What Do Images Say? Visual Metaphors of a Crisis.

Scientific objective: Reconstruction of the visual discourse of the categories of crisis, crisis management, and crisis communication in the context of the discursive field of modernism. Research methods: Semiotic analysis, and multimodal discourse analysis. Results and conclusions: Reconstructed basic semantics of crisis discourse (threat, uncertainty, catastrophe, helplessness, dehumanization), crisis management (control, process, knowledge, controlling reality), and crisis communication (human, interaction, chaos, spontaneity). Crisis is thus presented discursively in opposition to the dominant semantics of modernism, while crisis management is fully correlated with these semantics. Crisis communication updates both the elements present in the discursive field of modernism and those that are in opposition to it. Cognitive value: The presented paper is, on the one hand, an example of the use of multimodal discourse analysis and semiotic methods for visual communication, on the other it contains important explanations and suggestions for practical aspects of communication (also by specialists) of categories such as crisis, crisis management, and crisis communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]