Proceedings of the 1st Teaching & Education Conference, Amsterdam

THE GEOGRAPHY OF HOSTILITY - DISCURSIVE AND SEMIOTIC MEANS OF TRANSFORMING REALITIES IN GEOGRAPHY SCHOOL BOOKS

NURIT ELHANAN

Abstract:

This paper examines the linguistic and semiotic ways in which ideologies are recreated in Geography schoolbooks and transform Geo-political realities. Five schoolbooks currently used in Jewish mainstream schools in Israel were analyzed for the use they make of language and visuals such as photographs, maps, graphs, icons and colour in order to recontextualize both disciplinary and political discourses to education. The paper argues that in all those books scientific conventions and principles of visual and verbal representation are compromised by political messages and the commitment of these schoolbooks to promote Jewish territorial and national Identity, which is largely based on the denial of the identity of Palestinians, both the citizens of Israel and those that live under Occupation. The distortion of geopolitical and social facts and the concealment of any meaningful life beside the Jewish one promote hostility and reproduce Elite Racism .

Keywords: Social semiotics. Discourse Analysis. Multimodal analysis. Geography. Racist discourse.

DOI: 10.20472/TEC.2015.001.007

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