Discourse Analysis of Owj Arts and Media Organization’s Urban Advertis ing from the Perspective of Michel Foucault

Nowadays, each person is exposed to a large amount of advertising every day. Given the role these ads play in determining people’s lifestyle, it is essential to gain greater awareness of how urban advertising works. It causes a greater control over environment and a better understanding of the society. One of the essential functions of urban advertising is the role it plays in shaping public discourse in society and this study investigates this important issue. In present study, enjoying a descriptive-analytical approach, Owj Arts and Media Organization’s urban ads, selected purposefully, were studied and analyzed from Foucault’s perspective, using discourse analysis. Discourse understanding is a tool for understanding different streams of knowledge leading to the emergence, change, dissolution, or displacement of an object in the context of power or knowledge. In fact, what makes Foucault’s approach comparable to artistic research is his understanding of object production, which is parallel to form production in visual art in which urban advertising is like the forms of discourse. Therefore, the method of data collection is documentary-observational. This study aims to understand the conceptual-visual formulation of Owj Organization’s discourse in the light of the existing knowledge network and it seeks to answer these questions. How are the world, social reality, subjects and objects constructed in Owj Organization’s advertising discourse? How do the visual elements contained in Owj Organization’s advertising define the audience within discourse structures? Since in discourse analysis, in order to understand how subjects and objects are constructed in discourse structures, it is the discourse itself which is analyzed, the analyst in the study did not seek to find precise answers to research questions or discover the truth. Therefore, the performance of the discourse structures is analyzed only to illustrate how discourses shape human understanding of reality and how the boundaries between truth and error are drawn. The research generally shows that although the subject is constantly changing in the organization’s advertising and the audience is exposed to a variety of social, religious and family themes, what is always preserved is the use of images and themes which the viewer is familiar with and can communicate with. According to the research findings, concepts such as martyrdom, solidarity, generosity, religion, and patriotism are reproduced in the organization’s common discourse. The aim of this reproduction is to create belief and return to those values as well as to reproduce the desired discourses and prevent their removal. This is achieved through the use of visual elements to depict the human beings’ presence in the desired discourse, the use of symbols which have become meaningful in the historical context of that discourse, the elimination of the boundary between discourses in terms of time and place and the meaningful and truthful statements in common discourse. Examining the visual elements and form analysis, extracting the statements and analyzing the written texts indicate that the individuals, within the discourse context and through discourse structures, become involved in their roles and become subjects according to the object of each discourse