Publication Type

Blog Post

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

4-2020

Abstract

One of the exciting trends in the study of international relations is the growing appreciation of the visual in global politics. It builds on path-breaking work on aesthetics and IR (see Bleiker 2012, Shapiro 2014), to examine how images shape our view of the world, especially in our post-literate age where people primarily get their information about international affairs from visual media. As we saw with the photograph of the dead toddler Alan Kurdi during Europe’s migration crisis in 2015, iconic photographs can put issues on the global policy agenda, even provoking Angela Merkel to allow over one million refugees into Germany. This attention to the politics of framing – who and what is included inside the frame of the political, and how people and issues are excluded from the international – shows how iconic images can be very powerful, even demanding an ethical and political response. Many scholars thus argue that we need to understand how visuals are important not just because of the content of their meaning, but also consider how their meaning is constructed by the ‘who, when, where, and how’ issues of their production, distribution, and viewership. This attention to the social construction of the visible is what I call the ‘visibility strategy’: its goal is to ‘think visually’, and hence ‘speak truth to power’ by revealing the state and corporate power relations behind the image (see Bleiker 2018; Campbell 2003; Hansen 2011; Harman 2019; Vuori and Andersen 2018).

Discipline

Political Science

Research Areas

Political Science

Areas of Excellence

Digital transformation

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