This study examines newspaper photographs related to the COVID‐19 pandemic in Finland. Drawing on social representations theory and positioning theory, we explore social representations and identities related to COVID‐19 in mass media using a visual rhetoric analysis. More specifically, we focus on how newspaper photographs construct subjects' positions for different age groups. The data consisted of 4,506 photographs of people published in the two largest Finnish newspapers between 1 January and 31 August 2020. The study identified the following subject positions for the different age groups: (a) children as controlled pupils and joyful players; (b) youth as future‐oriented graduates and reckless partygoers; (c) adults as authoritative experts, adaptive professionals, responsible caretakers and active recreationists and (d) elderly people as isolated loners. In addition to echoing the positions of villains, heroes and victims identified in previous studies, the photographs seemed to construct an intergroup divide between adults and the other age groups. Methodologically, this study elaborates the usefulness of the analysis of visual rhetoric in social representations research. Theoretically, we seek to advance the understanding of the role of media, particularly images, in the social construction of knowledge.

This research examines the mobilization of populist rhetoric of the 2019 Finns Party election video. By focusing on both the FP's election video (production) and Youtube users' comments (reception), we examine the constructions and uses of social categories and humour as well as responses to their rhetorical deployment among like-minded supporters and opponents. The multimodal analysis of the production of a populist campaign video demonstrates the construction of social categories and humour through the five steps of collective hate. These humorous messages are differently received by like-minded and opposing YouTube users. Two supportive affective-discursive practices glorification and schadenfreudeboth express shared joy and laughter, but while glorification emphasizes the positive self-understanding of the in-group, schadenfreude belittles the 'political Other'. Two opposing affective-discursive practicesirritation and scornplace FP voters in subject positions of morally and intellectually inferior fascists, racists, and idiots. The populist message fosters expressions of social anger and polarization between FP supporters and opponents. Humour entangled with hatred encourages a sense of moral superiority in both groups. This study contributes to the current knowledge of mobilizing populist rhetoric and polarization, and responds to the call to broaden analysis of political communication in the field of multimodality. Recently, populism has been central to public and academic debate. Political and socialscientific discussion of its definitions have been lively: it has been defined as an ideology (Mudde, 2004), discourse (Laclau, 2005), and rhetorical style (Jagers & Walgrave, 2007), and a combination of these (see e.g. Rooduijn, 2019). Social psychology has approached populism as an intergroup differentiation based on its vertical and horizontal dimensions (Staerkl e & Green, 2018). While its vertical differentiation refers to the gap between 'good people' and a 'bad elite', its horizontal dimension concerns the confrontation between 'in-' and 'out-groups', the latter often referring to refugees, characterized as 'the dangerous Other' (Brubaker, 2020; Wodak, 2015). From this model, it follows that a combination of high-level vertical and horizontal differentiation best describes national (right-wing) populism, whereas a combination of high-level vertical and low-level horizontal differentiation best describes social (left-wing) populism. Previous studies suggest that This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

This study examines social representations of teachership based on students' and teachers' drawings. Fifty-nine students and thirty-nine teachers in upper-secondary education in Finland participated in the research, drawing a picture of a typical teacher and commenting on their drawings verbally. The study focuses on what kinds of social representations of teachership the drawings suggest and how teachers' and students' social representations relate to each other and to Finnish education policy. The data were analyzed by content analysis. This study shows that teachers' and students' social representations of teachership differ from each other and also deviate from Finnish education policy to some extent. Furthermore, the results suggest that teachers do not pay sufficient attention to their visual nonverbal behavior, which might contribute to the formation of unfavorable social representations of teachers among students, influencing interaction and learning negatively.

Media plays an important role in the formation of social representations. This study examines the cover images of Finnish Teacher Magazine published by the Trade Union of Education as means of communicating social representations of teachership among its readership consisting of teachers and student teachers. In order to critically discuss the structure of the cover images and their implications in terms of teachers’ professional identity, the study applies a visual rhetoric approach to the study of visually mediated social representations. The data consist of 138 cover images of Teacher Magazine between the years 2013 and 2017. The analysis of visual rhetoric was conducted using content analysis and semiotic analysis that provided means of examining both the visual form of the cover images and meanings communicated through them. Even though this study detects a variety of social representations of teachership, it also identifies a highly homogeneous type of teacher throughout the imagery, which is understood to present the members of the Trade Union with an ideal type of their profession. Consequently, cover images of Teacher Magazine appear to be vehicles of inclusion and exclusion, strengthening certain social representations of teachership and marginalizing others.

This study examines how Otherness is constructed visually in newspaper photographs of the refugee crisis. This visual rhetoric analysis examines the form, content, and function of images and explores the rhetorical strategies deployed in visualizations of the refugee crisis in a mainstream Finnish national newspaper from 2015 to 2016. The data consisted of 1,473 images. The study identified six rhetorical strategies used for dehumanizing refugees: massifying, separating, passivating, demonizing, individualizing, and recontextualizing the Other. The rhetorical strategies in turn constructed four discourses related to refugees, namely those of threat and victimhood aimed at dehumanizing as well as personhood and distance aimed at humanizing the Other. The paper contributes to the current knowledge on dehumanization and humanization of refugees in public discourse by unpacking the subtle visual mechanisms through which these processes occur.