Websites As Cultural Expressions - A Multimodal Analysis Of Arabic E-commerce Sites

Author(s):  
Divakaran Liginlal ◽  
Preetha Gopinath ◽  
Rizwan Ahmad ◽  
Robert Meeds
Hawwa ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-27
Author(s):  
Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi

Abstract This article examines Emirati public discourse on, and imagination of, gendered pious fashion and conflict talk as animated in the sitcom Shaabiat Al-Cartoon (SAC) and other connected cultural expressions. Through a multimodal analysis, it contributes to discussions of the politics of piety by analyzing the strategic illustration of the UAE’s female fashion sense and use of the linguistic features that move verbal dueling to verbal attack. In this prefabricated orality, the article outlines linguistic forms in mediating gendered conflict talk and animating pious fashion. The paper further argues that a multimodal social semiotic performance that is based on language and apparel can produce powerful effects on the co-production of gendered identities. Additionally, it demonstrates through this analysis how the producers of an episode of SAC, through the use of semiotic cues, attempt to reflect and shape Emirati sociocultural values and idioms on pious gendered clothing and perceptions of religiosity and modernity.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 168-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivien Heller

This paper is concerned with embodied processes of joint imagination in young children’s narrative interactions. Based on Karl Bühler’s notion of ‘deixis in the imagination’, it examines in detail how a 19-month-old German-speaking child, engaged in picture book reading with his mother, brings about different subtypes of deixis in the imagination by either ‘displacing’ what is absent into the given order of perception (e.g. by using the hand as a token for an object) or displacing his origo to an imagined space (e.g. by kinaesthetically aligning his body with an imagined body and animating his movements). Drawing on multimodal analysis and the concept of layering in interaction, the study analyses the ways in which the picture book as well as deictic, depictive, vocal and lexical resources are coordinated to evoke a narrative space, co-enact the storybook character’s experiences and produce reciprocal affect displays. Findings demonstrate that different types of displacement are in play quite early in childhood; displacements in the dimension of space and person are produced through layerings of spaces, voices and bodies.


Screen Bodies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 46-62
Author(s):  
Yunying Huang

Dominant design narratives about “the future” contain many contemporary manifestations of “orientalism” and Anti-Chineseness. In US discourse, Chinese people are often characterized as a single communist mass and the primary market for which this future is designed. By investigating the construction of modern Chinese pop culture in Chinese internet and artificial intelligence, and discussing different cultural expressions across urban, rural, and queer Chinese settings, I challenge external Eurocentric and orientalist perceptions of techno-culture in China, positing instead a view of Sinofuturism centered within contemporary Chinese contexts.


2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 511-525
Author(s):  
Diana Betzler

AbstractThis article deals with the question of whether regional cultural competence centers foster the diversity of cultural expressions and how the objectives of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Convention on Cultural Diversity are implemented. By introducing the Convention on Cultural Diversity, the conditions of regional cultural policy governance, and the idea of regional cultural competence centers, a framework for evaluation is outlined. The evaluation of four regional cultural competence centers in the Swiss Central Region shows that fostering cultural diversity is complex and has many different approaches and effects. The final discussion concludes that principles such as “interculturality,” “freedom,” and “access for all” under the Convention on Cultural Diversity can promote a diversity of cultural expressions but that these criteria have to be set from outside—for example, by public funding institutions—so that regional actors implement them.


Author(s):  
Hoang Van Nguyen

AbstractThe discourses of risk serve to organise the ways in which we understand and respond to potential harms and threats, which have become a major concern in our daily life. However, the discourses of risk have not been extensively investigated using linguistic text-based methods on the multimodal level, nor deeply examined beyond Western contexts. Grounded in the literature of risk and multimodal discourse, the aim of the study is to demonstrate Multimodal Discourse Analysis from a Systemic Functional Linguistics perspective as a potential methodology to investigate how risk discourses are constructed in and through semiotic resources in a non-Western setting. Through a case study of child helmet awareness advertisements in Vietnam, the multimodal analysis reveals a comprehensive picture of risk discourses constructed across various semiotic modes. In this analysis, the discourses of risk are constructed through a negotiation of expert knowledge and traditional values to encourage the audience to take actions and provide helmets for their children. Findings of the study demonstrate the use of Systemic Functional multimodal approach to media and communication to provide evidence for risk discourses in the Vietnamese setting, which are at odds with the current literature and can potentially be extended to other contexts.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document