This book provides the reader with a diagrammatic introduction to cross-cultural communication across 28 different nationalities.

Visual Communication: Understanding Images in Media and Culture provides a theoretical and empirical toolkit to examine implications of mediated images. It explores a range of approaches to visual analysis, while also providing a hands-on guide to applying methods to students′ own work. The book: Illustrates a range of perspectives, from content analysis and semiotics, to multimodal and critical discourse analysis Explores the centrality of images to issues of identity and representation, politics and activism, and commodities and consumption Brings theory to life with a host of original case studies, from celebrity videos on Youtube and civil unrest on Twitter, to the lifestyle branding of Vice Media and Getty Images Shows students how to combine approaches and methods to best suit their own research questions and projects An invaluable guide to analysing contemporary media images, this is essential reading for students and researchers of visual communication and visual culture.

Visual Communication and Culture: Images in Action uses a unique case-study approach to encourage undergraduate students at the second- and third-year level to critically examine the production and interpretation of images in their personal lives and across a range of disciplines and perspectives. Accompanied by nine student-friendly introductions, the twenty-five articles in this collection assist students in becoming visually literate consumers of images, with an understanding of how culture influences practices of image-making and vice versa.

While the literature on either contrastive linguistics or discourse analysis has grown immensely in the last twenty years, very little of it has ventured into fusing the two perspectives. Bearing in mind that doing discourse analysis without a contrastive base is as incomplete as doing contrastive analysis without a discourse base, the specific aim of this book is to argue that translation can add depth and breadth to both contrastive linguistics as well as to discourse analysis. Authentic data from both spoken and written English is used throughout to add clarity to theoretical insights gained from the study of discourse processing. Each aspect of the model proposed for the analysis of texts is related separately to a problem of language processing and in domains as varied as translation, interpreting, language teaching etc. The global objectives pursued in this volume are the training of future linguists and the sensitization of users of language in general to the realities of discourse.

How are we to understand how the dominance of visual images and representations in late modernity affects Social Work practice, research and education? Social workers are increasingly using still and moving images to illustrate their work, to create new knowledge, and to further specific groups’ interests. As a profession in which communication is central, visual practices are becoming ever more significant as they seek to carry out their work with, and for, the marginalised and disenfranchised. It is time for the profession to gain more critical, analytical, and practical knowledge of visual culture and communication, in order to use and create images in accordance with its central principle of social justice. That requires an understanding of them beyond representation. As important as this is, it is also where the profession’s scholarly work in this area has remained and halted, and thus understanding of the work of images in our practices is limited. In order to more fully understand images and their effects – both ideologically and experientially – social workers need to bring to bear other areas of study such as reception studies, visual phenomenology, and the gaze. These other analytical frames enable a consideration not only of images per se, but also of their effect on the viewer, the human spectators, and the subjects at the heart of Social Work. By bringing understandings and experiences in Film, Media, and Communications, Visual Communication for Social Work Practice provides the reader with a wide range of critically analytical frames for practitioners, activists, educators, and researchers as they use and create images. This invites a deeper knowledge and familiarity with the power dimensions of the image, thus aligning with the social justice dimension of Social Work. Examples are provided from cinema, popular media, but more importantly from Social Work practitioners themselves to demonstrate what has already been made possible as they create and use images to further the interpersonal, communal, and justice dimensions of their work. This book will be of interest to scholars, students, and social workers, particularly those with an interest in critical and creative methodologies.