Principles of visual promotion of volunteering in the texts of European Union institutions analysis of associative symbolism

Abstract

On 27 November, 2009, the European Commission publishes an adopted decision 2010/37/EC regarding European Voluntary Activities Promoting Active Citizenship (2011). The announcement of the European Year of Volunteering (2011) and creation of related political - legal decisions and conditions in EU member states, including Lithuania, commenting from the point of view of social engineering, refers to the objective of creating an identity of an European-volunteer (Lithuanian-volunteer) with the accompanying related positive lifestyle, values, sociality, cooperation, attitudes, and even individuation processes. A part of these processes is being analyzed in the paper. The aim of the paper is to identify the images of volunteering and a volunteer advocated in the visual texts of EU institutions as the associative symbols and to define the holistic image of volunteering in the aspect of a persuasion message content. The subject of the article is the visual texts of EU institutions intended for promotion of volunteering as a part of this discourse and the associative symbols of volunteering therein as the codes of public persuasion. After analysis done in the paper, it is possible to say that the voluntary activity and the volunteers as people of the visual texts created and advocated by EU institutions are subject to association with the missionary expressions of positive images by contrasting them with allegedly negative situations and environments before the appearance of. [to full text]