Visual Public Relations: Strategic Communication Beyond Text

This book brings together a broad and diverse range of new and radical approaches to public relations focussing on the increasingly vital role that visual, sensory and physical elements factors play in shaping communication. Engaging with recent developments in critical and cultural theories, it outlines how non-textual and non-representational forces play a central role in the efficacy and reception of public relations.

Challenging the dominant accounts of public relations which center on the purely representational uses of text and imagery, the book critiques the suitability of accepted definitions of the field and highlights future directions for conceptualizing strategic communication within a multi-sensory environment. Drawing on the work of global researchers in public relations, visual culture and communication, design and cultural theory, it brings a welcome inter-disciplinary approach which pushes the boundaries of public relations scholarship in a global cultural context.

This exciting analysis will be of great interest to public relations scholars, advanced students of strategic communication, as well as communication researchers from cultural, media and critical studies exploring PR as a socio-cultural phenomenon.

Simon Collister is a doctoral researcher in Royal Holloway, University of London’s New Political Communication Unit in the UK. He has published journal articles and contributed to edited collections on algorithmic public relations, innovative digital research methods and technology’s impact on communication and news media. He is co-editor of Debates for a Digital Age: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of our Online World (2015).

Sarah Roberts-Bowman, Ph.D. is a senior lecturer at Northumbria University, UK and formerly ran the MA Public Relations at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London, UK. Prior to entering academia, Sarah had 20 years’ experience in PR practice holding senior roles in the public, private and not-for-profit sectors and has worked regionally, nationally and at a pan-European level.