Lauren O’hagan
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 219044 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Lauren O’hagan |
| NOMBRES | Lauren |
| APELLIDO | O’hagan |
| FIRMA | O’HAGAN L |
| AFILIACIONES | Örebro University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5554-4492 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 47 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 31 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 47 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2018 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
‘The cheese that tastes good and does good’
This article critically examines the Folke Cheese Initiative, a corporate social responsibility project launched by the Swedish supermarket retailer ICA in 2017 and linked to its hard cheese brand, Folke. Using an historical–archival approach to multimodal critical discourse analysis, the study traces the Initiative’s evolution across product development, launch and promotion, call to action and impact, analysing social media campaigns, promotion…
Constructing Polar Heroism and National Myth-Making in Norwegian Sheet Music Covers
This paper provides the first systematic analysis of polar-themed sheet music covers depicting Norway’s celebrated explorers, Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen, using multimodal critical discourse analysis to examine how visual and stylistic choices shaped national myth-making. It identifies the recurring visual grammar of this genre, examines how these conventions evolved from 1888 to 1930 to reflect shifting national priorities and shows how s…
Material encounters with Rory Gallagher
This article presents a novel exploration of music keepsakes acquired by fans through direct encounters with Irish blues musician Rory Gallagher (1948–95). Drawing on findings from object-oriented interviews, it proposes the first typology of music keepsakes, categorizing them into four distinct types: stage-used items, fan-brought memorabilia, moment-captured souvenirs and opportunistic mementos. It also examines the embodied material networks t…
“Doing Right by Rory”
In 2024, the estate of the late Irish blues-rock musician Rory Gallagher announced that his personal instrument collection would be offered for sale at the London auction house Bonhams. As a site of highly charged fan engagement, auctions provide a unique lens through which to examine the intersection of music material objects with affective, ritualized, and ethical practices. Drawing on object-oriented interviews with auction participants and in…
Scrapbooking as sanctuary
This article offers the first scholarly exploration of a set of scrapbooks about Irish blues-rock musician Rory Gallagher, created by Carol Clerk – a teenage girl growing up in 1970s Belfast who would later become a renowned music journalist. It examines how embodied music fandom, affective attachment and female cultural labor are conveyed through the scrapbooks’ layout, composition and sensory dimensions. Using textual, material and semiotic ana…
The subtle codification of science through integrated design
Under neoliberal regimes, diminishing state support and care infrastructures have repositioned health as an individual responsibility (Petersen & Lupton, 1996). As a result, health has become both
How mobile mental health applications promote entrepreneurial ways of life
This study uses multimodal critical discourse analysis to explore the growing market of mental health applications (MHapps), particularly those using sound and music to promote wellbeing. Focusing on NuCalm, Endel and BrainTap, it examines the design and functionalities of their interfaces, revealing the underlying assumptions, values and ideologies embedded in their structures. It finds that these apps are structured around a script of self-mana…
Material hauntings
This Short Communication paper presents two case studies of absent and lost music keepsakes and the emotional and spatial chasms they leave behind. Focusing on a misplaced watch and a lost Guinness can that once belonged to Irish blues musician Rory Gallagher, it examines how these objects endure as material hauntings, evoking Gallagher's aura and eliciting feelings of mystery and unease. It argues that their absence foregrounds their material qu…
“When Jimi Hendrix was Asked. . .”
