This article introduces the special issue of the Journal of Language and Politics on ‘Discourse Theory: Ways forward for theory development and research practice.’ In this introduction we discuss the rationale behind the special issue and the structure of the special issue.
The proliferation of visual communication in contemporary societies, fuelled by the rapid transformation of photography from a specialised activity into a ubiquitous social practice, has not gone unchallenged and the recent "picture craze" has revived many long-seated objections and fears over the power of the image. This article presents one strand of these contestations that were articulated by the mainstream news media reports on the popular informal photographic self-portrait known as the selfie. This is presented through a discourse-theoretical analysis, which shows the discursive struggle about how to give meaning to the phenomenon. In order to show the confrontation between condemnatory and affirmative discourses on photographic change, 255 news articles and commentaries published by three Slovene and three UK mainstream news media, between 30 November 2012 and 30 November 2014, are analysed. The analysis traces the development of the contesting articulations of the discourse of photographic change that are structured around three nodal points-image producer identity, photographic image value and photographic subject relevance. The article also outlines the ideological implications of psycho(patho)logisation of the selfie that is prevalent in the analysed articles-of treating selfie primarily as a psychological rather than as a sociological communicational or photographic phenomenon.
The article addresses the issue of essentially Orientalistic pictorial coverage of the US invasion of Iraq in the Slovene daily newspaper, Delo. The study showed that such framing was not solely the result of western control over the images of war but was, to a large extent, a consequence of a set of specific sociohistorical factors, namely the particular political situation at the time of the invasion and the workings of the mechanisms of Slovene national identity construction that draws its strength from replicating the Occident-Orient oppositions in the Balkan geopolitical reality. The article points to the persistent ideological role of news photographs as expressions of a collective historical consciousness.
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