Global North-Global South Relations Around a Notional U.S.-Mexico “Border Wall”

In the present political moment, “border walls” between the U.S. and Mexico have become a flashpoint, representing binaries like governed / ungoverned spaces, security / insecurity, morality / immorality, respect / disrespect for human rights, human unity / disunity, North / South, haves / have-nots, citizens / non-citizens, Republicans / Democrats, conservatives / liberals, patriots / traitors, nationalists / internationalists (or globalists), and others. This work explores some of the thematic Global North – Global South implications of a notional “border wall” based on social imagery (in a multi-loop image analysis approach). This work questions how the “other” may be viewed through the limiting slats of a fence or windows in a wall. In addition to the image analyses, topic-related textual data will also be studied from various sources: academia, journalism, and social media (including mass search correlations, big data word search, related tags networks, and #hashtag network analysis).

Shapes of Threats in the Global South

What do “threats” look like in the Global South in tagged social imagery, and what can these respective imagesets suggest about (1) formal outreaches to the broader publics by strategic messengers, (2) public awareness of such threats and their potential response role, and (3) the apparent (root) causes of these threats and possible risk mitigations? Are there visual differences in the senses of threat to the Global South as compared to the world? Finally, global and national-level frameworks about global threats were captured from international and national entities and used to recode the selected social images in a top-down way and to understand if there are gaps in social image representations about threats in the Global South and what these gaps may mean in public awareness of threats and preparedness.

Body Abjectification as a Tool to Represent Poverty in Black Africa

Many human rights activists and West-based INGOs have entrenched the questionable culture of using pathetic and socially pornographic images to boost their advertising, mobilization and fundraising campaigns aimed at tackling social problems in Africa. The images deployed by these advocacy entities most often function as double edged swords: they do not only capture the wisdom and rhetoric marketed by the campaign organizers but sometimes subtly act as negative symbols or metaphors of the African continent. Many of these visuals as used in posters and ad copies subliminally abjectify Africans, thereby reinforcing the myriad of decades-old myths and stereotypes of the continent and its people – notably abject poverty, famine, illiteracy, and backwardness, among others. This chapter illustrates the above-mentioned thesis through a semiotic analysis of posters and image-based ads recently deployed by some West-based civil society organizations during the Nigeria-born #BringBackOurGirl movement. The chapter specifically illustrates how the visuals and anchorages used in the #BringBackOurGirl posters hyperbolically abjectify and denigrate African people, associating them with old-age stereotypes.

Global Evocations of South-Ness Online

To understand mass evocations of the Global South and its depiction via formal and informal media, it may help to capture a sense of the human massmind by using some mass-scale methods: mass search data, text search data from a mass digitized published-text corpus, related tag networks from social imagery, article-article networks from a crowd-sourced encyclopedia, and hashtag tweetstreams. It may help to contrast the sense of “south-ness” with those of “north-ness,” “east-ness,” and “west-ness,” given how people maintain mental models of regions and places—in terms of peoples, cultures, values, social practices, languages, and other dimensions. This data-heavy, bottom-up coding approach, based on grounded theory, enables the creation of mass-scale glimpses and ephemera, through the indirection of verbal and visual inferences at web scale.

From the Second World to Global South?

Tajikistan has experienced numerous barriers to economic and political development over the past 100 years. Pressured into joining the Soviet Union, which lasted nearly 70 years, Tajikistan sank into a civil war upon achieving its independence. This resulted in numerous deaths, displacement, and infrastructural devastation. Since the conflict, Tajikistan has experienced tremendous economic growth and positive social developments; however, Western media overwhelmingly focuses on isolated incidences of violence and socioeconomic trends that casts Tajikistan in a negative light. This also creates a “horn effect” that frames the Tajik socioeconomic situation as underdeveloped and lacking freedoms. A narrative analysis of stories on Tajikistan from the United States' top 10 news outlets from 1998 to 2018 portrays unrepresentative and paternal pictures of Tajikistan's political, economic, and social developments.

