Papers on Social Representations

The power of the image: the role of social representations

Cathy Nicholson — 2024-06-28

The theory of social representations has offered a significant and nuanced theoretical framework to gather and interpret knowledge across a wide range of subjects and mediums in order to discuss how different social and material contexts are perceived for the purpose of providing a meaningful foundation to a given reality. The theory has been critiqued and expanded hugely to provide a rich source of intellectual enquiry within social psychology and beyond. However, one area that has received scant attention, is the significance of graphic imagery as a source of data from which to explore social representations within the public consciousness. As imagery in media and social media has become an extension of perceptions of a given social reality, this special issue aims to fill this gap to explore how the power of the image can reflect the diffusion of social representations across our often politicised social and cultural worlds.

Memes as Images that Envisage Social Representations in Social Media.

Silvia Gutiérrez-Vidrio — 2024-06-03

In recent years, the study of social representations through images, icons, drawings, and the like, has attracted the attention of researchers interested in analyzing the role visual devices play in the elaboration and interpretation of Social Representations and Social Imaginary. Along the same lines, in this paper we study some visual elements that can provide relevant information for exploring and reconstructing social representations. These visual units are called Memes “units of popular culture that are circulated, imitated, and transformed by individual Internet users, creating a shared cultural experience in the process” (Shifman, 2013, p. 367); they generate and shape the mindsets and significant forms of behavior and actions of a social group.

Memes spread a particular idea as presented in images, animated GIFs, videos, written text, or some other units of cultural practices. They give rise to the materialization of the expression of a given social reality within which individuals and social groups live which is why we consider them as useful tool for communicating and reconstructing social representations. During the COVID-19 confinement, many internet memes circulated but we decided to study those on remote learning and teaching since education in that period was a great challenge. The corpus of study was gathered by manually tagged searches on social media such as Facebook, Reddit and Twitter using the following hashtags: #virtualeducation, #remoteteaching, #pandemicandschool. The internet memes analyzed show the difficulties students faced when they were confronted with remote teaching and the emotional states they experienced. These expressions and meanings allow us to reconstruct the social representation they have of this modality of teaching.

Faces of Citizenship: A social representational inquiry to understand how citizenship as social imagery is described in Turkey

Elif Sandal-Önal — 2024-06-03

Reflecting on the legal relationship between the individual and the nation-state, citizenship has long been considered a framework consisting of rights and obligations. However, in the last two decades, it has become intertwined with individuals’ meaning-making processes of their social world as well as with the dynamics of constructing group boundaries and (re)producing the hierarchies between groups. In this paper, we will present how the lay representations of citizenship prevailed on social media through publicly sharing visuals after the issuance of an amendment for a regulation stating the new conditions for granting Turkish citizenship to foreigners. After thematically analyzing the tweets containing visuals with hashtags related to citizenship, which were sent within the six months following the amendment, we extracted two main themes of citizenship in Turkey as "legal boundaries" and "sentimental citizenship". The study enabled us to show how visuals are used to communicate the social and political aspects of citizenship that are represented around objective and subjective meanings while also indicating how the lay meanings of citizenship are utilized to reproduce the inequalities.

Social media networks and the networks of meanings as imaginings of the Cyprus problem: A study on the use of images on Twitter in the Cyprus peace efforts

Christiana Karayianni — 2024-06-04

The article investigates images in communication processes as manifestations of social representations. Focusing on the conflict-affected society of Cyprus, it studies the images used in 76250 tweets related to the Cyprus problem during the intensification of the negotiations in the period between September 2016 – July 2017. Through social network visualisation we identify the most prominent images used to construct meaning about the Cyprus problem as well as the clusters created through the image tweeting. The results show that most of the images tweeted about the Cyprus problem are institutionalised manifestations of social representations that contribute to meanings that are not conducive to the peace process in Cyprus. They instead enhance the social imaginary of Cyprus being determined by a loop of unsuccessful peace efforts that are always distant from the grassroot of society and by the concept that a solution will arrive to Cyprus as an external force sourced from the political elites.

Femininity in Superhero Comics: a study of social representations

Lucas Eduardo Guimarães — 2024-06-03

The visual image has been largely taking up the means of communication of postmodernity as an important communicational resource. By the same token, the theory of social representations (TSR) has assumed a privileged place in the study of mass communication, to grasp the relationship manners socially shared by subjects about determined objects. The goal of this research is to present a methodological composition with a visual image analysis that can be useful in the field of research about TSR. To this end, we regained the analysis of visual content through an associative model of Variables and Values, linking it to the premises of Barthesian semiotics, attesting that they are complementary methods. This methodological composition was applied to investigate the femininity representation in superhero comics, through the image of Wonder Woman. The results show the reaffirmation of traditional values naturalized in the representation of femininity, exhibiting only a few (and momentary) changes over the years.