Framing Globalization: Visual Perspectives

The book presents a collection of readings to reflect and develop the varied and dynamic interfaces of globalization: the global and local. The purpose is to identify how global and local dimensions intersect with cultural construction and processes of identity. How do the images around us challenge us in everyday life? We are surrounded by a multitude of images in cultural contexts, with rich semiotic signs and symbols, manifest in posters, graffiti, advertising, the media, photographs, religious representation, sculpture, and myriad art forms. In the context of this assortment of representations, we explore visual sociological threads and constructs that emerge from issues evoked by modern ideas about globalization. This important contemporary theme is moved by the parameters of visual sociology, whereby photographic images in various contexts illustrate, reflect, and generate sociological concepts and theories. The collected writings point to a global stage, as we are guided through lands such as Australia, Britain, Canada, Egypt, France, Italy, and Lithuania, in the quest to understand globalization through prisms such as community, class, gender, ethnicity, and religious background. The book addresses the role of visual communication in an examination of these various theoretical facets, and explores ways in which individuals and institutions exchange information about themselves, their identities, their values, and their ideas of belongingness in the varied guises of culture.