Beautifying Controversial African Politicians Through Metaphors

This chapter critically analyses the use of conceptual metaphors in selected Cameroonian newspapers articles aimed at beautifying or criticizing President Paul Biya and his aides. The selected articles covered a 2018 US-Cameroon diplomatic crisis triggered by US Ambassador's advice to Biya to relinquish power. In the light of a textual analysis of the corpus, the chapter argues that journalists and citizen journalists whose articles were considered for this study portrayed Biya and his close aides along a variety of metaphors. Positivity or negativity in the metaphors used in the media text generally depended on their authors' tones and editorial policies. The pro-government and neutral media voices (notably Cameroon Tribune and Mutations) mostly used metaphors such as nation building (representing Biya as an accomplished nation builder) and scaling (by which Biya and his aides were judged or rated high above standards). Meanwhile, anti-government media outlets (such as Cameroon Concords, Cameroon Post, Le Messager and Bareta News) used such metaphors as bestiality, scatology/garbage, theatre, oppression, transgression, and sickness/handicap among others, to criticize Biya's rule.

Image on the Street Is . . .

To capture what some of the “Global South”-tagged social messages are in early 2019, an image set of 1000+ images was scraped from Flickr and another 500+ images from Google Images and dozens of fairly recent (past few years) videos were identified on YouTube (with their available closed captioning transcripts captured). These mostly decontextualized digital visual contents (still and motion) were coded with bottom-up coding, based on grounded theory, and some initial insights were created about the multi-dimensional messaging. These contents were generated by conference organizers, alternate and foreign news sites, university lecturers, and the mass public, so the messaging is comprised of both formal and informal messaging, information from news channels, and responses to news channels. This work discusses some of the manual and computation-based coding techniques and some initial findings.

“We Are Anything but a ‘Shithole' Country!”

This chapter examines Nigerian online journalists' reception of Donald Trump's shithole remarks through a content analysis of 126 articles published online by 12 leading Nigerian newspapers, from January 2018 to January 2019. The chapter argues that Trump's shithole remarks engendered mitigated reactions from the Nigerian public, particularly from Nigerian online journalists. The greatest portion of these journalists' articles (over 68.73% of what they published online) hastened to endorse Trump's insult rhetoric and gloomy description of their country, presenting Trump's comment as a vivid depiction of the Nigerian socio-political and economic reality. In their articles, Nigerian journalists mainly used Trump's insult rhetoric as a tool to lambast the Nigerian leadership and lament the degradation of living conditions in their country. One thing that unfortunately remains evident and relatively deplorable in their reactions is the fact that little attention was given to the one-sidedness and exaggeration in Trump's comments. Based on such a premise, the journalists' endorsement of Trump's comments were in themselves one-sided and exaggerative, as they deliberately overlooked the positive facets of life in Nigeria and sounded as if Nigeria is all about negativities and doom.

Tackling Nigeria's Image Crisis With the Aid of Popular Cinema

Knowing whether Nollywood filmmakers are conscious of their double role as Nigeria's image makers and cultural ambassadors has always been an interesting question to ask. However, only very few empirical studies have provided a forum for answering such a question. Most of the authors who have focused on Nollywood's contribution to the Nigerian image crisis have tended to dominantly relegate Nollywood filmmakers to capitalist “videastes” who are more driven by financial gains than by the desire to build or launder the image of Nigeria. This chapter censures this myopic tendency arguing that inasmuch as Nollywood filmmakers have be contributing to the Nigerian image crisis, a good number of Nigerian film directors and producers have, in their modus operandis sought to deconstruct the negative stereotypes of Nigeria in the international scene, thereby contributing to the rebranding of Nigeria. The chapter highlights a number of ways in which Nollywood filmmakers and the Nigerian government use cinema to deconstruct the negative image of Nigeria in the international scene.

Exploring Social Imagery Depictions of the Meeting of Human Needs in the Global South

A common narrative related to the Global South involves macro-level development for human well-being, involving endeavors for clean water, sufficient nutrition, access to universal education, access to energy, economic development, free trade, and political stability. At the micro- and ego-based level, development is about meeting human needs. Abraham Maslow's “hierarchy of needs” (1943, 1954, 1969, 1971) suggests that people tend to meet survival needs first before advancing to those of psychological and higher-level human actualization needs, from physiological, and safety needs to love/social belonging, self-esteem, self-actualization, and self-transcendence (in the six layer conceptualization). This explores “Global South”-tagged social imagery to explore the meeting of human needs.