Absent, obscured, and hidden An interdisciplinary analysis of visual race, ethnicity, and gender in UNDP representations of inequality

This study covers visual analyses of digital media to explore issues of inequality in development discourse. Using web-based articles presented by the United Nations Development Programme as our central object of research, we show the extent to which discourses on sustainable development represent ethnicity, gender, and race. This paper argues that representations can be interpreted as an integral part of systemic inequality. We demonstrate that the discursive formation reflects and encourages a specific approach to sustainable development, especially regarding inequality reduction. This approach is based on the four analytical categories: absence, arrangement, essentialization, and obscuration. This work encourages further interdisciplinary research and argues for a methodologically combined inequality analysis.