Abstract

Communication through or with images has emerged into one of the main method people engage to ‘talk’ in XXI century. It is engaged in many everyday life situations to replace or enhance oral communication and is now commonly used not only by social media, but also traditional ones, business and in widely understood politics. Image communication enhancing oral one has been engaged by Kenyan electoral commission, IEBC, to prepare multimodal voter education addressed to women. In this article I analyze multifaceted content present in video spots IEBC aired afore 2017 Kenyan general elections. Spots were published on modern communication platform i.e. Twitter and YouTube and were designed to encourage civic involvement of Kenyan women, whose presence in public life in Kenya is noticeably smaller. To analyze video spots I engaged methodology of cognitive linguistics, especially metonymy, metaphor & conceptual blending theory. It enables to pursue beyond what is explicitly said and conduct in-depth understanding of electoral spots. Chosen analysis also allows to perceive unique Easter-African cultural values and comprehend their conceptualizations in the analyzed videos. I argue, that IEBC created modern campaign and encouraged women to vote by creating images they can effortlessly identify with, as they were capable to show that traditional women’s social roles merge well with contemporary, democratic requirements. This article confirms that cognitive linguistics mechanisms can be used in the analysis of varied, multimodal texts, including of political character and they successfully trace cultural conceptualizations embedded in them, allowing audience to fully comprehend given source material.

Keywords: Kenya, Elections, Conceptualizations, Multimodality, Metaphor, Metonymy, Conceptual integration