This paper examines the contemporary legend surrounding the quotation “Ask Rory Gallagher,” allegedly spoken by Jimi Hendrix when asked how it felt to be the world's greatest guitarist. Long debated within Gallagher’s fan community, the statement's origins and authenticity remain uncertain. Using a netnographic approach combining digital archival research and social media observation, the study traces the legend's sources, circulation, and recept…
Materialising music worlds
This paper extends Crossley’s concept of ‘music worlds’ by foregrounding the role of material assemblages in shaping collective memory, fan practices and vernacular heritage. Drawing on object-oriented interviews with fans of Irish blues-rock musician Rory Gallagher, it examines how everyday music-related keepsakes mediate four sequential rites of passage in the fan experience: discovering Gallagher’s music, seeing him in concert, meeting him and…
The colleen and the crafting of Irishness
This article explores how McClinton’s Colleen Soap used the figure of the colleen to craft Irishness in its marketing through advertisements in the British and Irish press (1910–1923). Using visual social semiotic analysis, it examines the co-deployment of language, image, colour, typography, layout and composition to articulate and negotiate representations of Irishness and its evolution over time. Ultimately, it reveals the various ways in whic…
Historicizing the marketing of plant-based meat substitutes
This paper historicizes the contemporary meat substitutes trend by analyzing advertisements from the Sanitas Nut Food Company, founded by Dr John Harvey Kellogg, during its first five years of operation (1896-1901). Using visual social semiotics, it explores the rhetorical and multimodal strategies used in the advertisements, finding that Sanitas marketed its meat substitute products by drawing upon four meat myths—normal, natural, necessary, and…
A breakfast revolution for mothers
This paper explores the first decade of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes on the Swedish market (1929–1939), critically examining its national marketing campaign through van Leeuwen’s model of legitimation. It argues that scientific motherhood was a core aspect of Kellogg’s campaign, with advertisements emphasising three key themes: The Dutiful Mother and Wife; The Importance of Good Health; and The Embracing of Modernity. Through their advertisements, Kello…
English-medium education and the perpetuation of girls’ disadvantage
In our community, girls do not need this [English-medium education]. Interview with male teacher Nepal is classified as a low-middle income country (World Bank, 2023), and like other such countries, it is under international pressure to attain gender equality targets in order to receive international aid. However, Nepal is also permeated by widespread perceptions that girls are subordinate to boys, which influences girls’ access to education, inf…
Going bananas! The scientific marketing of a ‘new’ fruit in early 20 th -Century Sweden
This paper investigates the introduction of the banana to Sweden in the early twentieth century and how "eating knowledge" of this new and exotic fruit was transferred to consumers through marketing that drew heavily upon scientific discourse. Using a case study of advertisements from Fyffes – the most dominant banana brand of the period – it employs multimodal social semiotics to identify a range of verbal and visual strategies that were adopted…
Blurring the Boundaries Between Medicine and Food
This paper explores the early marketing practices (1910-1940) of the Swedish cough drop brand Läkerol, demonstrating how it capitalised on the 'spaces of confusion' posed by the product's liminality between food and medicine to create a slick marketing campaign inspired by the tried-and-tested formulas of the food industry. Advertisements used a range of strategies, such as expert and role model testimonials, humorous and serious newsjacking and …
Nerves Need Nourishment”
This paper offers the first case study of Phospho-Energon — an early twentieth-century Swedish patent medicine believed to cure nervousness. Using a large dataset of newspaper advertisements, it explores how the product was presented through scientific and medical language, which drew upon a range of visual and verbal rhetoric to convince consumers of its benefits. It finds that pseudoscientific discourse focusing on self-help was regularly used …
The semiotic remediation of hardtack biscuits during World War One
This study offers the first detailed examination of the materiality of World War One hardtack biscuits - a dense biscuit made from flour, water and salt, which was a key component of ration packs for both Australian and British soldiers. It is specifically concerned with the types of repurposing - or acts of semiotic remediation - that take place, their broader sociocultural functions and the semiotic resources drawn upon to make meaning. Using a…
