This report provides an understanding of the complexities involved in communicating through imagery. I've asserted in my research that the dissemination of images has changed significantly because of recent digital technologies. Social networking, in particular, has allowed for an intertextual web of communication to be created by exponentially increasing the visibility of images. By bringing these recent developments into my work, my design practice has focused on advancing social and political equality by exploiting digital reproduction. As part of my toolbox in image communication, the report focuses intently on two general methods of production: image-text relationships and visual tropes. By using these methods, I have been able to establish a critical practice that highlights the most recent possibilities in advancing social and political equality in the age of digital reproduction. / text

This dissertation examines the rhetorical function and social implications of the "dominant narrative of teenage pregnancy"--that is, the popular depiction of young motherhood as the tragic downfall of a woman's life. I employ feminist poststructuralist and visual rhetorical critique to analyze historical and contemporary teenage pregnancy prevention materials as well as journalistic representations of young mothers. Building from this analysis, I argue that the dominant narrative pathologizes teenage mothers, prevents a focus on structures of inequality and poverty, sustains racialized gender ideologies, and encourages practices that perpetuate disparities for pregnant/mothering young women. In addition, this project explores strategies for resisting this discourse. Specifically, I review scholarship that has contested the dominant narrative and identify counter-rhetorical practices that some young mothers use in their published first-person narratives. Finally, drawing on focus groups I conducted with 27 young mothers, I illustrate that visibly young pregnant and parenting women are often publically confronted by strangers because they embody an urgent and much-debated social issue. I offer the concept of "embodied exigence" as a way to understand how discursive and material realities of the body may construct rhetorical situations and how the body may function as a site of constrained agency. Building from rhetorical theories of agency, exigence, and feminist work on the visibility of motherhood, I assert that in moments of embodied exigence, marginalized young mothers may seize the opportunity to resist dominant rhetoric and act as rhetors in their own right.

I vår tid omges vi av reklam nästan överallt. I hemmet till exempel i form av TV-reklam, dagstidningsreklam och direktreklam. På stan till exempel i form av utomhusreklam och flygblad. I SOM-undersökningen 2005 visade det sig att endast 14 procent av de tillfrågade hade en positiv inställning till TV-reklam. Om det är så få som uppskattar TV-reklam, hur ska en reklamfilm utformas för att fler ska bli positiva? Syftet är att undersöka hur medie- och kommunikationsstudenter upplever storybaserade respektive informativa reklamfilmer ur ett retoriskt perspektiv. Vi vill undersöka vad som upplevs som bra respektive dåligt i reklamfilmerna och få fram åsikter om hur förbättringar kan göras. För att göra detta satte vi samman tre fokusgrupper med sex studenter i varje grupp. Valet av medie- och kommunikationsstudenter gjordes för att de har en god inblick i reklambranschen utan att ha jobbat i den och på det sättet tappat en del av sin objektivitet. Genom en kvalitativ innehållsanalys utifrån ett visuellt retoriskt perspektiv har vi analyserat respondenternas svar och placerat dessa under tre olika kategorier, målgrupp, budskap och utformning. Vi har kunnat utläsa kopplingar mellan respondenternas diskussioner kring reklamfilmernas utformning och visuell retorik, med fokus på etos, patos logos och metonymi och metafor. Intressanta resultat som framkom var att de flesta av respondenterna menade att båda formerna av reklamfilmerna uppfyllde ett visst syfte. De tyckte dock att målgruppen kunde bli mer specifik och tydlig i båda reklamfilmerna. Den stora skillnaden mellan kategorierna var underhållningsvärdet och trovärdigheten.

