Views of the Ending of the Cold War : A case study that compares multimodal images in Swedish newspapers and history textbooks

This study compares how newspaper yearbooks and current upper secondary school history textbooks represent the Cold War between the years 1985-1991. As earlier research, this multimodal study focuses discourses and images. In addition I examine the usefulness of mediatization as illuminating tool in this context. For these aims, I have constructed a three-step model, in which concepts from mediatization theory are operationalized, and combined with Theo Van Leeuwen’s social semiotic theory. This thesis compares 356 representations from two yearbooks to 16 ones from three textbooks. At present, historical images are neither addressed nor regulated in the national curriculum, yet both educators and researchers within the field of education address them. The contribution of this paper is hence to shed light on the complexity of images, which shows how their meanings, including degree of mediatization, depend on context. Thereby I add a new aspect to multimodal literacy research