1st Edition
Visual Public Relations Strategic Communication Beyond Text
This book brings together a broad and diverse range of new and radical approaches to public relations focussing on the increasingly vital role that visual, sensory and physical elements factors play in shaping communication. Engaging with recent developments in critical and cultural theories, it outlines how non-textual and non-representational forces play a central role in the efficacy and reception of public relations.
Challenging the dominant accounts of public relations which center on the purely representational uses of text and imagery, the book critiques the suitability of accepted definitions of the field and highlights future directions for conceptualizing strategic communication within a multi-sensory environment. Drawing on the work of global researchers in public relations, visual culture and communication, design and cultural theory, it brings a welcome inter-disciplinary approach which pushes the boundaries of public relations scholarship in a global cultural context.
This exciting analysis will be of great interest to public relations scholars, advanced students of strategic communication, as well as communication researchers from cultural, media and critical studies exploring PR as a socio-cultural phenomenon.
List of Figures; List of Contributors; Introduction: 1. Visual and Spatial Public Relations: Strategic Communication Beyond Text, Simon Collister and Sarah Roberts-Bowman; Part 1 - Visual Dimensions of Public Relations; 2. Public Relations as Visual Meaning-Making, Kirsten Kohrs; 3. Comic Books, Science (Fiction) and Public Relations, Ian Horton; 4. Picturing Statistical Narratives: A Century of Data Visualisation in Public Relations Practice, Jon Cope and Mark Wells; Part 2 - Spatial Dimensions of Public Relations; 5. Limits or Opportunities for Strategic Communication? The Role of Space and Place in Mediating #Demo2012, Simon Collister; 6. The Communicative Function of Public Spaces, Noureddine Miladi; 7. A Time and Place: The Las Vegas Mob Museum’s Experiential Public Relations, Jessalynn Strauss; Part 3 – Researching Visual and Spatial Public Relations; 8. A Visual History of BP’s Use of Public Relations after Deepwater Horizon, Nick Lovegrove; 9. Environmental Multi-modal Communication: Semiotic Observations on Recent Campaigns, Andrea Catellani; 10. Exploring visual experiments – measuring multimodal messages in laboratory research, Anna-Sara Fagerholm and Karina Göransson; 11. Conclusions and Future Directions, Simon Collister and Sarah Roberts-Bowman
Biography
Simon Collister is a doctoral researcher in Royal Holloway, University of London’s New Political Communication Unit in the UK. He has published journal articles and contributed to edited collections on algorithmic public relations, innovative digital research methods and technology’s impact on communication and news media. He is co-editor of Debates for a Digital Age: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of our Online World (2015).
Sarah Roberts-Bowman, Ph.D. is a senior lecturer at Northumbria University, UK and formerly ran the MA Public Relations at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London, UK. Prior to entering academia, Sarah had 20 years’ experience in PR practice holding senior roles in the public, private and not-for-profit sectors and has worked regionally, nationally and at a pan-European level.
