Practice and product: a social semiotic approach to visual communication in sexual and reproductive health promotion

Abstract

This article investigates the use of visual communication in sexual and reproductive health information resources produced by an Australian Family Planning organization for different populations – people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds (especially recent immigrants from Syria and Afghanistan), Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and young people from both these groups. Co-authored by a semiotician and the manager of the organization’s Health Promotion Team, it combines visual analysis of semiotic products with firsthand experience of the organization’s semiotic practices. The article shows how the same medical information leads to different health information products for different groups on the basis of ideas about what can be considered culturally acceptable to these groups. In this way, it demonstrates a social semiotic approach to the analysis of visual communication in which the findings of analysing visual products are understood in relation to the practices of their production.