Lectures and seminars Organisational Semiotics in Visual Communication on Sexual and Reproductive Health
This international series of talks is organised by The UCL Visual and Multimodal Research Forum, the University of Leeds Multimodality@Leeds and Unit of Teaching and Learning (KI). In this talk professor Theo Van Leeuwen will present his research on organisational semiotics in visual communication on sexual and reproductive health
Bio
Theo van Leeuwen was appointed Honorary Professor in the School of the Arts and Media, UNSW Sydney, in 2016.
He is Emeritus Professor and former Dean of Arts at the University of Technology Sydney; Professor of Multimodal Communication at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense; and Honorary Professor at the Australian Catholic University and the University of Lancaster, as well as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Professor van Leeuwen is a founding figure of social semiotic approaches to media and communication, and a founding editor of the international journal, Visual Communication.
His many books include Reading Images: the Grammar of Visual Design (with Gunther Kress; Routledge 2006); The Language of Colour (Routledge 2011); Speech, Music, Sound (MacMillan, 1999); Introducing Social Semiotics (Routledge, 2005); Global Media Discourse (with David Machin; Routledge 2007); and Multimodal Discourse: the Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication (with Gunther Kress; Arnold, 2001).
His current work encompasses the intersection of multimodal studies with organization theory, the affordances of online shopping, and the visuality of family planning materials across cultures.
About
The paper will introduce the emerging area of organizational semiotics, sketching its origins in collaborations between multimodal discourse analysts and researchers from the field of organization and management studies, and outlining its agenda.
It will then introduce the concept of resemiotization (Iedema 2001, 2003) and show how its combination of ethnography and semiotic analysis allows investigating how the structuring of organizational practices results in particular uses of particular combinations of semiotic resources and particular transformations of relevant medical information.
This approach will then be applied to a study of the production of sexual and reproductive health information resources in an Australian non-government Family Planning organization. Analysis will focus on the way the organization’s resemiotization practices on the one hand make sexual and reproductive health information more accessible and culturally appropriate for diverse populations but on the other hand risk transforming medical information through specific deletions, substitutions, additions and rearrangements.
The paper will conclude by discussing the practical usefulness of this approach to health communication.
References
Iedema, R, (2001) Resemiotization. Semiotica 37 (1-4): 23-40.
Iedema, R. (2003) Multimodality, resemiotization: extending the analysis of discourse as multi-semiotic practice. Visual Communication 2(1): 29-57.
Ravelli, R, Van Leeuwen, T, Höllerer, M and Jancsary, D, eds. (2023) Organizational Semiotics -Multimodal Perspectives on Organization Studies. London: Routledge