5:52 p.m.
Dear all,
Welcome to next week’s IMS seminar, We will be visited by PhD student Li Ling Siew, who
will present her project titled: An eye for an eye? Or Lost in Transmediation? A
Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of Political Visual Arts of Civil Disobedience
Movement in Hong Kong.
Abstract:
Civil disobedience movement or social movement is often perceived as a tool to bring about
political and social change. Using the Hong Kong anti-extradition bill protest as a case
study, I explore the discursive constructions of social movement in media discourse and
how they are ideologically produced through semiotic resources in multimodal modes. This
work-in-progress includes critical reading on multimodal corpora collected from news
articles by various media agencies, and user responses (such as writings, anecdotes and
visual artworks) on social media platforms curated by ordinary citizens showing solidarity
for different political affiliations. The interpretations of the event as reflected in the
corpora through various modal assemblages offer contrary realities to the “official”
public announcements and condemnations by the Hong Kong government agencies. In
particular, the creation and sharing of political visual arts such as posters, memes,
cartoons, and satires capture the complex multimodal representations of contestations,
identities and values in relation to the social movement, to which some are used as a
repetitive prompt or an ideological tool to create more visual expressions for political
propaganda. Political visual arts often enable audiences to consider or reflect on
perspectives on the reality surrounding the causes they are protesting, such as the larger
socio-political context that a real photograph cannot. I am more intrigued to investigate
as to what could possibly go “wrong” during the continual process of mediation when the
primary text (such as a video or photograph captured by reporters, protesters, or
civilians at the site of the protest) which serves as a prompt for propaganda is being
transferred from one mode to another. Using a case study that involves a young woman who
suffered a severe eye injury during one of the demonstrations in Hong Kong, I intend to
examine the discursive construction of multimodal semiotic modes which are ideologically
loaded in constructing visual representations of the protest. The conflicting realities
offered by various media sources prompt me to reflect on the values, truthfulness and
truth claims in the representation of facts and actual events of the Hong Kong protest in
dominant media discourse. How is the primary text being changed into a series of aesthetic
art forms for political propaganda? What aspects and messages of the primary are being
Li Ling Siew is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, University of
Malaya, Malaysia.
The seminar is, as always, on Wednesday, April 14, at 10.15 – 12.00 (CEST) on zoom:
https://lnu-se.zoom.us/j/940933326
Best wishes,
Signe – on behalf of IMS
Signe Kjaer Jensen
PhD student in Comparative Literature
Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS)
Linnæus University
Department of Film and Literature
351 95 Växjö
Sweden
https://lnu.se/personal/signe.kjaerjensen/
signe.kjaerjensen at lnu.se<mailto:signe.kjaerjensen at lnu.se>
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