Digital Multimodal Composing for Specific Purposes: The Case of Sustainability Discourse

Abstract

For decades, institutions, businesses, and individuals have engaged in discourse regarding their commitment to building a better world. In 2024, however, we are still a long way from achieving sustainable development. This new rhetoric is the result of corporate peer pressure, increased activism and consumer engagement on social media, and growing risks for reputational damage and financial impacts on corporations. Among all business sectors, luxury has historically been associated with qualities such as overconsumption and social stratification that do not naturally align with sustainability (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2017; Veblen, 1957), however, it has been integrating Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors into corporate discourse. This study is concerned with the semiotic construction of meanings related to the renegotiation of the oxymoronic concept of ‘sustainable luxury’ (Wells et al. 2021). This study adopts a social semiotic approach to analyse Instagram posts shared by luxury brands in 2019, 2020 and 2021 (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Nervino, 2018). The analysis shows how the discourse shared on Instagram constructs environmental, social, and governance claims by deploying a diversified set of semiotic resources enacting both conceptual and narrative processes, intertextual references, cohesive devices such as colour and medium-specific features to articulate a call for collective action and play the role of a catalyst for certain causes. This study is part of an overarching project which investigates sustainable corporate discourse and highlights how discourse enables individuals, public and private entities to advocate, influence, and drive change in the society. Among the outcome from this project, digital multimodal composing of sustainability discourse has been integrated into relevant courses and a new course ‘The Language of Sustainability’ has been developed and will launch next academic year.

Registration Link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfltl1mELS0FVmanOy_WLyjLFBoYT7NFHTogm7Yk8yRYIBnOg/viewform?usp=sf_link

Speaker

About the Speaker

Esterina Nervino is an Assistant Professor holding a joint appointment at the Department of English and the Department of Marketing at the City University of Hong Kong. She holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and her research interests include social semiotics, multimodality, and business communication.

Time

12:45-14:00

Location

Meng Wah Complex 646

Chair

Prof. Lianjiang Jiang