Communication lapses to combating COVID-19 pandemic: Evaluating Ghana’s COVID-19 campaign

COVID-19 is described as ‘novel’ largely because the virus has rarely been studied. Without any vaccine, the key to containing the virus was the timely delivery of educative public health information to people. With a population of 29 million composed of small urban segments, Ghana has enormous rural enclaves where most of her citizens live. This study seeks to explore the nature of Ghana’s COVID-19 campaign, focusing on the communication strategies and the extent to which indigenous communication tools (ICTs) have been employed. Relying on document analysis, Ghana’s COVID-19 campaign rarely deployed ICTs but rather paid lip service to the country’s indigenous resources in public addresses to the nation. It also found that the fight against the virus metamorphosed into political campaigns making WHO’s vital information subservient to images of political figures and political iconography in general. We argue that the nature of the campaign created generalized awareness of the pandemic, but did less to educate the masses on the WHO preventive protocols.

Political Iconography and Emotions in Electoral Campaigns: A Communicative Approach

The authors of this work believe that the fact that political iconography can influence reality and intervene in actual events -sometimes by using reinvented motifs and visual narratives from previous iconographic sources, after Warburg’s Pathosformel fashion–, is of utmost importance in political campaigns. In modern electoral campaigns, the use of visual themes that represent different emotions constitutes a clear link with the use of pathos in current political communication. From the perspective of political communication, this work analyses the use of iconography in modern electoral campaigns. In doing so, we trace a link between Warburg’s concept of the pathos formula and the use of different motifs of pathos developed in modern electoral campaigns. Electoral communication uses images linked to emotions such as enthusiasm, hope, fear and identity, which in this paper are studied from a database of posters and electoral spots from recent Spanish campaigns. The study also makes reference to visual motifs of pathos aimed at activating these emotions in the voters in different comparative campaigns and in electoral propaganda.

Iconography as a Means of Reaching Political Power: A Case Study of Three Georgian Presidents

This paper focuses on analyzing the structure of political iconography as one of the methods to achieve political power. On this basis, the political iconography of three Georgian presidents is analyzed. In the modern world, the most important tool for politics and politicians is creating a political icon. Political iconography is directly connected with Christian iconography. It is widely known that in order to get the desired impact on the society, various forms and means of mass communication are used such as personal, social, visual, rhetoric, audio, and communication. Using them without creating iconographic image from politicians does not have any result. Political iconography reaches and mostly remains in the mind of the society, and this leads people to make their decision to support the politician who is a hero of the iconography. This fits the narrative, meaning, and common discourse of the society, which formed an iconographic image of the certain politician. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a new type of political iconography of Georgia was born which is essentially different from the Soviet iconography. The political iconography of these three Georgian presidents is based on the narrative of creating a modern state. There is however a substantial difference between them. Zviad Gamsakhurdia created the political iconography of a savior, Edward Shevardnadze was seen as an iconic politician, and Mikheil Saakashvili was a creator of power and savior.

Walls of Anxiety: The Iconography of Anti-NATO protests in Spain, 1981–6

This article addresses the protest culture of the Spanish anti-NATO movement during the first half of the 1980s. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, it focuses on the collective practice of painting murals and graffiti ( pintadas) on walls in the outskirts of Spanish cities. This was done by neighbourhood associations, together with local artists, in order to display and disseminate the widespread angst regarding entering and remaining in NATO. Murals constituted a grassroots multi-layered phenomenon that emerged through the interaction of different communicative actors, social processes and semiotic forms. The article explores three themes. Firstly, the political iconography of anti-NATO murals in Spain whilst comparing it with the aesthetics of other European peace movements. Secondly, the domestic reframing of anti-war and antinuclear icons as well as anti-American clichés, violence and the army, gender relations, Spanish national sovereignty and, more generally, the process of modernisation and westernisation that was rapidly affecting post-Francoist society. Finally, the analysis of these visual expressions offers a bottom-up picture of the final stage of the Cold War and a better understanding of the role of Spanish civil society during the period of democratic consolidation.

