1st Edition

Visual Discourses of Disability Interpreting Press Images of Disability from a Discourse-Semiotic Perspective

By Pei Soo Ang, Siang Lee Yeo Copyright 2026
172 Pages 7 Color & 23 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

172 Pages 7 Color & 23 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This book demonstrates how the visual elements within news images of disability orchestrate and evoke social meanings about disability and disabled persons. It creates a Visual Discourses of Disability (ViDD) framework to delineate what and how the visualization of disability communicates ideas and attitudes, and how elements in an image are configured to frame the perspective of disability.... Read more

1.Disability as a discourse semiotic phenomenon.  2.Constructing disability: Models, discourses, and intersectional dimensions.  3.Construal of the visibility and non-visibility of impairment and disability in press images.  4.Perspectivizing and Personizing depictions in the visualization of disability.  5.Enabling and Disabling representations: The emotive dimension of visual discourses of disability.  6.Visual Discourses of Disability framework: Empowering, advocating, handicapping and othering effects.  7.Advocating emancipatory and inclusive disability social semiotics.

Biography

Pei Soo Ang is Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. Her research areas include disability and health discourses, critical disability studies, critical discourse analysis, social semiotics and multimodality.

Siang Lee Yeo is Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. His research focuses on the multimodal interactions of disabled individuals, especially autistic children, in educational and social settings.