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This paper discusses a teaching experiment in which 20 university students in Finland participated in the course "Critical and Novel Approaches to Management and Organisational Studies," which familiarized them with the method of embodied reflection of images. First, the paper presents the method and the teaching experiment. Then, it presents and discusses the students' experiences while experimenting with the method. The students' written reflections form the data of the study, which were analyzed qualitatively using content analysis. The findings of this small-scale study show that the method of embodied reflection of images provided students with a novel perspective into management and organization, fostered collaboration, and promoted critical thinking. In addition, rational knowledge was furnished with experiential and affective modes of knowledge. Based on students' positive feedback, the experiment succeeded in elucidating the method and its applicability in research on management and organization. This study promotes teaching arts-based research methods in higher education.

Inspired by the affective and sensory turns in the paradigm of art history, this article discusses making pictures as a method of teaching art history in Finnish Upper Secondary Vocational Education and Training (Qualification in Visual Expression, Study Programmes in Visual and Media Arts and Photography). A total of 25 students majoring in visual and media arts and photography participated in the research, studying art history by visual means and reflecting on their learning experiences. This article follows the principles of contextual subject-related didactics, where contemporary conceptions of the discipline and the objectives of the curriculum direct the choice of instructional approaches. The study shows that making pictures motivated the students to study art history and develop practical skills within the discipline in accordance with the curriculum objectives. In visual terms, the kinesthetic and haptic qualities associated with making pictures brought affects and emotions to art historical inquiries, which built bridges between art history and the students' life-worlds.

This article examines how students categorize teachers based on visual cues. The research drew on theories of social representations, social perception, and social categorization to study how students perceive and interpret teachers' nonverbal communication. At a Finnish vocational college for culture studies, 17 paintings depicting a variety of people were shown to 65 students, who reflected on them as pictures of teachers. The data were analyzed applying membership categorization analysis. Five categories of teachers emerged from the data. The results show that students make inferences about teachers' approachability and competence based on their visual cues, which might have implications for classroom management.

This study examines social representations of teachership based on students' and teachers' drawings. Fifty-nine students and thirty-nine teachers in upper-secondary education in Finland participated in the research, drawing a picture of a typical teacher and commenting on their drawings verbally. The study focuses on what kinds of social representations of teachership the drawings suggest and how teachers' and students' social representations relate to each other and to Finnish education policy. The data were analyzed by content analysis. This study shows that teachers' and students' social representations of teachership differ from each other and also deviate from Finnish education policy to some extent. Furthermore, the results suggest that teachers do not pay sufficient attention to their visual nonverbal behavior, which might contribute to the formation of unfavorable social representations of teachers among students, influencing interaction and learning negatively.

This study examines how news images of refugees in the context of the war in Ukraine mobilize intergroup relations. A visual rhetorical analysis is used to examine the rhetorical strategies employed in news images of Ukrainian refugees in a mainstream Finnish national newspaper from February 25 to May 31, 2022. The data consisted of 465 images. The study constructed four humanizing visual rhetorical strategies based on the visual expression in news images: maternalizing, fragilizing, agonizing, and activizing. The rhetorical strategies constructed four subject positions for Ukrainian refugees: vulnerable victims, innocent victims, suffering Ukrainians, and persistent/resilient Ukrainians. All rhetorical strategies implicitly communicated the subject position of evil to Russia. The paper contributes to the current knowledge of the humanization of refugees in media discourse and the potential of media images to mobilize intergroup relations. Methodologically, the paper elaborates visual rhetorical analysis as a means of social psychological study of refugee discourse in the context of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions on the body frequently foreground in empirical studies of social representations. However, there is scarce theoretical literature within social representations theory focusing on embodied social representation. This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of embodied, sensory experiences as part of social representation. More precisely, it attempts to elaborate how individual, social, bodily, and material layers work together in embodied social representation. This paper approaches the topic from four viewpoints: (1) social representation as action, (2) phenomenology, (3) embodied and socially situated cognition, and (4) sensory epistemologies and sensescapes. These approaches are used to provide insight into the conscious and unconscious processes of social representation and the multimodality of social representation. The paper contributes to the understanding of the role of sensory experiences and embodiment in the theory of social representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the possibilities of drawing as a method of researching social representations. The theory of social representations focuses on studying the forms, contents, and functions of socially shared common knowledge. In this paper, we (1) present the central premises of social representations theory, (2) elaborate drawing as a visual research method, and (3) synthesize how the drawing method may promote and diversify our understanding of social representations. We suggest that the drawing method is especially fruitful in the analysis of objectification process (how something abstract is made tangible); cognitive polyphasia (the idea of the simultaneous existence of diverse and contradicting social representations); and the different levels of analysis in which social representations become observable: ontogenesis (individual level), microgenesis (social interaction level), and sociogenesis (societal level). Through these insights, this paper advances the current understanding of the drawing method in qualitative social representations research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study explores how the polarized political discussion on climate change is used to construct as a humorous misogynist message in a Finnish far‐right political campaign video from 2021. Applying a multimodal analytical approach, the study explores the ways in which humor and irony are mobilized in the video through intertextual cues and verbal, visual, and sonic means to produce a dichotomy between "us"—the rational males who oppose strong measures against climate change—and "them," the irrational females, who propose them. The study contributes to political psychology, first by responding to the call for social and political psychologists to expand our knowledge of the production and spread of misogyny in online political communication; second, by showing the importance of studying intertextual and multimodal constructions of misogyny disguised as humor in political communication, and, finally, through demonstrating the utility of interdisciplinarity and multimodal analytic approaches in research on online political mobilization and persuasion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Membership categorization analysis focuses on studying how people categorize each other in interaction. Even though the role of observation has been acknowledged within this methodological approach, it has mainly been used to analyze oral and written communication. This study focuses on examining how membership categorization analysis can be applied to person perception. It elucidates the procedure with two examples where students in a vocational upper secondary college in Finland perceived portrait paintings and reflected in writing what kind of teachers the people depicted in them would be. Drawing on the theorization of person perception and membership categorization analysis, the study suggests a model for applying membership categorization analysis in person perception and discusses its relevance to social interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]