Traditionally, images have played an important role in politics and policy making, mostly in relation to propaganda and public communication. However, contemporary society is inundated with visual material due to the increasing ubiquity of media and visual technologies that facilitate the production, distribution and consumption of images in new and innovative ways. As such, a visual culture has emerged, and a number of authors have written on visual culture and the technologies which underlie it. However, a clear link to policy making is still lacking. This books links the emergence of this visual culture to policy making and explores how visual culture (and the growing number of technologies used to create and distribute images) influence the course, content and outcome of public policy making. It examines how visual culture and policy making in contemporary society are intertwined, elaborating concepts such as power, framing and storytelling. It then links this to technology, and the way this can enhance power, transparency, registration, surveillance and communication. Dealing with the entire cycle of public policy making, from agenda-setting, to policy design, decision making to evaluation, the book contains diverse international case studies including water management, risk management, live-stock diseases, minority integration, racism, freedom of speech, healthcare, disaster evaluation and terrorism.

Traditionally, images have played an important role in politics and policy making, mostly in relation to propaganda and public communication. However, contemporary society is inundated with visual material due to the increasing ubiquity of media and visual technologies that facilitate the production, distribution and consumption of images in new and innovative ways. As such, a visual culture has emerged, and a number of authors have written on visual culture and the technologies which underlie it. However, a clear link to policy making is still lacking. This books links the emergence of this visual culture to policy making and explores how visual culture (and the growing number of technologies used to create and distribute images) influence the course, content and outcome of public policy making. It examines how visual culture and policy making in contemporary society are intertwined, elaborating concepts such as power, framing and storytelling. It then links this to technology, and the way this can enhance power, transparency, registration, surveillance and communication. Dealing with the entire cycle of public policy making, from agenda-setting, to policy design, decision making to evaluation, the book contains diverse international case studies including water management, risk management, live-stock diseases, minority integration, racism, freedom of speech, healthcare, disaster evaluation and terrorism.

The role of the visual is largely unrecognized in the analysis of political behavior. The contemporary emphasis on the theoretical and analytic should not overlook the obvious routines of daily by which art informs the public sphere.

This is a book about how to read visual images: from fine art to photography, film, television and new media. It explores how meaning is communicated by the wide variety of texts that inhabit our increasingly visual world. But, rather than simply providing set meanings to individual images, Visual Culture teaches readers how to interpret visual texts with their own eyes. While the first part of the book takes readers through differing theoretical approaches to visual analysis, the second part shifts to a medium-based analysis, connected by an underlying theme about the complex relationship between visual culture and reality. Howells and Negreiros draw together seemingly diverse methodologies, while ultimately arguing for a polysemic approach to visual analysis. The third edition of this popular book contains over fifty illustrations, for the first time in colour. Included in the revised text is a new section on images of power, fear and seduction, a new segment on video games, as well as fresh material on taste and judgement. This timely edition also offers a glossary and suggestions for further reading. Written in a clear, lively and engaging style, Visual Culture continues to be an ideal introduction for students taking courses in visual culture and communications in a range of disciplines, including media and cultural studies, sociology, and art and design.

We live in a highly complex and evolving world that requires a fuller and deeper understanding of how modern technological tools, ideas, practices, and institutions interact, and how different societies adjust themselves to emerging realities of the digital age. This book conveys such issues with a fresh perspective and in a systematic and coherent way. While many studies have explained in depth the change in the aftermath of the unrests and uprisings throughout the world, they rarely mentioned the need for constructing new human rights norms and standards. This edited collection provides a balanced conceptual framework to demonstrate not only the power of autonomous communication networks but also their limits and the increasing setbacks they encounter in different contexts.

" This collection of classic essays in the study of visual culture fills a major gap in this new and expanding intellectual field. Its major strength is its insistence on the importance of three central aspects of the study of visual culture: the sign, the institution and the viewing subject. It will provide readers, teachers and students with an essential text in visual and cultural studies." - "Janet Wolff, University of Rochester""" Visual Culture: The Reader provides an invaluable resource of over 30 key statements from a wide range of disciplines. Although underpinned by a focus on contemporary cultural theory, this reader puts issues of visual culture and the rhetoric of the image at centre stage. Divided into three parts, The Culture of the Visual, Regulating Photographic Meaning, Looking and Subjectivity, this reader enables students to make hitherto unmade connections across art, film and photography history and theory, semiotics, history, semiotics and communications, media studies, and cultural theory. The key statements are from the work of: Visual Culture: The Reader sets the agenda for the study of Visual Culture and will be an essential sourcebook for researchers and students alike.This is the reader for the module "The Image and Visual Culture" (D850) - part of The Open University Masters in Social Sciences Programme.

First published in 1998, this volume considers the subject of arts policy as a subject of public policy making proper in UK and Ireland, with a particular focus on theatre as a profession rather than a mere hobby. Previous studies have placed the burden of policy improvements on the arts themselves, looking at what ‘the arts’ can do to be worthy of government funding and favourable policy, and have seen government actions as if they have a uniform effect. This study takes ‘the arts’ out of the abstract and discusses specific ways that diverse activities with even more diverse needs can be best approached with government policy, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of government initiatives. It is aimed at both political scientists and anyone with an interest in arts and cultural policy.

Protestors across the world use aesthetics in order to communicate their ideas and ensure their voices are heard. This book looks at protest aesthetics, which we consider to be the visual and performative elements of protest, such as images, symbols, graffiti, art, as well as the choreography of protest actions in public spaces. Through the use of social media, protestors have been able to create an alternative space for people to engage with politics that is more inclusive and participatory than traditional politics. This volume focuses on the role of visual culture in a highly mediated environment and draws on case studies from Europe, Thailand, South Africa, USA, Argentina, and the Middle East in order to demonstrate how protestors use aesthetics to communicate their demands and ideas. It examines how digital media is harnessed by protestors and argues that all protest aesthetics are performative and communicative.

This book explores Gilles Deleuze's contribution to film theory. According to Deleuze, we have come to live in a universe that could be described as metacinematic. His conception of images implies a new kind of camera consciousness, one that determines our perceptions and sense of selves: aspects of our subjectivities are formed in, for instance, action-images, affection-images and time-images. We live in a matrix of visual culture that is always moving and changing. Each image is always connected to an assemblage of affects and forces. This book presents a model, as well as many concrete examples, of how to work with Deleuze in film theory. It asks questions about the universe as metacinema, subjectivity, violence, feminism, monstrosity, and music. Among the contemporary films it discusses within a Deleuzian framework are Strange Days, Fight Club, and Dancer in the Dark.

These texts represent both the formation of visual culture, and the ways in which it has transformed, and continues to transform, our understanding and experience of the world as a visual domain.