Gakahu, N. orcid.org/0000-0003-0702-6337 (2024) Image-centrism in Africa’s political communication: a social semiotic analysis of self-presentation practices by women political candidates in Kenya’s social media space. Information, Communication & Society. ISSN 1369-118X
Abstract
This study explores self-visual presentation practices by female political candidates on Facebook during Kenya’s political campaigns that culminated in the national elections of 2022. The unit of analysis is the Facebook profile image of the women leaders. Image-centrism is operationalized as the extent to which ‘the image’ becomes the primary mode of self-presentation in political communication discourse. The study adopts a social semiotic approach to image interpretation postulated by Roland Barthes (1972. Mythologies. (A. Lavers. Trans) (Original work published 1957), 1977. Rhetoric of the image. In Image, music, text (pp. 32–51). Hill and Wang) and Kress and van Leeuwen (1996. Reading images: The grammar of visual design. Routledge, 2006. Reading images: The grammar of visual design (2nd ed.). Routledge). Using Kress and van Leeuwen’s approach, images are studied as ‘linguistic codes’ that have their own ‘grammatical’ structure. Barthes’s approach explores the cultural dimension of the images. The argument here is that visual communication is context-bound, and the theoretical premise laid is that politics is given direction, shape, and impetus by the culture of a people. In order to understand visual political communication in Kenya, therefore, the study analyses and interprets images from the lens of the wider African cultural contexts within which this communication takes place. The overarching questions in this study include:
How did female politicians in Kenya strategically use Facebook images for self-representation during the political campaigns in 2022?
How have women politicians in Kenya interwoven cultural ideology with visual political communication on their Facebook pages?
The ultimate conclusion is that political images not only serve as discourses for communicating political ideas and making political statements, but they also serve as self-representation modes as well as cultural manifestation codes that illuminate specific societal concepts.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2024 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | Visual communication; political communication; social media; women politicians; Kenya; social semiotics |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Media & Communication (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 29 May 2024 13:35 |
Last Modified: | 29 May 2024 13:35 |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | Taylor and Francis |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/1369118x.2024.2343367 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:212787 |