De Lincoln a Putin: el motivo visual del líder político caminando en los media españoles

How is power represented in politics? From the cinematographic fictions of Abraham Lincoln to photographs of politicians such as Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, or Vladimir Putin that have adorned the covers of national and international newspapers, the image of the walking leader has established itself as one of the most recurrent iconographies in the visual representation of political action. Despite this, the political leader walking has not been an object of analysis in studies on visual communication or political iconography. Starting from the prominent presence of this “visual motif” in the media and public imagination, we postulate that this perpetuation responds to a continuation and recognition of iconographic traditions that, despite their evolution and transformation, remain valid. Within the Movep research project, we developed a hypothesis on the representation of the political leader walking by studying a sample of the covers of the Spanish newspapers with the largest circulation (El país, El mundo, and La vanguardia) from 2011 to 2017. At a theoretical level, we start from the studies of political iconography by Carlo Ginzburg (2011), Horst Bredekamp (2007), and Christian Joschke (2012), all framed under the theses of Aby Warburg (1905) on pathosformel. The methodology used starts from visual semiotics and iconographic historiography to determine the predominant figurative features of the images. Likewise, by linking the analyzed photographs with audiovisual fiction and the plastic arts, we interpret the connoted planes of the image and identify the visual story that emerges from them, which is translatable into an ideology or political position of the actors involved. Thanks to this framework and using an analysis of the composition of the images, the dynamics with the physical environment, and the gestures of the subjects, we establish seven categories that expand the meanings. Resumen ¿Cómo se representa el poder en la política? Desde las ficciones cinematográficas de Abraham Lincoln hasta las fotografías de políticos como Barack Obama, Angela Merkel o Vladimir Putin que han vestido las portadas de los periódicos –nacionales e internacionales–, la imagen del líder caminando se ha consolidado como una de las iconografías más recurrentes en la representación visual de la acción política. Pese a ello, el líder político andando no ha sido objeto de análisis en los estudios de comunicación visual ni de iconografía política. Partiendo de la destacada presencia de este “motivo visual” en los media y el imaginario público, postulamos que dicha perpetuación responde a una pervivencia y a un reconocimiento de tradiciones iconográficas que, a pesar de su evolución y transformación, siguen vigentes. Dentro del proyecto de investigación Movep, desarrollamos la hipótesis sobre la representación del líder político andando mediante el estudio de una muestra de portadas de los diarios españoles de mayor tirada (El país, El mundo y La vanguardia) desde 2011 a 2017. A nivel teórico, partimos de los estudios de iconografía política de Carlo Ginzburg (2011), Horst Bredekamp (2007) y Christian Joschke (2012), todos enmarcados bajo las tesis de Aby Warburg (1905) sobre el pathosformel. La metodología utilizada parte de la semiótica visual y de la historiografía iconográfica para determinar los rasgos figurativos predominantes de las imágenes. Asimismo, mediante la vinculación de las fotografías analizadas con la ficción audiovisual y las artes plásticas, interpretamos los planos connotados de la imagen e identificamos el relato visual que surge de ellos, traducible a una ideología o posicionamiento político de los actores involucrados. Gracias a este marco y valiéndonos del análisis de la composición de las imágenes, la dinámica con el entorno físico y la gestualidad de los sujetos, establecemos siete categorías que amplían las significaciones.

Die Kraft der Gletscher. Ein Beitrag zur politischen Ikonographie in der Literatur der Napoleonischen Kriege

Der vorliegende Aufsatz widmet sich den politisch-nationalen Auslegungen der eisigen Landschaft in ausgewählten literarischen Werken der Napoleonischen Zeit. Eingangs wird die Aufwertung der polaren und alpinen Regionen im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert umrissen, in deren Folge die bis dahin negativ konnotierten Gebiete als antizivilisatorische Sehnsuchts- oder Erkenntnisorte umgedeutet wurden. Einen Höhepunkt fand diese Entwicklung am Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts. Der hohe Norden sowie die Alpen als Zitat des Nordischen wurden insbesondere zur Zeit der Befreiungskriege in der politischen Lyrik als Symbole der Freiheit und Hoffnung eingesetzt, da diese Himmelsrichtung assoziativ u.a. mit der vermuteten Herkunft der Germanen aus Skandinavien und der Niederlage Napoleons im winterlichen Russland verbunden wurde.The power of glaciers: Shedding additional light on the political iconography found in the lyrical production of the Napoleonic eraThis article undertakes to investigate national-political connotations attendant to glacier-featuring landscapes in some literary works of the Napoleonic era. The point of departure for this analysis is marked by the outline of the 18th century re-evaluative process which concerned the cultural conventional wisdom vis-à-vis the symbolic significance of polar and high-elevation regions. In that time, they came to be regarded as off-the-beaten-track refuges and loci affording illumination. This new trend found its culmination at the beginning of the 19th century. The Far North as well as the Alps may have functioned in that period as a symbol connoting freedom and hope for a victory over the French; this sentiment achieved particular prominence in the lyrical production of the Napoleonic period. The German national psyche invested such regions i.a. with two qualities: firstly, they were reminiscent of the cradle of the Germanic people, and secondly, they invoked the debacle of Napoleon’s winter military campaign in Russia.