Young people's readings of a political cartoon and the concept of multimodal literacy

Abstract

This article uses young people's responses to a newspaper cartoon as a way of exploring the concept of multimodal literacy. The discussion draws on data from a study which aimed to elicit the geopolitical views of 16–19-year-olds in a multi-ethnic British city by using cartoons as a way of encouraging them to talk about their thoughts and feelings towards recent political events. We argue that, contrary to popular perceptions, political cartoons are complex and polysemous and require a particular form of literacy. This not only encompasses the ability to read visual grammar, but also an understanding of the cartoon genre and how it is constructed, with a view to conveying particular meanings within a specific social and cultural context.

Keywords:

• critical geopolitics
• metaphor
• multimodal literacy
• newspaper cartoons
• systemic functional linguistics
• youth politics

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the British Academy for supporting the project (Grant No. SG-39469). We would also like to thank Nicholas Garland for his kind permission to reprint his cartoon.

Notes

1. Overall, we used a total of 10 cartoons for the individual interviews and a further eight cartoons for the focus groups.

2. The respondents were randomly allocated a letter in order to protect their anonymity. The symbol (.) in the transcriptions indicates a hesitation or pause in the respondents’ delivery; underlined words are those which were emphasized; ‘?’ indicates rising intonation rather than a grammatical question.