Semioscaping Eutopia: Qatar as a place in qatar airways advertisements

Abstract

This paper deals with place branding as a multimodally constructed phenomenon in the digital semioscape of advertisements pertaining to the collaboration between Qatar Airways and FC Barcelona. Through its digital spatialisation, Qatar, and, by extension, Qatari leadership of the country, is argued to construct for and brand itself as an image of eutopia (i.e. a nice place to live) drawing on two techniques, inter-peopleisation and reterritorialisation. In this way, Qatar aims at engaging in controversially conveyed soft politics, whereby it can strategically secure its national sustainability by achieving recognizability, admiration and respect both inside and outside its borders. Qatar Airways' semioscape is also argued to be a visceral semioscape, whose analysis creates academic fetish, namely added value for Qatar in academic scholarship from a person who has been living and working in the country for nine years. It is important to have such emic reflections, in order to do justice to a country that is usually portrayed in very negative and distorted terms in world media, by people who do not have deep knowledge of the country and its people.