The visual representation of the Chilean students' movement in the national established and alternative press: A multimodal analysis

Abstract

This paper examines how the Chilean students' movement was visually constructed in traditional and alternative media during one of the most violent and repressive demonstrations in August, 2011 (Vera 2012). My corpus is comprised by images taken from articles which covered this demonstration, which are analysed in light of Kress and van Leeuwen's (2006) visual grammar, complemented with van Leeuwen's (2008) Social Actor Approach. Likewise, I complemented this analysis by applying a corpus-assisted approach (Baker 2006; Baker et al. 2011) to the articles from the textual corpus. Results unveil how images and text work together to delegitimize specific social actors: the agency represented in these images intensifies linguistic strategies such as criminalization, collectivisation, and exclusion. The strategies used by established media reinforce a narrative construction based on the criminalization of social actors challenging the status quo, perpetuating the exclusion of the discourse proposed by social movements in the established media.