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Article In:
The Social Semiotic Forum: Special issue of the Journal Language, Context and Text 6:1 (2024)
Edited by Elizabeth A. Thomson, Awni Etaywe, Ingrid Wijeyewardene and Penny Wheeler
[Language, Context and Text 6:1] 2024
► pp. 200–218

The place of feelings

Empathetic discourse as a strategy for trade union organising

ORCID logo | Università degli Studi di Cagliari , Italy

This article describes the semiotic resources deployed during the creation, in 2021, of the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU): the trade union that represents the workforce of the tech giant Alphabet Inc. The focus is on how the union shapes and develops its identity as one of “empathetic workers who believe in social justice” (Alphabet Workers Union 2021). The analysis of the homepage of AWU’s website through the prism of the textual metafunction in the visual mode (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001, 2006) together with the analysis of the interpersonal metafunction in the verbal mode according to the “appraisal” paradigm (Martin and White 2005), shows how the union assigns a central position to positive feelings of togetherness.

Keywords: trade unions, tech industry, English, empathy, systemic functional linguistics, multimodal discourse analysis, appraisal theory, fourth industrial revolution, Alphabet Workers Union (AWU)
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology
  • 3.Analysis
    • 3.1Multimodal composition. Establishing the place of feelings
    • 3.2Multimodal ideation and exchange: Empathy as resistance/antidote
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Author queries
  • References
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