Dr Bernadine Jones

Dr Bernadine Jones is a Lecturer in Media Studies at the Centre for Film and Media Studies, UCT. Since graduating from her PhD at UCT in 2018, Dr Jones has worked in a range of universities, most recently as programme director for journalism in Stirling University, before returning home to CFMS. Her work sits at the intersection of visual journalism, semiotics, and African media studies, examining how meaning, power, and ideology are produced through images. She is especially interested in how visuals do political work: how these images persuade, exclude, mythologise, and sometimes mislead in a variety of contexts.

Her scholarship combines social semiotic theory with close, critical analysis of visual texts, and increasingly explores the implications of Generative AI and visual technologies for society. Her first monograph tracked the first five free elections in South Africa on television news, and she has published on government social media communication, news representation, semiotic methods, and most recently the history of South African television news.

She teaches and supervises projects on multimedia journalism, political communication, media production, and media writing and editing, all with an emphasis on visual storytelling and reflective practice.

She is currently involved in two contrasting research projects: developing a network of political communication scholars to debate the Africanisation of media/state relations models, and interrogating how Generative AI "sees" second order mythology in multimodal AI models and the ramifications of this simulacra.