I’m delighted to post that I have a new edited collection out with Routledge: Visual Public Relations: Strategic Communication Beyond Text.
Working with former colleague, Dr Sarah Roberts-Bowman from Northumbria University, we’ve put together a collection that we believe offers a really interesting – and challenging – account of strategic communications that brings together a range of inter-disciplinary ideas to close down gaps in scholarship.
This from the introduction:
[W]e believe that non-textual domains of media and communication have been left largely unexamined within the field of public relations and strategic communication. Starting an exploration of the visual and spatial aspects of the fields will play a significant role in closing – or at least, beginning to close – a conceptual gap in the literature. … [S]uch a project will initiate and encourage interdisciplinary thinking and approaches to public relations and strategic communication. As this chapter (and the collection itself) progresses, the need to seek out and bridge conceptual divides with other, related fields, such as cultural and critical theories, design and anthropology will hopefully become clear.
In short, we are confident that by connecting broader perspectives on the visual and spatial dimensions of culture and media with public relations and strategic communication, a much-needed opportunity for furthering theories about, and research into, these fields can be developed.
In meeting this challenge we have brought together scholars from across the globe to discuss topics covering three main areas:
- Theoretical and conceptual perspectives (from visual meaning-making to the communicative function of public spaces)
- Applied visual and spatial communications (from comic books to statistical visualisations)
- Research approaches (from multi-modal semiotic research to experimental, lab-based studies of emotion in communication)
More information is available on Routledge’s New Directions in Public Relations and Communication pages.
The book is available via Amazon (UK).