Nation and Globalization in Foreign News. Culture and Politics in the International News Picture Circuit (2008-2012)

The project is focused on world news picture paragraph slideshows in online newspapers from Sweden, the UK, and the USA. The slideshows are studied in the context of the overlapping theoretical fields of: theories on the development of online news, globalization theories, specifically concerning the nation-culture-globalization continuum, and theories on the roles of images in news, both when it comes to circulation and representation. Concurrently an important part of the project objectives is to develop identity politics theory for media studies. This is mainly done in studies of representation of people from different parts of the world in year-review slideshows and slideshows covering 1st of May demonstrations worldwide.

Other part studies include discussions of representation of different religions in the slideshows. All the above-mentioned studies apply discourse analytical methods, particularly "the analytics of mediation" which has been developed for documentary imagery. In addition to this, participatory observation and semi-structured interviews are applied, specifically with picture editors and photographers, predominantly from international news agencies, since the news images in the slideshows almost exclusively originate from news agencies. To this date interviews have been conducted in London, Toronto and Durban.

Already published texts that are connected to the project include

Roosvall, A. (2009) “Global Divides in Cosmographic Genres. Charity, Solidarity and Different Explanations of Difference” in Nordicom Review. Jubilee Issue, 30(2009)

Roosvall, A. (2010) ”Image-Nation. The National, the Cultural and the Global in Foreign News Slide-shows” in Roosvall, Anna & Salovaara-Moring, Inka (eds.) Communicating the Nation. National Topographies of Global media Landscapes. Gothenburg: Nordicom

Roosvall, A. (2013) “The Identity Politics of World News. Oneness, Particularity, Identity and Status in Online Slideshows”, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Prepublished January 24 2013. DOI: 10.1177/1367877912464369