Accentuating institutional brands: A multimodal analysis of the homepages of selected South African universities

In seeking to disentangle themselves from the constraints of apartheid, South African universities have immersed themselves in an identity modification process in which they not only seek to redress the past, but also to reposition their identities as equal opportunity and non-racial institutions. In this paper, we investigate how the University of the Western Cape, the University of Cape Town and Stellenbosch University have used visual and verbal semiotics to re-design their identities on their homepages to appeal to diverse national and international clients. Using Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA), we show how the multi-semiotic choices work together on the homepages to give the universities differentiated, competitive, powerful and attractive brands. We conclude that the homepages blended cultural semiotic artefacts, historical, global and transformational discourses, and architectural landscapes to construct different brand identities that, in turn, rebrand the universities from edifices of apartheid education to equal opportunity institutions

Commodification of transformation discourses and post-apartheid institutional identities at three South African universities

Using mission statements from the UCT, UWC and Stellenbosch University (South Africa), we explore how the three universities have rematerialised prior discourses to rebrand their identities as dictated by contemporary national and global aspirations. We reveal how the universities have recontextualised the experiences and discourses of liberation struggle and the new government's post-apartheid social transformation discourses to construct distinctive identities that are locally relevant and globally aspiring. This has led to the semiotic refiguring of universities from spatial edifices of racially based unequal education, to equal opportunity institutions of higher learning, and to the blurring of historical boundaries between these universities. We conclude that the universities have reconstructed distinct and recognisable identities which speak to a segregated past, but with a post-apartheid voice of equity and redress.IS

Accentuating institutional brands: A multimodal analysis of the homepages of selected South African universities

In seeking to disentangle themselves from the constraints of apartheid, South African universities have immersed themselves in an identity modification process in which they not only seek to redress the past, but also to reposition their identities as equal opportunity and non-racial institutions. In this paper, we investigate how the University of the Western Cape, the University of Cape Town and Stellenbosch University have used visual and verbal semiotics to re-design their identities on their homepages to appeal to diverse national and international clients. Using Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA), we show how the multi-semiotic choices work together on the homepages to give the universities differentiated, competitive, powerful and attractive brands. We conclude that the homepages blended cultural semiotic artefacts, historical, global and transformational discourses, and architectural landscapes to construct different brand identities that, in turn, rebrand the universities from edifices of apartheid education to equal opportunity institutions