Political semiotics of national campaign posters and pictorial representation: Thailand's 2011 general elections
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William J. Jones
William J. Jones (b. 1978) is a lecturer at Mahidol University International College 〈william.jon@mahidol.ac.th〉. His research interests include European integration, Southeast Asian integration, and contemporary Thai politics. His publications include ``European Union soft power: Cultural diplomacy and higher education in Southeast Asia'' (2011); and ``The ASEAN economic community and new regionalism: A neorealist analysis.''
Abstract
The 2011 Thai general election was seen by many Thai political analysts as a watershed moment that would hopefully be the tipping point of socio-political reconciliation in the drawn out political struggle that has characterized Thai politics since 2005. The highly contested nature of Thai politics becomes salient when viewing campaign posters pictorial and linguistic content. The most controversial of which was the ``Vote No'' campaign taken on by the For Heaven and Earth Party, which is a political party nominally associated with Thailand's conservative People's Alliance for Democracy. This study seeks to unwrap and decode the semiotics of this party's political campaign posters in Thailand's 2011 general election by providing cultural context to the application of multimodal discourse analysis and critical semiotics framework. I will argue that the ``Vote No'' campaign and its campaign posters depicting politicians as animals is a continuing political discourse of conservative Buddhist philosophers/scholars that reaches back to the 1980s. Furthermore, the ``Vote No'' campaign seeks to create dissonance and reinstate conservative rule via monarchial and/or military intervention by creating political deadlock thereby undermining democratic rights and rule by the exercising of democratic rights of voting, thus disenfranchising citizens by their own hand.
About the author
William J. Jones (b. 1978) is a lecturer at Mahidol University International College 〈william.jon@mahidol.ac.th〉. His research interests include European integration, Southeast Asian integration, and contemporary Thai politics. His publications include ``European Union soft power: Cultural diplomacy and higher education in Southeast Asia'' (2011); and ``The ASEAN economic community and new regionalism: A neorealist analysis.''
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- A life for images: Homage to Omar Calabrese
- Semiotic entanglement: The concepts of environment, Umwelt, and Lebenswelt in semiotic perspective
- Passage à l'écrit et production du sensfictionnel : Deux cas du berbère
- The role of symbolism in adolescent gang membership: Results of a pilot study
- What can a philosophy and ethics of communication look like in the context of documentary filmmaking?
- Micropolitics: Signs of interpersonal hierarchy and solidarity in everyday conversation
- Boris Uspenskij and the semiotics of communication: An essay and an interview
- The (non-)random distribution of formational parameters in the established lexicon of Israeli Sign Language (ISL)
- Consumer satisfaction and confirmation of habits of comprehension: The effect of inductive print advertisements – Peircean comments
- Hegemonic signification from perspective of visual rhetoric
- Measuring the luxurious in advertisements: On the popularization of the luxury perfume market
- Environmental issues in unconventional social advertising: A semiotic perspective
- Jim and Bonnie's telephone conversation revisited: A meaning-based approach to talk in interactive events
- Political semiotics of national campaign posters and pictorial representation: Thailand's 2011 general elections
