A Common Future and a Common Identity： The Transformation Process of Political and Social Identities in the South Caucasus Countries

In reflecting on the case of the South Caucasus （Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia）, one of the most popular perspectives is its lack of a common identity. The main argument is that it is a culturally diverse region with old-fashioned, ethnically exclusive nationalism. From this point of view, the process of the formation of a European identity in the region acquires particular importance. A European identity could act as a catalyst for bringing the region together. This identity could be considered as based on much more than just political orientation but fundamentally grounded in common values. This comprehensive integration in the South Caucasus can be achieved through the formulation and acceptance of a common political identity based on the political orientations of the South Caucasian States and their citizens. The main question that this study tries to answer is how people in the South Caucasian countries identify themselves in terms of a European identity. A suitable analysis is increasingly important at both the micro and the macro levels. The author examines the people＇s attitudes in the three South Caucasian states toward Western culture, states, and organizations, drawing on opinion polls conducted by the Caucasus Research Resources Center （CRRC）. The author seeks to analyze attitudes toward the West in the South Caucasus on a macro as well as on a micro level. The author seeks also to provide a much-needed analysis for decision making, based on empirical data that help understand public opinion toward the European Union （EU） in the countries of the South Caucasus, and that can contribute to the refinement of integration strategies.     

A framework for the multimodal analysis of online news galleries: What makes a “good” picture gallery?

The development of digital technology in recent years has led to a revolution in news production and dissemination. In terms of production, we have witnessed a fundamental shift towards visual story-telling. Images dominate the verbal story space and have the potential to become the story themselves. Beyond this, they are also creating unique spaces for themselves (e.g. the online news gallery), with new multimodal genres posing challenges for practitioners and analysts alike. The potential effects of such fundamental shifts on the professional news story-telling practices of the legacy news media provide a rich research opportunity for understanding both how and whether news organisations fulfil their mandate of making sense of the plethora of information that is now available. In this paper, we concern ourselves with one particular innovation in visual news reporting – the online news gallery, or picture gallery in journalism terms. We report on a qualitative analysis of 35 galleries from 12 English-language newspapers with online presence from Europe, North America, Australia and Asia, and interrogate the choices made by institutions in composing this particular type of multimodal “text”, as it is situated in a professional, news story-telling context. In doing so, we explore how a systemic-functional semiotic approach to multimodal news discourse may help us to access the meaning potential of this emerging genre as a vehicle for multimodal digital news reporting, present a framework for the multimodal analysis of online news galleries and consider its implications for the education of media practitioners.     

Managing South African transformation: the story of cricket in KwaZulu Natal, 1994–2004

Sport has historically been an important element of South African popular culture, even though it was divided along racial lines for much of the country's history. In post-apartheid South Africa, sport is seen by politicians, sports officials and many ordinary people as a means to surmount race and class barriers and to forge nationhood. But sport remains a site of acute contestation over what transformation means: ‘merit’ versus ‘affirmative action’, beneficiaries of change, pace of transformation and so on. This conflict reflects the broader tensions over how South African society should be restructured. Change in racial composition at the level of leadership, coaching and players since 1990 has failed to transform cricket into a ‘people's game’. The cricket establishment is following the lead of government in prioritizing the empowerment of a minority. Class privilege has replaced race privilege. At the same time, tensions generated by change are producing further hostility along the fault lines of race and class. There is, for example, a conflict over resources among those previously labelled ‘Black’: Indians, Coloureds and the majority African population. These struggles reveal the fragmented nature of post-apartheid South African society, notwithstanding attempts to define South Africa as a ‘rainbow nation’. The historical, social, economic and cultural legacy of South Africa's conflicting pasts, the impact of globalization—and sport is a principal front of globalization, generating vast economic revenue and creating intolerable pressure to succeed—as well as post-apartheid discrepancies in economic and social conditions are all making it difficult to forge a united national culture, despite the attempt to use sport for the ‘mythic enactment’ of a collective South African identity. The tensions discussed in this article continue to be alive though the ‘patterns of prejudice’ are manifesting themselves in different forms.     

A semiotic study of regional branding reflected in the slogans of Korean regions

The purpose of the present analyses of regional slogans is to provide a semiotic perspective for understanding the symbolic communication systems involved in the construction of Korean regional governments. This study attempts to evaluate the slogans in terms of the semantic and morphological aspects of the texts. Findings show an overuse of signs within the slogans of regional governments that weakened the delivery of information regarding local identity. A leading slogan for a large region may create a unique identity in relative terms, whereas second-tier regions tend to mimic the success of others. The present research illustrates that each region of Korea cannot be differentiated in terms of a semantic analysis of linguistic signs. The communication tendencies that influence the creation of slogans for Korean regions are morphologically complex but semantically simple, resulting in the failure of these regions to secure distinctiveness in their individual brand identities.     

东南亚华人的身份、地位和权利问题

到20世纪80年代末,东南亚华人基本完成了从华侨社会向华人社会转变的过程,绝大多数都加入了当地国籍成为各国的公民.东南亚华人身份的转变过程由于受到冷战时期的一些时局因素的制约变得复杂而曲折,转变过程的完成意味着长期以来使用的"华侨"称呼已经不能反映实际情况,同时学术研究和实际工作中也应该做出一些相应的调整.华人成为东南亚国家的公民之后,在有些国家可以享有充分的社会政治权利,而在有些国家则受到不同程度的歧视,处于一种二等公民的地位.华人的政治社会地位如何往往并非掌握在华人自身手中,因为除新加坡之外,在各国华人都是少数民族.     

A discourse–design approach to multimodality: the visual communication of neoliberal management discourse

This paper takes a discourse–design approach to communication, providing a framework as to how this should be done. Design here is how individuals and institutions realize their interests in the world. We show how it is fruitful to link design more closely to the way discourse has been used in critical studies which draws attention to the motivated use of design, for thinking about design in terms of socio-political context. Due to their affordances, semiotic modes such as photography, graphics, layout, colour, numbers and writing will be deployed and co-articulated. The aim, using a discourse–design approach, is to show how we can best identify the very different affordances of such modes and how they rely on the principled design of a discourse. We illustrate this using examples from management documents at a university which draw on these different affordances in different ways to communicate the same discourse. Through this analysis we see how a neoliberal discourse based on a general design principle of coordination enters everyday practices and become very difficult to challenge.     

The Dreyfus affair in the British press

Stone argues that, although German anthropologists were relatively liberal thinkers before 1900, they nevertheless advocated an understanding of race that encouraged hierarchical thinking. Such thinking saw colonized peoples as primitive and culturally inferior. When, around 1900, anthropologists became increasingly reactionary and drawn to social Darwinist and racist ideas, their work served as a scientific legitimation for colonial atrocity, as the case of the Herero genocide in German South West Africa (1904-5) demonstrates. At this point anthropologists, along with the colonial military, were more sanguine about the disappearance of 'backward races'.