This dissertation studies visual artifacts associated with early modern theatre and book culture, and through them examines acts of communication in the marketplace. These artifacts, illustrated play-text title pages from the period 1600 to 1660, provide scholars with an opportunity to better understand the discursive power of theatre and subjects associated with drama in seventeenth-century London. This work offers a set of case studies that demonstrate how title page imagery and its circulation can contribute to our understanding of contemporary theatre culture, and addresses questions of intention, production and distribution. As well, it offers insights into early modern modes of constructing visualization. These artifacts served not only as visual reminders or interpretations of the dramatic works they represented, but were also used as powerful marketing tools that enhanced the cultural capital of the plays throughout London. The title pages were used as posters, tacked to the walls of the booksellers’ shops; the woodcuts were also repurposed, and incorporated into other popular publications such as broadside ballads, which retold the plots of the plays in musical form and were sold on city street corners. These connections raise questions about early modern forms of marketing used by publishers, and challenge the widely accepted belief that images held little value in the society and in the culture of print of the period. In addition, the distribution of these illustrations challenges the widespread conviction that early modern English culture was iconophobic, and suggests that seventeenth-century English society embraced rather than spurned visual media. Methodologically, this study is built on the foundations laid by scholars of English theatre and print culture. Within those fields, however, it has been customary to view these title page illustrations as inferior forms of representation, especially in comparison to their continental counterparts. By using tools from visual rhetoric to expand on how and what these images communicate, I am able to show the important functions they performed, and the distinct and playful way they represent complex relationships between stage and page, audience and performance, reading and spectating. These readings, in turn, enrich our historical understanding of the cultures of print and theatre, and build upon our knowledge of the interactions between these rich and important fields. Each chapter explores theoretical and contextual questions that pertain to some aspect of each illustration, as well as examining whether individual illustrations can inform us further about early modern theatrical performance practices. The introduction surveys the relevant field and introduces the theoretical resources that will be used in the subsequent chapters. Chapter Two examines the 1633 edition of Arden of Faversham and the question of whether the action in the illustration pertains to the play or to a broadside ballad that appeared in the same year. The third chapter provides a theoretical analysis of the performance of violence in the woodcut for The Spanish Tragedy, and how emphatic elements in the image may demonstrate the influence of theatrical performance upon the artist. Chapter Four explores the relationship between the title page of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and the concept of celebrity in relation to the Tarltonesque clown character who dominates the action of the image. Chapter Five considers the problematic relationship between theatre, politics and satire in the competing engraved title pages for A Game at Chess. The conclusion draws together the findings, and points to other aspects of early modern print and theatre cultures to which they pertain.

Typefaces contain explicit and implicit character in their appearance. They are valuable to the designer to convey an appropriate rhetorical voice. Typefaces can be powerful expressions for the persona of user groups and their specialized information. This interpretive exploratory study looked at design as research. Textual data was collected from several sources that revealed typeface trends. As a precedent, Helvetica and Times used on National Park plans forecasted Parks Canada’s preference for Helvetica Neue as the current display font family. The second case study revealed several recurrent typefaces used for titles and headings on Canadian Society of Landscape Architects’ professional journals. Lastly, survey data about landscape architects’ current typeface preferences showed a trend for certain styles and persistent connotations. The personality and physical characteristics of these preferences were synthesized into design guidelines and a typeface concept. This representative landscape architecture typeface is intended to promote professional salience and unity. / The continuity of this thesis will generate a digital design resulting in the release of a typeface taking approximately two years. The author will engage with professionals within landscape architecture and typography to ensure that the typeface development and assessment is holistic and fulfills the recommendations outlined by the key informant and popular literature. / Landscape Architecture Alumni Award

This dissertation builds upon the relatively young fields of visual and environmental rhetoric and analyzes the rhetoric of natural history filmmaking, focusing on the ways in which the genre illustrates the complex relationship between contemporary culture and the environment. Each text demonstrates how the constructs of “nature” and “wilderness” perform necessary cultural work by representing particular ideals that change to meet the public’s shifting needs. Nature performs various roles, serving as a source of knowledge, solace, wonder, mystery, anxiety, truth, identity, and affirmation. The dominance and immediacy of visual culture make the natural history film, along with advertising, one of the most significant sources of meaning regarding the natural world. These films employ familiar syntactic and semantic cues such as sentimental parent/offspring interactions, authoritative narration that limits the ability of the audience to interpret freely, and a musical score that influences the viewer’s emotional response to certain scenes. The net result of these rhetorical practices is a distancing of the viewer from the natural world that destabilizes the attempts of many eco-political programs to emphasize the interconnectedness of ecological systems and their components. The emergent genre of big-budget nature films (BBNFs) is a distinctly modern and extremely popular take on natural history filmmaking that has more in common with summer blockbusters and wildlife theme parks than its predecessors with an unprecedented ability to influence public perception of the natural world. Even as environmental concerns become increasingly dire, the BBNF tends to commodify death and extinction, avoid political engagement, reduce engagement with nature to its most sentimental and violent moments, perpetuate the perceived separation between humans and their environment, and provide a soothing escape to a virtual environment that too often seems unaffected by climate change and habitat destruction. The BBNF has the potential to undermine environmental and conservation efforts. It also exemplifies what some ecocritics have termed “ecopornography,” an exploitative representation that objectifies its subjects, encourages viewers to develop identifications with unrealistic images rather than their real-world analogs, and helps enable unethical behavior toward the environment and nonhuman animals. At stake in this dissertation is a deeper understanding of how natural history filmmaking affects the public’s awareness of (and role in) the environment.

