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This research set out to examine how ancient myths, Bible stories, and romantic visual imagery were used as discursive devices in the populist communication of the 2019 Finns Party election video. This study draws from systematic functional multimodal discourse analysis and its concepts of intersemiotic texture, co-contextualization, and re-contextualization to examine how different semiotic resources work together in the video. The multimodal analysis demonstrated the aforementioned resources served as a means of constructing a palingenetic myth, intertwining mythical resources with current social and political circumstances in Finland. Together, the verbal, visual, and sonic modalities as well as the mythical, biblical, and artistic rhetorical devices constructed multimodal political communication that was capable of appealing to emotions, constructing collective identities, and mobilizing people.

Social representations of European integration in the school textbooks of five European countries (France, England, Germany, Finland and Sweden) are analyzed. By analyzing the history and civics textbooks of major educational publishers and by presenting a double content analysis of textbooks of five European countries, this study aims to demonstrate what is written on European integration and how it is portrayed. The study shows how textbooks function to shape the identity space through articulations of the symbology of history and identity. The results show how European identity is only very rarely portrayed as an end in itself, but dominantly as an instrument for the nations to gain power in the globalizing world or even as a threat. Despite the efforts to Europeanize educational systems in the EU-countries, the story of European integration is told from a national perspective in each country and textbooks are used as vehicles of nationalism.