Browse below books and scholarly monographs authored by our members and pre-eminent academics affiliated with the International Communication Association’s Visual Communication Studies Division. If you’re a member and would like your book added, please fill out this form and your request will be considered. Alternatively, you can email our Division’s secretary.
Our members’ books offer students and educators media production skills, research methods training, and the theory and conceptual understanding to understand visual communication in diverse contexts, from journalism to new media.
Day of the Dead in the USA: The Migration and transformation of a cultural phenomenon (2009)
By Regina Marchi | Book type: Conceptual/Theoretical
Tracing Day of the Dead celebrations from Mexico to the US, this book reveals cultural and political transformations along the way, as Chicano artists embraced and altered Indigenous Mexican rituals to express cultural identity and oppositional political messages. Public Día de los Muertos celebrations emerged in the US in the 1970s when Chicano artists created altar exhibitions, death-related performance art and other visual expressions. Considered “morbid” when first introduced to US audiences, Day of the Dead is now widely featured in educational curricula, museums, newspapers, magazines, TV shows, films, the Internet and commercial venues – all integral forces in popularizing it. Combining visual analysis, ethnography, archival research, oral history and critical cultural analysis, the author illustrates the influence of the mass media, commercialization and globalization on the growth of Day of the Dead.
Digital Life on Instagram: New Social Communication of Photography (2018)
By Elisa Serafinelli | Book type: Conveptual/Theoretical
How does Instagram shape how we relate to each other online? Are users concerned about privacy when documenting their lives in fine detail? How does Instagram work as a marketing machine? Drawing on three years’ research with Instagram users, Elisa Serafinelli explores how Instagram is changing people’s visual experiences. Instagram is now by far the most popular online photo sharing platform, fuelled by the growth of smart mobile devices, and the management of an online persona is now part of millions of people’s everyday reality. This has not gone unnoticed among commercial actors, with the savviest of these exploiting the social dynamics of sharing that underlie the very logic of Instagram. This book addresses the issue of how mobile media and visual communication permeate people’s daily routines, how marketing influences practice, whether privacy and surveillance concerns are a reality, and how the platform shapes social relationships and identity formation. In its conclusion, the book advances the innovative concept of new mobile visualities to describe the social communication of photography and its huge expansion. Digital Life on Instagram is an online ethnography fit for the modern age of social media.
Image Bite Politics: News and the Visual Framing of Elections (2009)
By Maria Elizabeth Grabe and Erik Page Bucy | Book type: Conceptual/Theoretical
Winner of the 2010 ICA Book Award, Image Bite Politics systematically assesses the visual presentation of presidential candidates in network news coverage of elections and connects these visual images with political motivations and shifts in public opinion. Presenting the results of a comprehensive visual analysis of general election news from 1992-2004, encompassing four presidential campaigns, the authors highlight the remarkably potent influence of television images when it comes to evaluating leaders. The book draws from political science, behavioral biology, cognitive neuroscience, and media studies to investigate the visual framing of elections in an incisive, interdisciplinary fashion. Findings challenge widely held assumptions, yet are supported by systematic data. In an era of mediatization and growing visual influence, book provides a foundation for promoting visual literacy among news audiences and brings the importance of visual analysis to the forefront of media research.
By Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield, & Crystal Abidin | Book type: Conceptual/Theoretical
In the first book-length examination of Instagram, Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield and Crystal Abidin trace how this quintessential mobile photography app has developed as a platform and a culture. They consider aspects such as the new visual social media aesthetics, the rise of Influencers and new visual economies, and the complex politics of the platform as well as examining how Instagram’s users change their use of the platform over time and respond to evolving features. The book highlights the different ways Instagram is used by subcultural groups around the world, and how museums, restaurants and public spaces are striving to be ‘Insta-worthy’. Far from just capturing milestones and moments, the authors argue that Instagram has altered the ways people communicate and share, while also creating new approaches to marketing, advertising, politics and the design of spaces and venues.
The SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods (2019, 2nd ed.)
