Voiceless but empowered farmers in corporate supply chains: contradictory imagery and instrumental approach to empowerment

There have been calls for a shift of focus towards the political and power-laden aspects of transitioning towards socially equitable global supply chains. This paper offers an empirically grounded response to these calls from a critical realist stance in the context of global food supply chains. We examine how an imaginary for sustainable farming structured around an instrumental construction of empowerment limits what is viewed as permissible, desirable and possible in global food supply chains. We adopt a multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine the sustainable farming imaginary for smallholder farmers constructed by one large organization, Unilever, in a series of videos produced and disseminated on YouTube. We expose the underlying mechanisms of power and marginalization at work within the sustainability imaginary and show how “empowerment” has the potential to create of new dependencies for these farmers. We recontextualize the representations to show that while the imaginary may be commercially feasible, it is less achievable in terms of empowering smallholder farmers

What’s in a click? A social semiotic framework for the multimodal analysis of website interactivity

This article presents a social semiotic framework for the multimodal analysis of website interactivity. Distinguishing it from interaction, it defines interactivity as the affordance of a text of being acted (up)on, thus including hypertextuality. The author introduces the notion of ‘interactive sites/signs’ as the loci of interactivity in digital texts; these have a two-fold nature and a two-dimensional functioning. In their two-fold nature, they are both places enabling actions producing effects and forms endowed with meanings. Notwithstanding the non-direct correspondence between forms, actions and effects (which makes any specific association between the three significant within a webpage design), and in spite of their many possible forms (encompassing still and dynamic images, shapes and writing), a small range of actions can activate them (click/click+type/hover), producing a restricted set of textual effects (access/provide/transfer text). In their two-dimensional functioning, interactive sites/signs function both syntagmatically, on the page where they are displayed, in their relation with other co-occurring elements, and paradigmatically, opening to optional text realizations, hence in their relation with these. The framework adapts Halliday’s three metafunctions to the analysis of the two-fold nature and two-dimensional functioning of interactive sites/signs. It provides a fine-grained account of the interactive meaning potentials of digital texts, distinguishing between a text’s aesthetics of interactivity – as visually communicated before it is activated, performed and experienced – and its functionality, in the configuration of interactive possibilities offered by a page. Designed to complement the extant practices of text analysis of webpages, the framework can be used comparatively, as exemplified in its application to the analysis of two blog pages, and can provide a more refined assessment of the interactive meaning potential of a webpage than traditional methodologies such as content analysis

Analysing the language of war monuments

This paper seeks an approach for a systematic analysis of the semiotic resources used by the designers of British World War 1 monuments. Semiotic studies of monuments have emphasised on the one hand factors from outside the' text', in other words contextual social and political factors that lead to design decisions, and on the other hand factors within the text, as being maximally important for this - the latter characterising such visual communication, like language, as a system or code. The paper uses an assessment of an example of the latter, O'Toole's functional analysis (1994) of sculptures, using a number of theories of the visual to draw out its limitations and point to a number of characteristics of visual communication that would need to be considered in order to carry out a satisfactory analysis.Peer reviewe