The interrelated topics of food, eating, nutrition, and diet continue to represent growing areas of interest in communication studies and related disciplines. Food is essential to our existence, and the images we use to communicate about food are important to public culture. In this project, I conduct a visual rhetorical analysis of the food pyramids created by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the 1992 Food Guide Pyramid and the 2005 MyPyramid, to explore how these iconic images negotiate the competing interests of the food industry, nutritionists, and the general public. As icons circulate, they become subjected to various forms of appropriation which includes copying, imitating, and satirizing the original image. Therefore, I study a collection of appropriated food pyramids created by different groups and individuals to identify the salient features of the food pyramid icon. As a group these images encourage viewers to believe that an abundance of food always exists by highlighting products over processes. Viewing the earth as endlessly abundant aligns with a cornucopian perspective on the environment which implicitly supports the status quo in the U.S. industrial food system. I conclude by offering ideas of appropriated food pyramids that visually challenge this problematic ideology. The USDA food pyramids and their visual appropriations provide an important space for us to interrogate the rhetorical messages we consume in public culture.

In this paper, we explore how corporations use visual artifacts to translate and recontextualize a globally theorized managerial concept (CSR) into a local setting (Austria). In our analysis of the field-level visual discourse, we analyze over 1,600 images in stand-alone CSR reports of publicly traded corporations. We borrow from framing analysis and structural linguistics to show how the meaning structure underlying a multifaceted construct like CSR is constituted by no more than a relatively small number of fundamental dimensions and rhetorical standpoints (topoi). We introduce the concept of imageries-of-practice to embrace the critical role that shared visual language plays in the construction of meaning and the emergence of field-level logics. In particular, we argue that imageries-of-practice, compared to verbal vocabularies, are just as well equipped to link locally resonating symbolic representations and globally diffusing practices, thus expressing both the material and ideational dimension of institutional logics in processes of translation. We find that visual rhetoric used in the Austrian discourse emphasizes the qualities of CSR as a bridging concept, and facilitates the mediation of inconsistencies in several ways: By translating abstract global ideas into concrete local knowledge, imageries-of-practice aid in mediating spatial oppositions; by linking the past, present, and future, they bridge time; by mediating between different institutional spheres and their divergent logics, they appease ideational oppositions and reduce institutional complexity; and, finally, by connecting questionable claims with representations of authenticity, they aid in overcoming credibility gaps.

With the unprecedented rise in the use of visuals, and its undeniable omnipresence in organizational contexts, as well as in the individual's everyday life, organization and management science has recently started to pay closer attention to the to date under-theorized "visual mode" of discourse and meaning construction. Building primarily on insights from the phenomenological tradition in organization theory and from social semiotics, this article sets out to consolidate previous scholarly efforts and to sketch a fertile future research agenda. After briefly exploring the workings of visuals, we introduce the methodological and theoretical "roots" of visual studies in a number of disciplines that have a long-standing tradition of incorporating the visual. We then continue by extensively reviewing work in the field of organization and management studies: More specifically, we present five distinct approaches to feature visuals in research designs and to include the visual dimension in scholarly inquiry. Subsequently, we outline, in some detail, promising avenues for future research, and close with a reflection on the impact of visualization on scientific practice itself. (authors' abstract)

The purpose of this project is to examine the visual political ad hominem arguments used on Instagram during the 2016 presidential campaign. Using Walton’s (2007) five subtypes of ad hominem arguments, this study analyzes the “attack ads” posted on Instagram from five of the 2016 presidential candidates into each subtype. This project seeks to understand how ad hominem arguments within political rhetoric function when they are visual. This study uses Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) theory of modality and Rose’s (2012) compositional interpretation to analyze compositional structure of the image and parallels this analysis with ad hominem subtypes. Findings reveal the abusive (direct) subtype as the most commonly used which aligns with traditional or popular uses of Instagram as a social networking site aimed at sharing personal events and stories. The abusive (direct) subtype is an ad hominem that attacks a respondent’s moral character, or ethos, rather than their argument or biases or inconsistencies. The visual abusive (direct) arguments used by the candidates largely targeted their opponents personally which parallels the popular uses of the medium Instagram.