Cognition and ideological effects in the interaction between viewers and BBC travel documentaries: combining multimodal critical discourse analysis and audience research

The talk will provide an overview of my PhD project and thesis, which I have recently completed. My research integrates Audience Research (e.g. Schrøder et al., 2003) in Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (Machin and Mayr, 2012; Machin, 2013; Ledin and Machin, 2018) to investigate “how individuals discursively constitute themselves” (Castaldi, 2021, p. 56). My approach takes a narrow reading of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, where ideological dissemination is seen as the work of civil society, rather than political society, and therefore focuses on the mass-mediated genre of travel and cultural documentaries. The research assumes that multimodal semiosis is infused with ideologies, as the choice of signs is always motivated (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006). The approach, however, acknowledges the agentive position of the individual in ideology formation and, through the analysis of three case studies, aims to shed some light on the whole process of mass-mediated communication, from reception to production. Over the course of the talk, excerpts from the case studies will be used to illustrate how the theoretical and methodological approaches have been put to work.
The methodology includes a qualitative analysis of the unique interaction of the viewers with the documentaries of their choice, explored by means of pre- and after-viewing questionnaires and follow-up interviews, as well as critical multimodal analyses of the programmes. Through the investigation of how social actors and events are represented during the interactive experience and drawing on theoretical and analytical concepts from social semiotics (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001, 2006; van Leeuwen 2005; Kress, 2010) and the cognitive-pragmatic model of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995), the research explores how individuals use media discourses to build their ideological positions. Furthermore, the societal struggles associated with those discourses are also investigated.
Findings suggest not only that the BBC documentaries analysed reinforce neoliberal and neo-imperialistic ideologies, but also that the documentaries had ideological effects on the viewers. The research analyses the conditions under which this phenomenon occurs by focusing on the multimodal manipulation of the viewers’ epistemic vigilance (Sperber et al., 2010).