Browsing by Subject "representation"

This study explores how the representation of homeless people is constructed in charity appeals drawing on the example of Nochlezhka, the leading homelessness charity in Russia. Nochlezhka is not only a shelter providing immediate help but also an NGO with a wide range of activities, including advocacy, consultancy and resocialization of the homeless. International recognition of its achievements and its prominent work offered a necessary basis for situating the organization as the subject of a case study. Two factors which have driven the researcher’s interest in the chosen topic are the recent development of the charity sector in Russia and the appalling number of homeless people in the country. Mainstream representations of homelessness tend to present stereotypical images of urban others, reducing them to a set of stable characteristics, often negative in their nature. In other words, homeless people subjected to othering, and their difference becomes fixed to the state of being unsettled. Being homeless is then associated with being dirty, drunk, and completely degraded. Such preexisting attitudes towards homeless people problematize their representation for charity purposes. The aim of this study is to understand how the appeals on homelessness are reaching the potential sea of donors, considering that they are making a proposal to help those who are generally not considered to be an object for help. The thesis relies on the theory of representation and the area of media research which studies humanitarian communication and its ethical implications. The former examines how the other is portrayed and discusses stereotyping practices on the general level. The latter draws on paradoxes of the particular styles and differentiates three ways of formulating a charity appeal: shock-effect appeal, deliberative positivism and post-humanitarian or reflexive appeals. A critical discourse approach was chosen to study how appeals construe certain ways of representing the world and the actors in it. In order to examine the different semiotic modes (e.g. verbal and visual) of appeals the methods of multimodal analysis were employed. The analysis shows that rather than represent homeless people and their struggles in a shocking or exaggeratedly positive way, Nochlezhka balances a reflexive style of appealing and a tendency to represent the homeless through their own narration. The charity employs strategies of nomination and cultural estrangement, while the aesthetical power of appeals is realized through the means of multimodal metaphors. Assigning homeless people with their names works as an antidote to the conventional impersonalization of this social group. Representing the loneliness in their campaigns, Nochlezhka replaces the raw reality of suffering with a significant and universal human experience. The decision to communicate the fragility of human life through the theme of illness also points to the broader discourse of social insecurity.

Syftet med den här avhandlingen är att närmare granska hur personer med icke-typiska finländska drag respresenteras i finländska reklamer. Tidigare studier tyder på att etniska minoriteter oftast representeras stereotypiskt gentemot sin kultur eller som exotiska, animalistiska eller barnsliga. En annan typisk representation är att framställa etniska minoriteter som utlänningar, turister eller främlingar i ”vårt” land. Reklamer har en stor makt i vårt samhälle och hur olika etniciteter framställs och representeras i reklamer påverkar samhällets uppfattning om dem. I den här avhandlingen tar jag avstamp i tidigare studier och teorier om representation, identitet och kultur och granskar närmare hur etniska minoriteter syns och framställs i finländska reklamer idag. I studien valdes fem finländska företag ut vars reklamer granskades under en tre månaders period. Reklamerna analyserades genom en kvalitativ innehållsanalys. Alla reklamer som innehöll en eller flera personer med icke-typiska finländska drag analyserades närmare utgående från ett kodningsschema. Företagen vars reklamer granskades är Fazer, Finnair, Elisa, Lumene och Marimekko. Reklamerna valdes ut från respektive företags Youtube-sidor. Under den tre månader långa perioden bestod 16 reklamer av totalt 80 stycken av en eller flera personer med icke-typiska finländska drag. I materialet som granskades syntes tre olika teman vad gäller framställning av personer med icke-typiska finländska drag. Dessa teman var: jämlik representation, lika men ändå olika och turisten eller den andra. Dessa teman är relativt långt i likhet med vad tidigare studier tyder på. Det fanns flera exempel på reklamer där personer med icke-typiska finländska drag till synes framställdes lika som finländare, men vid närmare granskning upptäcktes subtila stereotypiska tecken. Ännu i denna dag är det vanligt att framställningen av etniska minoriteter är i rollen som utlänning eller turist. Det finländska samhället är idag mer mångkulturellt vilket delvis även syntes i materialet som granskades. Det fanns exempel där personer med icke-typiska finländska drag framställdes som inkluderade i det finländska samhället utan att framhäva dem som exotiska eller annorlunda. Men fortfarande finns det flera exempel där personer med icke-typiska finländska drag framställs som turister eller utlänningar och på så sätt skapar en ”vi” och ”dem” framställning. Jämfört med tidigare studier verkar finländska reklamer gå mot en mer jämlik framställning vad gäller representation av etniska minoriteter i reklamer, men fortsättningsvis syns subtila stereotypiska tecken i reklamerna vilket bidrar till att de ännu inte fullt reflekterar det samhälle vi lever i.

