Session 7b: Choosing and Chasing a New View
3rd Global Conference
Tuesday 14th July 2009 – Thursday 16th July 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford
On Visual Kinderculture: Taiwanese, Japanese and Spanish Children Depicting Their Leisure Habits
Estefanía Sanz and Pablo Romero
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
During 2008 our research’s team (from Spain, Taiwan and Japan) has been doing the first stage of a project entitled ‘Culture and identity in children’s drawings’. We have gathered and analysed pictures made by students (around 400) aged ranging from 10 to 15 years old, in Spain, Japan and Taiwan. In order to do a graphic poll (common in the three countries) we asked for pictures about four different topics. Two of the topics were focused on cultural issues implicit in drawings (self-portrait, stereotypes concerning to their own culture, leisure, issues of global culture…). In other hand, the other two topics were focused on formal issues (composition, procedures, relationship between text and image).
In our paper we will talk about the analysis of the drawings related to the topic “Me, in my favourite place, doing my favourite hobby”. The analysis methodology displayed was varied: visual content analysis, discourse analysis, visual anthropology, conclusion’s triangulation (researchers and experts).
We expected to find similarities -engaged with the presence of subjects from the global kinderculture- and differences- concerning with gender, age and local cultural patterns-. Some of these expected similarities have been confirmed: i.e. coincidence in leisure’s consuming (preference for malls, videogames and fiction characters coming from mass media). Nevertheless, we have found unexpected categories, repeated in different cultural environments and different ages (i.e. “sleeping in my room”).
We do believe that our research contribute strongly to the Visual Literacies field since we are researching about images using visual methodologies and we refer our conclusions to a wide context of visual culture.
The Gaza War as reflected Visually in Israeli Daily Journals
Rachel Shalita
Education Department – “Hamidrasha” – Art Teaches College – The Academic College – Beit-Berl, Israel
Severe military restrictions during the war, prevented Israeli photojournalists as well as foreigners, to approach the “battle field” in Gaza, and obliged them to take pictures from a very long distance. Of course there were no such restrictions on taking pictures on the Israeli side – the Israeli towns bombed with Hamas measles.
In my presentation I would like to explore the front pages of five daily journals in three points in time: the first day of the war, the entrance of earth forces into Gaza and the first days of the Cease-fire.
Different visual aspects will be examined – the chosen front pictures as well as the use of colored backgrounds, fonts, visual design of the entire front page, and analysis of the main headlines.
The journals’ front pages will be studied not only in order to discover the ways in which the differences of political attitudes are reflected visually, but also in order to examine in what visual means the shift in the public opinion within Israeli people that developed during the war, is visually manifested.
Gender and Visual Literacy: Women’s /Media Watch Group/ (MEDIZ) in Turkey
Emek Çaylı Rahte
Faculty of Communication, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey
Feminist criticism is able to foster a greater understanding of sexist and discriminating discourse and images of the media. The normalization, naturalizing and reframing effects of ideology within media texts have been subject to numerous academic studies. These studies also provide recognition of how women are victimized and exploited in the context of visual images and reveal the ideological meanings of visual communication generally. As an important component of media literacy, visual literacy requires a close reading of media texts, recognition of the relation between image-making and gender. Media activists have a crucial role to provide an understanding of visual literacy. A media activist group called “Media Watch”, founded by Ann Simonton in Santa Cruz, California, is an example to challenge the biased images and abusive stereotypes in media. Beginning in 1984, Media Watch, in its own words, distributes educational videos, media literacy information and newsletters to help create more informed consumers of the mass media. In Turkey a group of women, women organizations and institutions have combined to compose a similar activist group called Media Watch Group (MEDİZ). Their main objective is “to give an end to the gender inequalities and violation of women’s human rights in the media”. Generally, image interpretation and critical analysis of women images in the media is one of the major goals of “media watch groups.” This paper will focus on women’s media activism groups and compare the two activist groups, MEDIZ in Turkey and Media Watch in USA. In this way the efforts for visual literacy skills related to the gender issues in Turkey will be evaluated. Also interviews with the founders of MEDIZ will be made to reveal media activists’ contribution for visually literate media consumers.
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