@c3ds.bsky.social @exeter.ac.uk @uniofexeternews.bsky.social

As always, thanks to the amazing @carbonbrief.org for their support of my PhD work!

🔄 Images used strategically show how transformative journalism can defend objectivity while still connecting with audiences on a human level.

⚖️ Images can blur the lines between naturalism and symbolism, enabling journalism that is factual, ethical, and emotionally resonant.

3 key takeaways:

🎭 Images act as more than “proof”: they carry symbolic power to communicate complex issues like climate justice, migration, and inequality without overt editorialising.

This was a really collaborative piece of work with co-author @joshgabbatiss.bsky.social from Carbon Brief and Catherine Butler at @universityofexeter.bsky.social
@c3ds.bsky.social

@drkowert.bsky.social

💚 This has been such a fun project to be a part of, massive thanks to editor Rachel Kowert for involving me and for all the cool work she does around making academic work on pop culture and digital platforms accessible, open, and fun!

🧣 My chapter focuses on the visual communication of Taylor Swift through colours in her lyricism and branding of albums/eras

🔴 I look at how colour and visuals create a "fanilect" - shared visual language among fans

📷 "There are without doubt vital and profound reasons to criticise AI-generated images. I'm just not sure that the fact they don't look sufficiently like volumetrically-organised photographs or film is one of them"

@profgillian.bsky.social

✏️"To be blunt, both photography and coordinate-based mapping were technologies deployed extensively by European states to expropriate common land, to colonise territories and to categorise people."

@profgillian.bsky.social

🖼️ Our poster will be up all day today and the rest of the week in the Forum at @universityofexeter.bsky.social - please pop by and put a sticker on to share your views!

Please can I be added? I'm a researcher of climate communication!

This was part of a wider ethnographic study of climate visuals in the news...

... please get in touch and stay tuned for future papers from this work, coming soon! 👋
@c3ds.bsky.social @uniofexeternews.bsky.social

We found that images from COP26 were mostly:

👔 "talking heads" politicians
✊ images of protest

🧵 We trace the journey of a news visual from camera to (web)page
🔎 There are many (hidden) sites of power in this journey
📷 This can result in marginalised perspectives, people or movements