Perempuan dan Anak dalam Visualisasi pada Komunikasi Lingkungan

Abstract

Children and women are often used as iconography to draw attention to social campaigns because they are able to bring up empathy and moral responsibility of parents, especially mothers. How social actors is presented in an environmental discourse such as Jakarta's air pollution determines who is responsible for decreasing air quality to cause health risks for children and women. Aku dan Polusi is an active campaign by the Gerakan IBUKOTA which is filing a citizen lawsuit demanding the responsibility of the government for the declining quality of Jakarta's air. This study aims to describe the visual and lexical strategies used by Aku dan Polusi in presenting children and women, as well as emphasizing responsibility to parents, especially mothers. This research conducted a multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) on four Aku dan Polusi’s campaign materials using iconography of children and women wearing anti-pollution masks. To describe the visual strategy the researcher uses the Visual Grammar perspective from Kress & van Leeuwen, while the lexical strategy refers to the MDA by Machin & Mayr. The research findings show that Aku dan Polusi deployed two discourse strategies on the campaign material, namely 1) describing health risk threats due to air pollution and 2) describing victims of air pollution. This discourse strategy has three implications: 1) victimizing vulnerable groups, 2) confirming the existence of a gender gap in environmental talks, and 3) using a colonial perspective in presenting children and women as iconography in campaigns.