Rethinking verticality through top-down views in drone hobbyist photography
This paper adopts a geosemiotics perspective to the study of top-down views produced by drone hobbyists to explore how they challenge or disrupt traditional meanings associated with verticality. Using a dataset of 748 drone visuals collected from two months of participant observation on social media platforms, we identify four unique functions of top-down views: as abstract art, as transformations of the mundane, as playful mapping and as dronies…
Music for Mental Health
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, there has been a major increase in anxiety and depression. For many, online music fandoms have offered an important platform to combat loneliness and aid well-being. In this study, I use autoethnography, supported by psychosocial theory on recovery and sociological theory on music fandoms, to track my personal journey of recovery (2020–2022) from a mental health crisis through the support of the Rory Gallagher Inst…
The golden path to health”
Throughout the early twentieth century, the widespread growth of coffee drinking in Sweden led for calls by health reformers, doctors and scientists to implement measures to curtail what they deemed “coffee abuse.” Debates about the dangers of coffee took place in Swedish Parliament and trickled out into the popular press. It was not long before canny manufacturers saw an opportunity to capitalize upon this, introducing coffee substitutes onto th…
In search of the social in social semiotics
This paper reflects on the importance of the social to the analysis of historical multimodal texts and how some concepts and analytical tools from SFL can prevent researchers from getting the most from their data. Building on the work of Ledin and Machin (2018), it looks at three main areas of concern when dealing with historical multimodal texts—context, attention to micro, meso and macro levels, and historically-developed affordances—and uses e…
Introducing ethnohistorical research to multimodal studies
This paper reflects on the importance of archival research to the analysis of historical multimodal texts. Specifically, it put forwards a “multimodal ethnohistorical” approach, offering a guide to the key principles and resources that underpin the methodology and using examples from past research to demonstrate its effectiveness. The paper argues that multimodal ethnohistory can help address many of the criticisms around text-based multimodal an…
Selling Swedish summer
This paper offers the first case study of the Swedish soft drink Pommac, launched in 1919, and how the brand established itself as the ‘taste of summer’. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis to examine a large dataset of Pommac advertisements, it traces the brand's development over its first forty years on the market (1920–1960), identifying the ways in which summer was depicted in advertisements, how this shifted over time in accordance …
Fashioning the “People’s Guitarist” The Mythologization of Rory Gallagher in the International Music Press
This paper traces how the international music press used the clothing and appearance of the Irish blues/rock musician Rory Gallagher to mythologize him as the “People’s Guitarist.” I explore how this image was constructed and developed over time, as well as Gallagher’s own response to this mythologization and how it has consolidated since his death in 1995. I argue that Gallagher’s unwillingness to compromise his integrity and shift his music or …
Drone views
Drone visuals are rapidly becoming part of our sociocultural imaginaries, generating distinct images that differ from traditional visual conventions and producing unexpected perspectives of the world that reveal hidden aspects of our surroundings. Despite the growing use of camera-laden drones in a range of commercial and non-commercial activities, to date, little scholarly attention has been paid to the semiotics of drone visuals. This article i…
Modern science, moral mothers, and mythical nature
This paper offers the first case study of the marketing of cod liver oil in Sweden (1920-1930), following the discovery of vitamins A and D. Drawing upon a large dataset of cod liver oil advertisements from the Swedish Newspaper Archive, it uses multimodal critical discourse analysis to investigate how language and other semiotic resources (e.g. image, typography, colour) work together to convey the benefits of cod liver oil intake. It identifies…
Towards a multimodal ethnohistorical approach
This study uses four examples of bookplates printed in Edwardian Britain (1901–1914) to demonstrate how the adoption of an ethnohistorical approach to social semiotics can vastly strengthen multimodal analysis. It argues that situating choices of image, colour, typography and materiality in archival research and the broader sociohistorical context of the Edwardian period can help to uncover the external motivations for a bookplate’s structure. Th…