Modern life is saturated with advertisements that use images. We see them on our phones, our TVs, on billboards and signs, though very few are memorable or meaningful to us once they have reached the end of their lifecycle. One campaign that challenged the notion of traditional advertisements was HSL’s “Faces of Public Transport” campaign, which ran in autumn of 2013 and winter of 2014 in Helsinki. The HSL campaign featured 526 portraits of people from the Helsinki area who utilize public transportation in a unique and notable campaign in celebration of HSL reaching an annual ridership of one million people in the Helsinki region. The HSL campaign brings up questions about representation, the intersection of identities, and the power of images and the creator of images. Dyer (1997) and Hall (2003), among others, inform the theoretical background of the research on identity and representation, though the main focus of this work is methodological development and practice, specifically in terms of visual research methods and the use of photography as an ethnographic research tool. As the results show, making meaning from images does not produce neat datasets, but instead prompts further interrogation of local, national and global power structures that affect how identities are represented.

In the thesis, I analyze how language choices affect characters’ representation in two different Grand Theft Auto video games. The characters in the games are fully voiced by real-life actors and actresses, and they represent a large variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Language plays a huge part in the construction of a character, and the character is given a voice which is received and assessed by millions of players worldwide which is why the character represents different things to different people. Players’ attitudes and prejudices toward a certain variation of a language affect how the character is represented. In the thesis, I examine the characters’ Englishes through syntax, vocabulary and slang, but also their cultural and political status and stereotypes. Even fictional characters’ language does not exist in vacuum, because it always carries cultural and political baggage through language language attitudes and ideologies. I apply a multimodal approach to studying representation, which is still a fairly rare subject in video game studies. Both games are set in a fictional version The U.S. which means that their locations, characters and other cultural traits are parodies of their real-life counterparts. They were a huge hit when they were published, selling millions of copies worldwide and shaping players minds throughout the years. Both games are around twenty years old at this point, but still possess for example an active speedrun community online. The games have also been ported to newer gaming systems because of their popularity. The characters, whether e.g., Hispanic or African American, represent at least a little those people living in The U.S. in the past or present. The cultural stereotypes and references to real-life actions, language or appearance cannot be separated from themselves which makes this an interesting, both linguistic and sociolinguistic, study. The groups represented in the games are not portrayed in the best possible way because of the games’ being overtly exaggerated and stereotypical satire. That said, groups and individuals in the games are after all fictional and should be first and foremost seen as such. Even though the games are an entertainment product, a thorough study of representation can be carried out because of their cultural impact and somewhat realistic nature.

