This course aims to explore common patterns and common forms of communication which are found across all sectors of society as well as across cultural boundaries for communicating ideological values and constructing subjectivities and identities. It specifically focusses on the fact that people from over the world use multiple means of meaning making i.e. semiotic resources in their routine activities and social practices. Essentially, it marks a significant global trend to depart from the traditional opposition of ‘verbal’ and ‘non-verbal’ communication, which presumes that the verbal is primary and that all other means of meaning making are subordinate and not worthy of as much attention. It is that recognition of the need for studying how different means of meaning making (e.g. image, writing, speech, gesture, etc.) in diverse cultural settings are combined into an integrated, multimodal whole that we attempt to highlight throughout this course. The crux of the idea is that if we want to study meaning in different social and cultural artefacts (e.g. advertisements, television commercials, magazines, websites, social media photographs), we need to attend to all semiotic resources with different potentialities and constraints which combine and interact into a complete ensemble to achieve particular ideological goals in certain communities. Semiotic resources carry in them the traces of the socio-political environment in which they are formed; in other words, that they have, in some sense and to some extent, ideological meanings and values already built into them. This helps us to look at the rich and diverse range of linguistic and discursive resources that different cultures make available for talking about topical issues that are of pertinence to certain social groups in a particular culture, e.g. parenting, health and immigration, and hence for revealing buried ideological interests that these may serve.

In keeping with the conceptual framework of the curriculum, this course embodies two fundamental outcomes of the programme: (i) it has a strong cross-cultural, multidisciplinary focus, offering rich insights into multimodal discourses in the understanding of ideologies across different cultural contexts; (ii) it specifically stresses the role of language and communication in mediating reality by exploring how linguistic and visual practices serve to obfuscate and conceal ideological underpinnings in multiple genres in a digital age.

This broadly conceived course offers students the chance to reflect in-depth and critically upon a wide range of issues in (visual) communication, social semiotics, and multimodal critical discourse analysis in relation to the multicultural-intellectual topic of the socially and culturally situated construction of ideological meaning in semiotic artefacts and practices.

Main topics include different approaches to ideologies; multimodal critical discourse analysis; a social-semiotic theory of communication; semiotic resources as a system of ideological choices; evaluation of stance; discourse representations of social actors and social actions in historical and cultural contexts; modality; nominalisation and presupposition.

1. Explain the central principles, terms and analytical tools in a multimodal social-semiotic approach to critical discourse analysis of common forms of communication across the globe to reveal the dominant ideologies that are present in the socio-political and cultural contexts in which these communicative events are found and often preloaded with specific meanings from them;
2. Analyse social practices involving multimodal communication and discuss how the affordances and constraints of the traditional media and new digital technologies affect the deployment of semiotic resources for different ideological purposes in different cultures;
3. Consider key issues in investigating (digital) multimodal texts to address the need for a greater and more sophisticated understanding of the way in which visual semiotic resources and language work together cross-culturally to make meaning in an increasingly complex and connected world in the era of globalisation;
4. Evaluate and critique ideology in a wide variety of genres including newspapers, print advertisements, TV commercials, websites, digital photography, leaflets, catalogues, space and furnishings, and fashion and clothing in Asia, Middle East and the West.

The class will follow a seminar format that creates a learning space conducive to the full embrace of student engagement and contributions. There will be lectures or workshops or a combination of both. At the beginning of the course, the class will be assigned a reading list for the semester. Students are expected to do some self-study of both the required and indicative texts (see below) in preparation for deciding on a research area/focus. After the Reading Week, students will be responsible for presenting on one piece of key reading selected from the list that align with the overall theme of the course and are most pertinent to their field of interest. Ideally, the key reading presentation will lead in to the final group research project. In the remainder of the semester, students will then work in collaboration on their research projects and data examples in their final research essay.  

• Class participation and contribution (20%) 
• Key reading presentation (40%) 
• Research paper (group) (40%)

A list of key readings will be provided on Moodle. Other readings will also be provided throughout the course.