Flesh-formers or fads? Historicizing the contemporary protein-enhanced food trend
This paper explores the historical development of protein-enhanced foods in Great Britain and how they were marketed by food manufacturers to convince consumers that protein was essential to maintaining a healthy lifestyle. It focuses particularly on Plasmon and Emprote – the two biggest brands of the early twentieth century – and uses multimodal critical discourse analysis to identify how semiotic resources are used to embed products in scientif…
Classifying” Margarine
From its inception in 1869, margarine was considered a working-class food, associated with poverty and inferiority. In the early twentieth century, Swedish margarine brands set about to change public perception of the product, investing vast sums of money in extensive marketing campaigns to showcase it as suitable for the middle classes. However, wanting to retain as much market share as possible, they also continued to direct margarine advertise…
Pure in body, pure in mind? A sociohistorical perspective on the marketisation of pure foods in great Britain
Going bananas! The scientific marketing of a ‘new’ fruit in early 20 th -Century Sweden
This paper investigates the introduction of the banana to Sweden in the early twentieth century and how "eating knowledge" of this new and exotic fruit was transferred to consumers through marketing that drew heavily upon scientific discourse. Using a case study of advertisements from Fyffes – the most dominant banana brand of the period – it employs multimodal social semiotics to identify a range of verbal and visual strategies that were adopted…
In search of the social in social semiotics
This paper reflects on the importance of the social to the analysis of historical multimodal texts and how some concepts and analytical tools from SFL can prevent researchers from getting the most from their data. Building on the work of Ledin and Machin (2018), it looks at three main areas of concern when dealing with historical multimodal texts—context, attention to micro, meso and macro levels, and historically-developed affordances—and uses e…
Foodstagramming’ in early 20th-century postcards
Introduced in 1907, the ‘real photo’ postcard destabilized the boundaries between private and public life, enabling people to perform identity in ways that anticipate contemporary social media practices. In this visual essay, the author explores one particular phenomenon – the sharing of food – drawing comparisons with ‘foodstagramming’ in terms of its compositional structure, social objectives and communicative functions. In doing so, she challe…
The Edwardian Selfies
Rory played the greens, not the blues”
This study explores expressions of Irishness by fans on the official YouTube channel of the Irish blues/rock singer and guitarist Rory Gallagher. Drawing upon a dataset of some 500 comments, I note the various strategies that fans, both Irish and non-Irish, adopt to engage in public displays of Irishness and explore the personal links that they make with Ireland and Irish culture to situate themselves as “authentic.” I demonstrate how, for Rory G…
Selling “Healthy” Radium Products With Science
We study the marketing of radioactive products in Sweden from 1910 to 1940, using a dataset of newspaper and magazine advertisements. We use multimodal critical discourse analysis to show how marketers harnessed the meaning potentials of language and semiotic resources to embed radium in discourses of science and technological development, and thus convince consumers of its health benefits. We find that canny marketers continuously colonized, sha…
The dip pen as a source of social distinction in Victorian Britain
In the nineteenth century, Britain was the epicentre of pen-making, with around 75% of the world’s dip pens being manufactured in Birmingham. While the ownership of dip pens was initially restricted to upper-class Victorians due to their expensive cost, the introduction of mass-production techniques and the 1870 Education Act led to their adoption by the lower classes. The democratisation of the dip pen offered manufacturers an attractive new opp…
Towards a multimodal ethnohistorical approach
This study uses four examples of bookplates printed in Edwardian Britain (1901–1914) to demonstrate how the adoption of an ethnohistorical approach to social semiotics can vastly strengthen multimodal analysis. It argues that situating choices of image, colour, typography and materiality in archival research and the broader sociohistorical context of the Edwardian period can help to uncover the external motivations for a bookplate’s structure. Th…
Clean Nails are the Mark of a Well Brought-Up Girl”
e d fo r p u blic a tio n
Pure in body, pure in mind? A sociohistorical perspective on the marketisation of pure foods in great Britain
The Irish Rover