This thesis explores the representation of female sexuality in D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Elizabeth Gilbert’s City of Girls. This work aims to compare the patriarchal image of Connie Chatterley with a more progressive image of Vivian Morris with the help of interdisciplinary feminist theory and feminist literary criticism. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a final novel by the British writer D.H. Lawrence, written in 1928 but banned from publication until 1960 for its explicit sexual content. The novel portrays the interclass affair between Connie Chatterley and the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors and is problematic in representing gender and sexuality. Employing feminist interpretations of essentialism, theory of binary opposition, and Freud’s theory of sexuality, I analyze how the novel portrays othering of the female body, disparaging attitude toward the womb, and heterosexual power dynamic, thus making Connie an embodiment of the patriarchal vision. Gilbert’s City of Girls is a progressive literary work published in 2019 which explores the theme of female sexuality from a contemporary point of view through the narrator-protagonist Vivian Morris. Gilbert presents a refined image of female sexuality by tackling assumptions traditionally assigned to it. The novel explores feminine beauty, sexual shame, and social punishment due to female sexual expression. Gilbert portrays Vivian as a sexually transgressive heroine who eventually embraces her sexuality and accepts it as a natural part of her identity. Gilbert’s representation of female sexuality presents a feminist perspective and subverts literary tradition.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the representations of women in the activism of 19th-century freethinking feminists and the underlying motives thereof. I analyse the representations offered by Harriet Martineau in her writings on the Contagious Diseases Acts – legislation regulating prostitution – consisting of the four letters to the London Daily News in 1869, electoral placards and personal letters written c. 1871. In examining the different representations of women, I use content analysis to categorise Martineau’s rhetoric in her writings on the middle-class activists and lower-class sex workers. The three key concepts for this thesis are freethought, gender, and representation. By freethought I refer to the ideology of the organized 19th-century secularist movement that lobbied for the separation of political, cultural, and moral life from religion. I use the term gender as theorized by Joan Scott, conceptualising it as a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences and as a way of signifying relationships of power. In utilizing the term representation, I use Stuart Hall’s definition of representation as “the process by which members of a culture use language to produce meaning”. The representations of women in Martineau’s writings on the Acts are varied and conflicting. I identify three representations of middle-class women: self-sacrificing patriots, moral guardians, and intellectual educators. Each is used to justify women’s move into politics. The emphasis on self-sacrifice and moral guardianship employs the dominant ideology of femininity in which women were passive but at the centre of the morality of the nation. However, at the same time Martineau challenges the dominant idea of femininity in presenting the female activists as active agents and intelligent educators. I identify three representations of lower-class sex workers: passive victims, sinners, and fellow English women. In the victimizing rhetoric, Martineau utilizes the common idea of the sex worker’s fallenness to evoke sympathy. However, she never differentiates between the sex workers by virtue, presenting all as victims of society. Most radically she portrays them as English women, equal subjects of the British law. This egalitarian representation challenges the hierarchical structure underpinning the victimizing rhetoric. I suggest Martineau’s representations draw from two distinct aspects: her middle-class background and her freethinking mission of bettering society through education. Her moral background explains the more traditional depictions of women. However, I argue that her belief in necessarianism motivates her egalitarian view of sex workers as fellow Englishwomen. I suggest that Martineau’s over-arching agenda was to educate the public. This is apparent in her appeals to the duty of citizens to learn and enlighten others.

Abstract The aim of this study is to critically analyse and unfold common discourse on emigration in Georgian talk radio show “Migration Routes”. It is largely focused on non-elite talk on emigration from Georgia with the purpose to find different metaphors that were involved in the talk. The study aims to answer the following questions: 1. how is emigration and emigrants linguistically constructed in talk radio show? 2. Is there evidence that can be found in the speakers’ use of language that promotes dramatization of female emigrants from Georgia? 3. What functions do such discourses have in the society? I have chosen Critical Discourse Analysis as a methodological approach to better analyse naturally occurring spoken material. For the analyses of material, the following scheme has been implemented: 1) identification of thematic content areas of the material; 2) analysis of the dominant rhetorical devices in the talk (e.g. the use of metaphor, referential vagueness, extreme case formulations, etc.); 3) argumentative strategies that lie behind emigration discourse, which at the first glance seems to be very positive. In total, eleven talk radio shows have been listened and analysed. Three discursive strategies have been used by the actors of talk radio show to convey ideologies, attitudes and common sense knowledge: victimization of migrants, avoidance of concrete discussion on the empowerment of migrants and use of positive rhetoric with contradictory implications. It has been revealed that speakers of this radio programme enjoyed drama talk on emigrants which in turn reinforced myths, idealized discussions and perpetuated portrayal of emigrants as “victims”, “lost generation”. Discourse around representation of female emigrants from Georgia was contrasting in essence. Most commonly, it was linked to negatively connoted metaphors such as “virtual parent”, “guest”, “other”, “sacrifice”, “battle”, “and “fear”. However, the other side of female emigration was understood as positive in terms of their success stories and professional as well as personal achievements. Behind the good intention to cover emigration topic and bring their voices into the public, the way it has been achieved resulted in symbolic understanding of emigration which was on the surface.

