication, Ahead of Print.
- by Brian F O’NeillVisual Communication, Ahead of Print. Based on visual ethnographic research conducted in a California city from 2019 to 2022, this photo essay elaborates the politics of coastal desalination, the industrial practice of producing drinking water from saline sources. The images provoke a dialogue about how photography can be used, not only as an ethnographic passport, but also in a broader sense of encountering spaces, processes and organizations, thus assisting in unpacking various layers of society and how it (dis)connects with nature. Developing a ‘go-along’ ethnographic approach, such as taking ‘toxic tours’ with research subjects, the techniques of portraiture, landscape and […]
- by Felicia ChuaVisual Communication, Ahead of Print. Despite the proliferation of scholarly studies on social media in recent years, not many have focused on male social media influencers in the beauty industry, which is often viewed as a feminine preserve with the vast majority of ‘beauty influencers’ being female. This study focuses on the discursive practices of two male beauty influencers to examine how their visual self-portrayal contributes to their popularity and influence. A total of 752 photographs collected from their Instagram accounts were examined using a visual appraisal framework adapted from Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal Theory described in The Language […]
- by David ShimVisual Communication, Ahead of Print. This article examines how Fridays for Future Germany (FFFG) uses photographs of climate protests to convey the politics of climate change to wider audiences. The author argues that FFFG is an ideal-type form of visual activism in which visual imagery is central to its climate activism. The article builds on climate change communication scholarship and visual social movement studies to contribute an inquiry about FFFG’s visual activism. The focus is on FFFG’s visual self-representations on the social media platform Flickr, which promises to give insights into its strategies of self-legitimation. The empirical analysis discusses the […]
- by Olivia InwoodVisual Communication, Ahead of Print. This article explores the use of screenshots as a form of visual evidence on social media platforms. It considers their role in YouTube videos that spread misinformation and disinformation about the Notre Dame Cathedral Fire and an internet hoax, the Momo Challenge. The article draws on two social semiotic frameworks, legitimation (Van Leeuwen in ‘Legitimation in discourse and communication, 2007) and affiliation (Knight in ‘Evaluating experience in funny ways’, 2013, and Zappavigna in ‘Searchable Talk and Social Media Metadiscourse’, 2018), to analyse how screenshots and accompanying voiceovers construe technological authority and propagate social values. Seven […]
- by Joshua ZeunertVisual Communication, Ahead of Print. Agriculture has the largest visual and environmental impact on Australia’s landscape, ecologies and environments. It is frequently visually communicated through romantic imagery and reinforced by messaging that emphasizes trust, environmental stewardship, and ethical livestock practices. The quality of satellite imaging is generally inadequate for verifying these practices and illuminating the state of agricultural environments. This visual essay presents a photographic counter narrative based on a comprehensive visual research process spanning the breadth of the continent. It presents 56 unaltered still images selected from over 10,000 captured by the author using a consumer drone. Images have […]
- by Shiyu YangVisual Communication, Ahead of Print. Comics have increasingly served as a tool for delivering scientific information to diverse audiences. However, little is known about how visual elements in comics influence their persuasive potential. Inspired by McCloud (1993)’s ‘masking effect’ theory featured in Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, this study examined how different degrees of realism in comic characters, combined with background details, affected readers’ character identification. The findings suggested that exposure to comics featuring unrealistic, cartoonish characters minimized the gap in character identification between Black and white US participants. Contrary to McCloud’s hypotheses, exposure to comics with less detailed backgrounds […]
- by Charles ForcevilleVisual Communication, Ahead of Print.
- by Baldwin Van GorpVisual Communication, Ahead of Print. This visual essay makes use of sketches and watercolour drawings in order to present an observational study of a hunger strike conducted by undocumented immigrants in a Brussels church in 2021. The study aimed to explore the lived experience of the hunger strikers, focusing on the physical consequences, emotional states and process of the strike. The essay highlights the importance of visibility in gaining public support for a hunger strike. The study adds to existing scholarship on the use of visual methods in social research and highlights the potential of observational drawings as a tool […]
- by Alexandra LasczikVisual Communication, Ahead of Print. This visual essay curates an exhibition of photographic data from a project with children about Landcare, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to managing environmental issues in local communities across Australia. The project sought to empower children to engage with Landcare Reserves through participatory arts-based research to map their awareness of and participation in local Landcare Reserve sites. This visual essay recognizes the images as agentic entities, with the power to activate the gaze beyond the boundaries of this project as embedded yet transcendent from it whilst simultaneously acknowledging the ‘failing’ agency of the sensing body of […]
- by Louise RavelliVisual Communication, Volume 23, Issue 4, Page 547-547, November 2024.
- by Xiyuan TanVisual Communication, Ahead of Print. The award-winning indie video game Chinese Parents, developed by a mainland China-based studio, has gained significant popularity among both Chinese and Western players owing to its unique narrative and representation of contemporary mainland China. Some of these in-game representations include the strict parenting style, academic pressure on Chinese children, unique Chinese school culture and popular Chinese internet memes. This article applies compositional interpretation, as well as the framework of iconology in visual culture to analyse the representation of contemporary mainland China from a video-game-context graphic communication perspective. Examples of character portraits, background scene illustrations, biaoqingbao […]
- Visual Communication, Ahead of Print.
- by Ricardo GreeneVisual Communication, Volume 23, Issue 4, Page 549-562, November 2024. In October 2019, fuelled by a collective discontent with the lifestyles and inequalities generated by the capitalist model, social protests took place in the Chilean streets. People staged massive demonstrations in every city demanding profound changes to the system. Known as the ‘Estallido Social’ (Social Explosion), the demonstrations paralysed an important part of the country and, after a few weeks of revolt, managed to initiate a new Constitution-making process. These events triggered a process in which the country was re-imagined, subjectivities were rewritten and objects and the environment were heavily […]
- by Coral Calvo-MaturanaVisual Communication, Ahead of Print. This article critically explores the concept of ‘adoption’ via the semiotic analysis of the picture book A Mama for Owen (Bauer and Butler, 2007), which stands here as a testimony of adoption narratives and the ways in which they are creatively re-addressed in the context of children’s literature – as children’s books challenge traditional stories, establishing a contrastive dialogue, they are able ‘to sow and nurture the seeds of social change’ (see Reynolds, Children’s Literature, 2011: 5). The study proposes the application of textual tools of analysis developed in the area of stylistics (see Short, […]