Abstract (eng)
The foreign or the Other is not only part of our daily lives, but is also subject to several aca-demic disciplines, such as sociology. But who is the so-called Other and why are certain in-dividuals, groups or objects identified as something foreign, even though the term as such cannot be objectively defined? The purpose of this Master’s thesis is to not only discuss this question, but also the means and ways of how the foreign or the Other is construed. More precisely, it examines how the Other is represented visually in picture books for children. The focus on this medium as a source of material can be reasoned by the fact that picture books often times serve the purpose of being a body of knowledge for children. Therefore, it is of utmost interest in which ways the Other is presented for this particular age group.
To that end, a corpus of illustrations from a variety of picture books addressing otherness was assembled. On the basis of a technique designed by S. Müller-Doohm, called “Ersteindrucksanalyse“, several topical clusters were created, from which two contrasting illustrations were picked and analyzed according to R. Breckner‘s visual segment analysis (“Segmentanalyse”).
On the basis of these image analyses one can show that especially a society’s approach to diversity has significant impact on the existence of otherness. Depending on whether the degree of acceptance of diversity is low or high, there is either a drawing of boundaries be-tween the Known and the Unknown – the Own and the Other – or there exists a cohabitation despite all differences.
Furthermore, the pictorial representation of the Other will be compared to the depiction of the Own, while the two analyzed images will also be set into context of sociological theories of the Other.