Specialized Discourses of Well-Being and Human Development. Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives

This volume brings together different kinds of expertise and disciplinary approaches to human development and well-being, crucial issues in today’s world threatened by such diverse problems as climate change, natural catastrophes, unequal distribution of wealth and economic exploitation of developing countries, uncontrolled technological progress, systematic violations of human rights, discrimination and racism, health emergencies. The language analysis toolkit ̶ e.g., cross-cultural pragmatics, corpus linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, Systemic Functional Linguistics ̶ has been enriched by the analytical tools and frameworks volunteered by scholars in demography, economics, international relations, law and political geography. The analysis of the specialized discourses of well-being and human development has meant to investigate to what extent different communities of practice share approaches and methodologies around these current issues

Beyond Binary Thinking through Inclusiveness: Interdisciplinary Reflections and Perspectives

The main goal of this Special Issue is to offer readers interdisciplinary studies in which the contributors used a wide range of theoretical and analytical tools to explore recurrent dichotomous discursive patterns in online and offline dialogues, in different socio-cultural contexts and across communities of practices (e.g. education, politics, health sector, tourism) and make suggestions to go beyond binary thinking and overcome societal divisions and barriers

Carolina Pironti e Vernon Lee: la traduzione come tecnica di apprendimento delle lingue straniere

Attraverso l’analisi del “Parassitismo della donna” di Carolina Pironti, traduzione del saggio “The Economic Dependence of Women” di Vernon Lee, l’articolo propone alcune attività didattiche al fine di identificare i possibili vantaggi della traduzione come tecnica/metodo di apprendimento all’interno di un percorso di acquisizione della lingua straniera, in particolare per gli studenti di madrelingua italiana che studiano inglese a livello universitario

Experimenting Transmodal Storytelling in EFL Classrooms to Enhance Literacy

This paper focuses on transmodal storytelling and its pedagogical 4 implications for the development of English literacy for non-native speakers. Transmodal storytelling, which utilizes more than one mode of expression to tell a story (drawing on performative arts including dance, music, theatre, mime and puppetry) and takes into account learners’ everyday experiences, can be a starting point for developing literacy skills. Testing it in the classroom by telling the students the same story through different modes and different media platforms, using a wide range of meaning-making resources, I explored whether transmodal storytelling can become a didactic instrument in an EFL classroom, in particular with students viewed at risk of falling behind in school, and can improve their language skills and creative capacities. In order to test the effectiveness of transmodal storytelling in the teaching and learning process, I carried out a preliminary empirical study on a group of 14 seven-year-old students in an Italian state primary school between March and May 2018. This research argues that transmodal storytelling could rejuvenate literacy in classrooms, in relation to students with behaviour/integration difficulties and children from disadvantaged backgrounds who receive less support with literacy at home

"Quando la fantascienza è donna" di Eleonora Federici

“Quando la fantascienza è donna. Dalle utopie femminili del secolo XIX all’età contemporanea” di Eleonora Federici regala al pubblico italiano un affascinante percorso tutto al femminile all’interno della tradizione utopica e fantascientifica in lingua inglese, sottolineando la stretta connessione tra le utopie femminile del XIX secolo e la fantascienza moderna e contemporanea

Internationalisation and Globalisation. A Multimodal Analysis of Italian Universities’ Websites

Through a multimodal discourse analysis approach, this study tries to identify the verbal and non-verbal distinctive features of the collected data based on a sample of Italian universities' official websites. I will also compare the organization of signs on the web pages and frameworks of the websites of Italian universities to a sample of British universities. The potential meanings these may hold for users and how they may relate to the ongoing processes of internationalization and globalization in online environments will be taken into account. A social semiotics perspective will allow to investigate how signs are displayed on the screen through the interaction of a variety of modes including images, colours, writing, font and layout

Professional development and well-being: promoting the practice of statistics in Amstat News

The paper emphasises the need for job satisfaction as a major ingredient of people’s well-being and also suggests that different jobs require different job skills (for example, statisticians resort to creativity and problem-solving). By investigating a sample of Amstat News issues, the American Statistical Association’s monthly magazine, the linguistic analysis has foregrounded the persuasive strategies employed by the organisation to promote the practice and profession of statistics by eradicating some misconstructions about statistics and prioritizing work-life balance and well-being

“How much do you know about the European Union”: Disseminating EU Policies and Values through Comic Books

Nowadays it has become increasingly important for large institutions such as the European Union (EU) to bridge the knowledge gap between experts and citizens. The EU’s website, for instance, offers information materials in a form that can be easily understood by non-specialists. In this study we focused on the Learning Corner , a EU’s website which contains a wide range of teaching resources aimed at explaining the European Union and its policies in an understandable and attractive way to students of different age groups. The Learning Corner webpage includes different text types – booklets, comics, videos and websites; this analysis was conducted on a sub-corpus of four comic books: Troubled waters, Take two, Jump start and Hidden disaster whose target audience are young people from 15 years old onwards. By combining Narrative Analysis and a Multimodal approach, we investigated the linguistic and visual strategies for knowledge dissemination about the EU policies and procedures and we looked at how institutional discourse is recontexualized in these teaching resources in a student-friendly language. Finally, we looked at the values and ideologies that the EU seeks to communicate to young people through the aforementioned comic books

“How dare you call her a pig, I know several pigs who would be upset if they knew”. A multimodal critical discursive approach to online misogyny against UK MPs on YouTube

On the occasion of the 2017 UK election campaign, Amnesty International conducted a large-scale, sentiment-based analysis of online hate speech against women MPs on Twitter ( Dhrodia 2018 ), identifying the “Top 5” most attacked women MPs as Diane Abbott, Joanna Cherry, Emily Thornberry, Jess Phillips and Anna Soubry. Taking Amnesty International’s results as a starting point, this paper investigates online misogyny against the “Top 5” women MPs, with a specific focus on the video-sharing platform YouΤube, whose loosely censored cyberspace is known as a breeding ground for antagonism, impunity and disinhibition ( Pihlaja 2014 ), and, therefore, merits investigation. By collecting and analysing a corpus of YouTube multimodal data we explore, critique and contextualize online misogyny as a techno-social phenomenon applying a Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) approach ( KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018 ). Mapping a vast array of discursive strategies, this study offers an in-depth analysis on how technology-facilitated gender-based violence contributes to discursively constructing the political arena as a fundamentally male-oriented space, and reinforces stereotypical and sexist representation of women in politics and beyond

The Economic Parasitism of Women by Vernon Lee in an Italian translation

“I believe that ‘Women and Economics’ ought to open the eyes and, I think, also the hearts, of other readers, because it has opened my own to the real importance of what is known as the Woman Question” (Vernon Lee, 1902: 71). In 1902 Vernon Lee reviewed Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics for The North American Review arguing that women must change their cultural identities. This essay was then repeated in 1908 as The Economic Parasitism of Women which was later translated by Carolina Pironti, an intellectual Neapolitan lady, and appeared as the introduction to the Italian version of Gilman’s work. Following the tradition of translation studies, a pragmatic comparison between the source text and the target text will allow to identify the translation strategies used by the Italian lady. Since the complexity and richness of Vernon Lee’s prose, full of rhetorical elements aimed to promulgate the writer’s thinking, this work explores how the source text is translated and transposed linguistically, conceptually and culturally about the specific issue of the “Woman Question”. In Vernon Lee’s work the use of rhetorical strategies becomes also an instrument of political propaganda to support her “radical” ideas. In addition, the analysis aims to verify whether in the translation process from English into Italian some relevant elements are lost and/or gained and to find out in which way the issue of women’s economic dependence is represented by Pironti through her linguistic choices