Who leads the #FashionRevolution? A study of the presentation of agents related to fashion sustainability

Aulit, Laetitia [UCL] Cigada, Sara [Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore] De Cock, Barbara [UCL] Greco, Sara [Università della Svizzera italiana] Modrzejewska, Ewa [University of Warsaw] Palmieri, Rudi [University of Liverpool]

In this paper, we analyze who is represented as responsible for ethical and environmental problems related to the fashion industry as well as for possible solutions to these problems, in a corpus of tweets containing the hashtag #FashionRevolution. This corpus contains messages produced by experts, companies, NGOs and consumers in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish. We look into the representation of agentivity, namely who among the agents related to fashion sustainability is represented as agentive for the causes or possible solutions of problems related to sustainability in the fashion industry, as well as into whether these agents are represented in an explicit or implicit way and whether this is justified argumentatively. We furthermore look into whether tweeters define about which type of sustainability (ethical, environmental or both) they are talking. Through the combination of these analyses, we show how misalignment can occur in this Twitter polylogue regarding the definition of the sustainable issues at hand as well as regarding who can play a crucial part in solving these issues. By analyzing a multilingual corpus, we aim to contribute to analyzing how these online discussions evolve at the European level and how they are potentially construed differently across linguistic communities.