How does one speak of/for animals in the public debates about animal welfare legislation? One of the ways that many choose is through visual depictions. Animal welfare and animal rights groups publish photos or share videos that depict animal suffering, or perhaps show animals who are healthy and happy in contrast to those who are cruelly abused. Currently I am reading a study of such visual representation, which draws on post-structuralists such as Derrida to analyze more deeply what is happening through the use of visuals. It will be interesting to continue to explore the rhetorical aspects of these questions, but I also plan to approach the issues from a quantitative perspective in another class I am taking.
In Advanced Quant, my semester project will be a proposal for a project that assesses people's cognitive/emotional responses to visual depictions of animal suffering, with a sample drawn from actual materials distributed by animal welfare/rights groups. The question I plan to explore is whether certain depictions cross the threshold of cognitive overload, causing people to turn away (and thus, most importantly, not to process the intended message). I think that this study will be an important complement to the rhetorical explorations I will be doing in our class.
Looking forward to seeing how the connections unfold...
And how might we talk about those as "argument"? Are visuals argument? We haven't really talked about that much in class--certainly, people talk about visuals as argument, but how then are we defining argument? Might be a useful question to explore.
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