Phil Lynott, the lead singer of the rock band Thin Lizzy, was a complex character. An illegitimate black child who grew up in a working-class, Catholic district of Dublin, Ireland in the 1950s, Lynott spent his life searching for a sense of belonging, something which he explored through rock and roll. This study uses Lynott’s song lyrics to investigate his quest for identity. In particular, it identifies the many recurring themes and archetypes i…
Contesting Women’s Right to Vote
This article uses multimodal critical discourse analysis to explore the messages promoted by anti-suffrage postcards produced in Britain between 1909 and 1914. It identifies five salient themes across the postcards (subversion of gender roles; physical ridicule of women; mental ridicule of women; violence towards women; and an imagined future), arguing that, despite their aim of presenting anti-suffragists as united in their objective of opposing…
‘Home Rule is Rome Rule’
In 1912, the British government introduced a Home Rule Bill to Parliament, proposing that Ireland be granted the right to self-govern. This Bill provoked widespread outrage in the Ulster province of Ireland, where most people were Protestant and felt strongly in support of the Union. To express their opposition to Home Rule, Ulster Unionists produced propaganda postcards to convince fellow Irish citizens, the British government and the British pu…
Blinded by science? Constructing truth and authority in early twentieth-century Virol advertisements
This paper conducts a case study of the marketing of Virol – a malt extract preparation that was popular in early twentieth-century Britain – using advertisements from British newspapers. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, it explores how marketers drew upon linguistic/semiotic resources to embed Virol in discourses of scientific knowledge and how these discourses were made to appear true. Through targeted marketing campaigns, Virol es…
The Anatomy of a Battle Jacket
The battle jacket—a sleeveless denim jacket customized with band patches—is a staple item of clothing for heavy metal fans. This paper brings together social semiotic analysis and ethnographic insights to explore three different types of battle jacket: the “classic” jacket, the “tribute” jacket, and the “modern” jacket. It discovers that, despite the jacket’s assortment of bold images, colours, typography, and symmetrical arrangements, owners, in…
The Edwardian Selfies
Flesh-formers or fads? Historicizing the contemporary protein-enhanced food trend
This paper explores the historical development of protein-enhanced foods in Great Britain and how they were marketed by food manufacturers to convince consumers that protein was essential to maintaining a healthy lifestyle. It focuses particularly on Plasmon and Emprote – the two biggest brands of the early twentieth century – and uses multimodal critical discourse analysis to identify how semiotic resources are used to embed products in scientif…
Rory played the greens, not the blues”
This study explores expressions of Irishness by fans on the official YouTube channel of the Irish blues/rock singer and guitarist Rory Gallagher. Drawing upon a dataset of some 500 comments, I note the various strategies that fans, both Irish and non-Irish, adopt to engage in public displays of Irishness and explore the personal links that they make with Ireland and Irish culture to situate themselves as “authentic.” I demonstrate how, for Rory G…
Selling “Healthy” Radium Products With Science
We study the marketing of radioactive products in Sweden from 1910 to 1940, using a dataset of newspaper and magazine advertisements. We use multimodal critical discourse analysis to show how marketers harnessed the meaning potentials of language and semiotic resources to embed radium in discourses of science and technological development, and thus convince consumers of its health benefits. We find that canny marketers continuously colonized, sha…
Instagram as an exhibition space
This paper explores the impact of COVID-19 on a planned physical exhibition – Prize Books and Politics: Rethinking Working-Class Life in Edwardian Britain – and the experience of transforming it into a digital exhibition through the platform of Instagram. Using feedback from visitors in the form of likes, comments and surveys, I reflect on the exhibition in terms of its scope, content, visitor experience and overall success. I also outline the va…
Introducing ethnohistorical research to multimodal studies
This paper reflects on the importance of archival research to the analysis of historical multimodal texts. Specifically, it put forwards a “multimodal ethnohistorical” approach, offering a guide to the key principles and resources that underpin the methodology and using examples from past research to demonstrate its effectiveness. The paper argues that multimodal ethnohistory can help address many of the criticisms around text-based multimodal an…
Selling Swedish summer