In recent decades, the visibility of Finland has been increasing in Japan. It might even be almost impossible not to notice “Finland” in everyday life. -Products with Moomin characters, trendy Finnish style saunas, Finnish words used in brand or product names and Finnish themed facilities. But what kind of themes spring to mind when Finland is mentioned? What images are attached to Finland, or how is Finland talked about in everyday life? This study investigates what Japanese people post about Finland and what kind of representations of Finland appear on Japanese Twitter, as well as how the Japanese society is represented through these discussions. For the data collection, the search word and command “フィンランド min_faves: 1000” was used, in order to find tweets that included the Japanese word for Finland, フィンランド, and which had accumulated more than 1000 likes. The final data amounted to 364 tweets posted on Twitter between September 16th 2020 and November 7th 2022. The analysis was conducted in two separate phases; in the first phase, themes of the tweets which appeared in the data were identified by using qualitative content analysis (QCA), and in the second phase, representation analysis was conducted together with QCA in order to find out how Finland is represented on Japanese Twitter, and what kind of meanings are attached to Finland. The analysis identified the following themes that often appear in the tweets about Finland: Nature, travel destination, history, national defence, brands, art, language, customs, education as social welfare, school, work-life balance, gender equality, and mindset. The representations of Finland found in the data were: The ideal model for Japan (a model for a fair society/ a model for a happier life), magical and consumable Finland, a small but brave and a strong country, and questioning “the dream country Finland”. The analysis also found that the images of Finland are constructed to fit the narratives of Japanese people. “The dream country Finland” was created by Japanese people’s fantasies and ideals and it was used to criticize some aspects of the Japanese society: the Japanese government, politics, social welfare, working style, national defence, among others.

My thesis is about photography and its aesthetics in a world of digitized culture. The main hypothesis is that there is an ongoing and fundamental change in the way photographs and images are being produced, distributed and consumed in society, resulting in a new kind of aesthetics, that did not previously exist in photography. I argue that digital photography should be seen as part of a wider range of digital imaging, as a separate field from traditional analogue photography. My observation is on all different aspects of photographic practice: artistic, technical and social; on the different aspects of photographic expression in different artistic, social and scientific practices (both analogue and digital). Fundamental issues are how the digital divide changes our perception, the way we work and how we process and understand images. I complement academic thought with empirical observations derived from my background as a practicing media-artist and film- and photography professional with almost two decades experience from the field. I start by introducing a basic history of photography, in order to place the practice in a historicaly and technologically determined context, followed by defining what a photograph is in an analogue and digital sense. The main discussion looks at aesthetic concepts related to photography and imaging. This is mainly done by deconstructing formal aspects of the image/photograph and examining the photographs function as a representation of reality and truth. To support my thoughts and to argue against conflicting theories, I mainly rely on writings and thoughts by authors like Bruce Wands, Vilém Flusser, Jerry L. Thompson, Martin Hand and Charlie Gere. From more classic writers on photographic theory I use Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Roger Scruton. The aim is to create a comprehensive image of the field of thought, both on a contemporary and historical axis, and through this build a solid base for understanding and argumentation. I conclude that we are already living in the future, and that the reality we know will change with an ever-increasing pace, soon taking the step over to augmented and virtual reality. Current and future image makers should consider in depth what it really means to create images in a digital universe. A new way of seeing digitally is crucial for future understanding of the changing digital landscape of images.

This thesis explores the tropes through which the American South is represented in American popular music from the 1910s and 1920s. During the early 20th century, the music publishing industry based in New York City—often referred to as “Tin Pan Alley”—produced hundreds of popular songs whose lyrics romanticized the South as a harmonious paradise free from the troubles associated with living in the urban North. Although popular at the time, these so called “Dixie tunes” have faded into obscurity from the mainstream but continue to be performed in barbershop singing contests around the world. Rather than performing the songs as written in the early 20th century, Barbershop quartets and choruses present audiences with modernized arrangements that often include alterations to song lyrics. The dataset for this thesis consists of 18 “Dixie tunes” that have been used as repertoire by male barbershop groups competing in regional and international contests held by the Barbershop Harmony Society in recent decades. By categorizing the songs thematically, we discuss the most prominent cultural representations they depict. By using copies of original sheet music, we compare the original song lyrics with modern barbershop arrangements in order to understand what types of changes, additions or reductions have been made when these particular songs have been adapted into the barbershop style. We conclude that these songs portray the South through myths and archetypes like the “mammy”, the “happy darkie” and activities such as musical celebrations and performances, while the reality of racial tension in the region is not adressed. These depictions are often preserved in barbershop arrangements. However, lyrics are often altered in order to bowdlerize the racial stereotypes that are present in the original texts.