By Luc Pauwels & Dawn Mannay (Eds.) | Book type: Research methods
The second, thoroughly revised and expanded, edition of The SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods presents a wide-ranging exploration and overview of the field today. As in its first edition, the Handbook does not aim to present a consistent view or voice, but rather to exemplify diversity and contradictions in perspectives and techniques. The selection of chapters from the first edition have been fully updated to reflect current developments. New chapters to the second edition cover key topics including picture-sorting techniques, creative methods using artefacts, visual framing analysis, therapeutic uses of images, and various emerging digital technologies and online practices. At the core of all contributions are theoretical and methodological debates about the meanings and study of the visual, presented in vibrant accounts of research design, analytical techniques, fieldwork encounters and data presentation. This handbook presents a unique survey of the discipline that will be essential reading for scholars and students across the social and behavioural sciences, arts and humanities, and far beyond these disciplinary boundaries.
The Handbook is organized into seven main sections:
- PART 1: FRAMING THE FIELD OF VISUAL RESEARCH
- PART 2: VISUAL AND SPATIAL DATA PRODUCTION METHODS AND TECHNOLOGIES
- PART 3: PARTICIPATORY AND SUBJECT-CENTERED APPROACHES
- PART 4: ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORKS AND PERSPECTIVES PART
- 5: MULTIMODAL AND MULTISENSORIAL RESEARCH PART
- 6: RESEARCHING ONLINE PRACTICES PART
- 7: COMMUNICATING THE VISUAL: FORMATS AND CONCERNS
Seeing Human Rights: Video Activism as a Proxy Profession (2021)
By Sandra Ristovska | Book type: Conceptual/Theoretical
As video becomes an important tool to expose injustice, Seeing Human Rights (MIT Press, 2021) examines how human rights organizations seek to professionalize video activism through video production, standards, and training. The result, it argues, is a proxy profession that helps legitimize video’s potential to serve distinct policy functions while brokering human rights voices in journalism, the law, and political advocacy.
To see and Be Seen: The Environments, Interactions and Identities Behind News Images (2019)
By T.J. Thomson | Book type: Conceptual/Theoretical
Winner of the 2020 Diane S. Hope NCA Book of the Year Award, To See and Be Seen considers some of the ideological, aesthetic, pragmatic, institutional, cultural, commercial, environmental, and psychological forces that consciously or otherwise shape the production of news images and subsequently influence their reception. The results of Thomson’s research provide one of the first empirical and real-time glimpses into the experience of being in front of a journalist’s lens. To See and Be Seen enables us to understand the stories behind images by considering the environment in which such images are made, the exchange (if one occurred) between the camera-wielding observer and the observed, the identities of both parties, and how they react to the representations that are created.
Video Journalism: Beyond the One Man Band (2012)
Video journalism, the process by which one person shoots, writes, and edits video for broadcast or the web, is a form of newsgathering taking hold in newsrooms of all kinds, by professionals and would-be citizen journalists around the world. This book presents more than two years of research in a wide variety of contexts to study the way VJs work. In a departure from other news ethnographies, this book takes a somewhat unusual approach in that the author observes video journalists in the field. The resulting description offers insight into the forces that shape video narrative in the digital age.
Visual Communication Theory and Research: A Mass Communication Perspective (2014)
By Shahira Fahmy, Mary Angela Bock, & Wayne Wanta
In today’s multimedia environment, visuals are essential and expected parts of storytelling. However, the visual communication research field is fragmented into several sub-areas, making study difficult. Fahmy, Bock, and Wanta note trends and discuss the challenges of conducting analysis of images across print, broadcast, and online media. The book is organized according to Lasswell’s classic question that defines communication studies: “Who says what to whom in which channel with what effect?”
Visual Imagery and Human Rights Practice (2018)
By Sandra Ristovska and Monroe Price (eds) | Book type: Conceptual/Theoretical
Visual Imagery and Human Rights Practice examines the interplay between images and human rights, addressing how, when, and to what ends visuals are becoming a more central means through which human rights claims receive recognition and restitution. The collection argues that accounting for how images work on their own terms is an ever more important epistemological project for fostering the imaginative scope of human rights and its purchase on reality. Interdisciplinary in nature, this timely volume brings together voices of scholars and practitioners from around the world, making a valuable contribution to the study of media and human rights while tackling the growing role of visuals across cultural, social, political and legal structures.
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ICA Visual Communication Studies 