Visual Analysis and the Study of Political Participation

Studying visual types of data, including physical, representational, and public visibility elements of political participation, we analyze recent case studies of Black Lives Matter protest worldwide and immigration activism in Europe. Our empirical examples cover the visual dynamics of political participation across a wide array of political events. We include historic and contemporary “visibility” acts of citizenship in which minorities, migrants, and people struggling for civic rights perform visual gestures of protest, including kneeling, toppling of statues, or fist-raising as symbols of resistance. We discuss the theory and methods of multimodal visual analysis, and argue that visual analysis offers researchers in social movements and political participation, as well as media scholars and discourse analysts, a unique and rich angle for analysis.