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Part of
Argumentation across Communities of Practice: Multi-disciplinary perspectives
Edited by Cornelia Ilie and Giuliana Garzone
[Argumentation in Context 10] 2017
► pp. 291–316

Chapter 12
Visual arguments in activists’ campaigns

A pragmadialectical perspective

This chapter contributes to the ongoing debate on the possibility and realizations of visual arguments, focussing on advertisements produced by NGOs as part of their campaigns – image-based messages that are inherently argumentative and whose reach, thanks to the Web, extends well beyond the time and space constraints of the campaigns themselves. One of the nodes of such a debate concerns whether visuals can express at the same time the two parts of an argument (standpoint and supporting argument), and how each of them can be identified. The analysis carried out here heads into this direction, by putting to use categories from Kress and van Leeuwen’s ‘grammar’ of visual design and combining them with the tenets of the pragma-dialectical approach to argumentation.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Review of the literature
  • 3.Material and method
  • 4.Analysis
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/aic.10.13deg
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