The power of pictures, images, film and, in general, visual representation in political discourse is an obvious and much debated fact. However, the conceptual and theoretical challenges of studying aspects of visual representation in social and political context have only slowly been taken up in empirical social science. In our presentation, we will outline strategies for integrating the study of practices of visual representation into argumentative policy analysis. Especially when controversial and emotional questions are at stake, actors choose innovative ways of communicating their interests, and images function as an attractive rhetorical tool. We will especially highlight the importance of image events, provocative gestures that function as oppositional arguments to widen the production of argumentation. We will study a series of image events in the context of the contemporary end of life policy debates in Italy and present the cases of Piergiorgio Welby, affected by muscular dystrophy, and of Eluana Englaro, a long term vegetative state-patient that both drew the attention of Italian publics and policy-makers to the problem of a still lacking living-will-legislation in Italy with the two patients becoming iconic figures of the end-of-life-debate. Conceptual insights will be drawn from the case studies for argumentative policy theory.
