The discourse of digital activism: from the linguistic analysis of calls for action to the analysis of metaphors regarding the Fashion Revolution

Aulit, Laetitia [UCL] De Cock, Barbara [UCL]

This paper is based on linguistic research aimed at analyzing the calls for action formulated in a context of digital activism: the 2020 Fashion Revolution Week (De Cock et al., 2024). This event, which is annually organized in commemoration of the Rana Plaza accident in Bangladesh, seeks to raise awareness and advocate for the social and environmental sustainability of the fashion industry. On the basis of our study of a multilingual corpus of tweets with the hashtag #FashionRevolution, we first highlight the main characteristics of this digital campaign regarding the formulation of the calls for change as well as the actors who formulate them and those to whom they are addressed. Following the Method for Coding Source Domains in Metaphor Analysis (Reijnierse & Burgers, 2023), we look next at the metaphors that appear in this context of digital activism. In this regard, we first identify the metaphors used to refer to the idea of revolution or mobilization. Secondly, we discuss the most common metaphors in the corpus, namely, the metaphors that question the real cost of the fashion industry (e.g. “clothes should cost the earth”), the threat it represents (e.g. “des vêtements qui ne sacrifient pas les hommes ni la Terre”) and the idea of saving the planet (e.g. “join our #FashionRevolution and help save the planet”). De Cock, B., Aulit, L., Cigada, S., Greco, S., Modrzejewska, E., & Palmieri, R. (2024). The Discourse of Digital Activism: A Linguistic Analysis of Calls for Action Concerning the Fashion Revolution. Applied Linguistics, XX, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amae046 Reijnierse, W. G., & Burgers, C. (2023). MSDIP: A Method for Coding Source Domains in Metaphor Analysis. Metaphor and Symbol, 38(4), 295-310. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2023.2170753