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Afghan Girl

In Rae Lynn Schwartz-DuPre’s paper, Portraying the Political: National Geographic’s 1985 Afghan Girl and a US Alibi for Aid, she discusses the effects of the Afghan Girl’s iconic photo, which was to help the U.S.’ political agenda. What was so surprising to read was the fact that National Geographic is a subdued puppet for the government. However, once Dupre points out how National Geographic can secretly supplement the government’s agenda onto their citizens, it was an ‘aha’ moment. I could not believe I did not see it before. While reading the paper, I was curious and googled the Afghan Girl, and it is an image that does not resonate very much with me like the photograph of Iwo Jima. However, the eyes, how the girl was posed, and the framing or cropping that was done in the photo feels familiar, in a sense that I see females around me trying to imitate the intimacy within a photo.  Another google I did was the Migrant Mother, and the person who was pictured was ident...

Charland

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Maurice Charland’s article Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Quebecois felt like the paper version of the class we had about discourse. Charland’s insight is that we all live in some sort of discourse, and the case of the Peuple Quebecois was an example of a failed defined and recognized discourse within a country. For the Quebecois, and those in the past like them, felt a need for sovereignty from Canada because it helped the essence of life for them. This conflict continually expresses itself in civil wars and identity debates, and I wonder if that is one of the basic human right. In the case of Quebec, it was a strong 45% of the population that agreed to The White Paper’s suggestion, yet it fell short of the majority. This case reminded me of the time when of the failed Annexation of Texas and the civil war. Here, the disagreement was resolved within paper while Texas and the civil war was messy. This leads me to the issue that I wonder which is if Texas of the Sout...

Raising Iwo Jima

The article by Hariman and Lucaites tries to interpret the symbolism within the photograph of marines raising the American flag at Iwo Jima. They not only discussed the symbolism within the photograph, but also the implications that it had among the exposed society. The ideology behind the image runs a lot deeper than we may not foresee. Hariman and Lucaites appears to be stating that “Iconic photographs … reflect social knowledge and dominant ideologies; … shape understanding of specific events and periods; … influence political action by modeling relationships between civic actors; and they provide figural resources for subsequent communicative action” (366). Then in class, we talked about the quote, “’publics do not exist apart from the discourse that addresses them.’ The norms, interests, political effectivity, self-awareness, and substantive claims characterizing public culture are defined by the composition and circulation of text (including words and images) through ma...