This paper offers the first case study of the Swedish soft drink Pommac, launched in 1919, and how the brand established itself as the ‘taste of summer’. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis to examine a large dataset of Pommac advertisements, it traces the brand's development over its first forty years on the market (1920–1960), identifying the ways in which summer was depicted in advertisements, how this shifted over time in accordance …
Fashioning the “People’s Guitarist” The Mythologization of Rory Gallagher in the International Music Press
This paper traces how the international music press used the clothing and appearance of the Irish blues/rock musician Rory Gallagher to mythologize him as the “People’s Guitarist.” I explore how this image was constructed and developed over time, as well as Gallagher’s own response to this mythologization and how it has consolidated since his death in 1995. I argue that Gallagher’s unwillingness to compromise his integrity and shift his music or …
“My Musical Armor”
This paper offers the first detailed exploration of the key functions and meanings of battle jackets -sleeveless denim jackets customized with band patches -for heavy metal fans. Drawing upon a dataset of 50 battle jackets collected from Instagram and Reddit, coupled with evidence from questionnaires and comment threads, it identifies three key aspects of battle jackets (sense of community, pursuit of selfhood, and codes of civility/authenticity)…
“It’s always nice to head for home”
This paper builds upon the work of Hogan (2016, 2021) by casting a historical lens on the importance of emotional connectivity to place in Cork through a case study of the city’s most famous musician: the blues/rock guitarist Rory Gallagher. Specifically, it investigates how sense of place and Corkonian values are narratively produced and depicted in the Irish Tour ’74 documentary. It argues that the documentary portrays County Cork as a close-kn…
Classifying” Margarine
From its inception in 1869, margarine was considered a working-class food, associated with poverty and inferiority. In the early twentieth century, Swedish margarine brands set about to change public perception of the product, investing vast sums of money in extensive marketing campaigns to showcase it as suitable for the middle classes. However, wanting to retain as much market share as possible, they also continued to direct margarine advertise…
Transhistoricizing the Drone
This article seeks to situate drone imagery within a more extensive lineage of practice by focusing on one particular form with which it is comparable: pigeon photography. Using a combination of visual social semiotic analysis, literature from Drone Studies, and archival research, it highlights four overarching characteristics shared between photographs taken by pigeons between 1908 and 1912 and contemporary drone visuals produced by hobbyists: v…
Foodstagramming’ in early 20th-century postcards
Introduced in 1907, the ‘real photo’ postcard destabilized the boundaries between private and public life, enabling people to perform identity in ways that anticipate contemporary social media practices. In this visual essay, the author explores one particular phenomenon – the sharing of food – drawing comparisons with ‘foodstagramming’ in terms of its compositional structure, social objectives and communicative functions. In doing so, she challe…
Alcohol is Humanity’s enemy!” Propaganda Posters and the 1922 Swedish Prohibition Referendum
In the early twentieth century, intense public debate was taking place in Sweden around the control of alcohol consumption. Under intense pressure from the growing temperance movement, the Swedish government passed a motion to hold a referendum on 27 August 1922 to determine whether a total prohibition of alcohol should be implemented. One of the most important means of influencing public opinions was the propaganda poster, which relied on simple…
Drone views
Drone visuals are rapidly becoming part of our sociocultural imaginaries, generating distinct images that differ from traditional visual conventions and producing unexpected perspectives of the world that reveal hidden aspects of our surroundings. Despite the growing use of camera-laden drones in a range of commercial and non-commercial activities, to date, little scholarly attention has been paid to the semiotics of drone visuals. This article i…
Modern science, moral mothers, and mythical nature
This paper offers the first case study of the marketing of cod liver oil in Sweden (1920-1930), following the discovery of vitamins A and D. Drawing upon a large dataset of cod liver oil advertisements from the Swedish Newspaper Archive, it uses multimodal critical discourse analysis to investigate how language and other semiotic resources (e.g. image, typography, colour) work together to convey the benefits of cod liver oil intake. It identifies…
Sociology (30 obras) · Art (21 obras) · Aesthetics (16 obras) · Psychology (14 obras) · Political science (13 obras) · Business (12 obras) · Linguistics (12 obras) · Semiotics (12 obras) · Advertising (11 obras) · Culinary Culture and Tourism (11 obras)