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Article In: Journal of Language and Politics: Online-First Articles

The multimodal construction of sustainability

A critical analysis of reddit

ORCiD logo with link | UCLouvain
ORCiD logo with link | UCLouvain
ORCiD logo with link | UCLouvain
ORCiD logo with link | UCLouvain
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Abstract
This paper investigates how the concept “sustainability” is constructed and negotiated on the r/France subreddit between 2017 and 2025, using quantitative lexical analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis, and Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis. We analyse a self-compiled corpus of 50 French-language posts through lexical, diachronic, and event-oriented analyses of keywords, collocations, and semantic clusters, before examining relations between text and image, and their negotiation in their 3,256 comments. Findings show that sustainability functions as a flexible and contested discursive object, organised around shifting configurations of responsibility that vary across temporal and event-specific contexts. Multimodal analysis shows that text and image may reinforce one another, generate meanings that neither mode conveys independently, or create tensions. Sustainability emerges as an object of social and ideological negotiation concerning legitimate knowledge, and pathways for environmental change.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.State of the art
  • 3.Methodology and theoretical framework
  • 4.Sustainability in the textual corpus
    • 4.1Quantitative lexical analysis of the corpus
    • 4.2Diachronic thematic analysis
    • 4.3Event-oriented diachronic analysis
  • 5.Visual and textual constructions of sustainability
  • 6.Conclusion and discussion
  • Appendix
    • Appendix 1.Most frequent nouns and adjective in the corpus of posts and comments
    • Appendix 2.Metadata of the posts with images
  • References
References (42)
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