Palestinian Children during the Al-Aqsa Flood: A Socio-Semiotic and Socio-Cognitive Analysis

Abstract

The current study examines the visual depiction of Palestinian children in the wake of the Al-Aqsa Flood, through a combined socio-semiotic and socio-cognitive discursive model. The circulation of photographic representations of children happening during this episode became some of the leading visual texts that prefigure humanitarian misery, vulnerability, and loss. Though these images received a large circulation, little academic attention has been paid to the semiotic and ideological processes that constitute the meaning-making of these images. The research agenda, therefore, is to examine how the visual representation of the Palestinian children was made and to determine how visual decisions helped create images of power relations, vulnerability, victimhood and victimization. The study is based on a qualitative interpretive methodology, which brings together the social semiotics by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) and the socio-cognitive model by van Dijk (2008). The sample size was six purposively chosen images of the Palestinian children in the Al-Aqsa Flood. The empirical evidence shows that the pictures do not simply store the agony of humanitarianism; instead, they are ideologically structured visual practices. The Palestinian children are continually staged as the symbolic representations of overall vulnerability that is accomplished with the help of visual means like gaze, salience, spatial organisation and symbolism, and symbolic elements. The representations make suffering prospective but place agency and responsibility in the background, a process that helped create sharedcognitive frames with regard to childhood in conflictual conditions.