The Special Interest Group is home to a diverse group of enthusiastic scholars, citizen linguists, teachers and students, working within the tradition of systemic functional semiotics. We collectively seek to understand, promote and raise awareness of the specific functions of language and other semiotic resources to express peace, compassion and empathy in everyday life and in other theatres of social engagement.

For media inquiries or those seeking professional and research-based insights from the Special Interest Group, please get in touch with the SIG Convenor, Adjunct Professor Dr Elizabeth Thomson, who can be reached via email at ethomson15@gmail.com. She is available to provide expert commentary, resources, and engage in discussions on topics related to peace, compassion and empathy, and the group’s current initiatives. If needed, Dr Thomson can also direct you to other experts within the SIG.

SIG Meetings | Work in progress | Vision Statement | Mission Statement | Glossary

Our next webinar

Our next webinar is on Thursday 1 May 2025 (4 to 5:30 pm, Australian Eastern Standard Time) by Zoom | * UTC 6 am | Jakarta 1 pm | Hong Kong 2 pm | Auckland 6 pm

SPCE webinar – Secular communion: so much trouble in the world

Speaker: Professor J R Martin, Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney

Registration: Please register to obtain the Zoom link for this webinar.

Abstract: In this paper I will take stock of work on bonding developed in Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) studies of the coupling of attitude and ideation and the generative role of these couplings in negotiating community, taking into account recent work on the technicalisation and iconisation of feeling (as axitech and bondicon respectively) – by way of exploring how much progress we are making in the development of SFL as a genuinely social theory of language.

I write this as an elder aghast at the ways in which belongings of particular kinds draw on ‘e/vilification’ to cultivate fear and hate and thereby engender a ‘licence to kill’ which trumps values which we might otherwise share as basic human rights.

To begin I will develop the discussion in relation to sport, where the consequences of iconising the inside and outside of a community are somewhat less severe. By the end of the paper I hope that the implications of the analysis for the sorry state of our partisan world will be clear and that we can begin to think about strategies for defusing some of the ferocious identity madness currently displacing the more charitable humanity we so desperately need to foster, home and away.

keywords: appraisal; bonding; iconisation; individuation; positive discourse analysis (PDA)

Biography: J R Martin is Professor of Linguistics (Personal Chair) at the University of Sydney. Professor Martin was elected a fellow the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1998, and awarded a Centenary Medal for his services to Linguistics and Philology in 2003.

Later in the year:

• Acknowledging the past to heal the future: A case study on the Colombian Truth Commission. Date and time: Thursday 24 July 2025, from 4 pm (AEST / Sydney time). Speakers: Alexandra García Marrugo, The University of Sydney; Annabelle Lukin, Macquarie University. Online via Zoom, registration link to come.

• Sentients with intentions or research material serving human purposes?: The representation of the agency of research animals in the Report on vivisection Date and time: Thursday 18 September 2025, from 4 pm (AEST / Sydney time). Speaker: Anna Runsio, School of Languages and Translation Studies, University of Turku, Finland. Online via Zoom, registration link to come.

For more about our upcoming webinars, see the SPCE Reading Group and Webinar series.

SIG General Meetings

Our next general SIG meeting will be held on Thursday 10 April 2025 at 4 pm Australian Eastern Standard Time.

Subsequent committee meeting dates are: 21 August 2025; and SIG general meetings on 12 June 2025 and 13 November 2025.

2025 SIG Committee

• SIG Convenor: Dr Elizabeth Thomson, Adjunct Professor, University of Wollongong
• Publications officer: Dr Ingrid Wijeyewardene, University of New England
• Research Communication and Social Media officer, Dr Awni Etaywe, Charles Darwin University

Our work in progress

Special Issue: The Social Semiotics of Peace, Compassion and Empathy. The Editorial Committee of the SPCE-SIG is pleased to announce that a special issue on the social semiotics of peace, compassion and empathy has been published in the journal Language, Context and Text, special issue 6.1.

By adding to the interdisciplinary research into online and offline communication, the special issue aims to stimulate discussion on how the different areas of SFL theory and related disciplines have been applied, adapted, and/or extended to explore texts within this field of discourse.

Past events from the SPCE SIG

ISFC49 Conference: Great to meet with so many old friends and new faces at the 49th International Systemic Functional Congress, which had the theme of Harmony, Compassion and Empowerment. SIG leaders A/Prof Elizabeth Thomson and Dr Awni Etaywe provided keynotes for the first two days of the Congress:

• Empathic listening as a resource for enriching life: A systemic functional perspective (Thomson)
• Navigating compassion development in digital activism through moral affiliation enactivism (Etaywe)

Members of the SIG presented as part of the colloquium organsied by A/Profs Daniel Fryer (SIG member) and Shoshana Dreyfus, ‘Linguistics as social action: SFL scholar-activism’ on day 3 (3 July 2024) of the International Systemic Functional Congress.

We heard papers on:

• Letters to government that are successful in bringing about change (Dreyfus & Han);
• Bearing witness: social semiotic perspectives on animal vigils outside slaughterhouses (Fryer); and
• Perspectives on compassion in digital activism: Ideal victim or systemic compassion (Etaywe & Wheeler).

SPCE Reading Group and Webinars

Do you have a topic you would like to present to our group? Proposals welcome any time for roughly quarterly webinar or reading group sessions during 2025.

See the call for expressions of interest.

Webinars / reading groups conducted in 2024

Webinars / reading groups conducted in 2023

Date	Hosted by	Topic
5/05/2023	Penny Wheeler	Multimodal communication of empathy (Boeriis 2021)
23/06/2023	Dr Awni Etaywe and A/Prof Daniel Lees Fryer	Action and activism: disentangling and critiquing empathy and compassion (Gruen 2013; Curtin 2022)
6/10/2023	A/Prof Elizabeth Thomson	Empathic listening as a social semiotic practice in the tradition of Nonviolent Communication:  An analysis of choices in thematic progression and information structure (Rosenberg 2015)

Webinars / reading groups conducted in 2022

Date	Hosted by	Topic
24/06/2022	Awni Etaywe	‘Compassion’ and the development of compassion (Bandura, 2016)
12/08/2022	Dr Elizabeth Thomson	Working towards a Systemic Functional description of the word ’empathy‘ (Pounds, 2010)

We are keen to connect with research that aims to use, critique and develop our understanding of the social semiotics of peace, compassion and empathy within the tradition of Systemic Functional Linguistics. Here are some recent events where SPCE topics were featured.

ASFLA 2023 Conference: SIG member Dr Awni Etaywe

ASFLA 2022 Conference: SIG members conducted a colloquium, The semiotics of peace, compassion and empathy in our changing world, at the 2022 ASFLA conference.

SIG convenor Elizabeth A. Thomson also conducted a pre-conference workshop on ‘Building Resilience Using the Semiotics of Empathy‘, drawing on and extending on a foundation of Marshall Rosenberg’s work on non-violent communication. (Video overview)

Connecting through talk: introduction – an OpenLearning mini-course

Reference list for works investigating peace, compassion and empathy

Vision Statement

To empower and improve all lives, we examine and celebrate the semiotics of peace, compassion and empathy through collaboration and research, teaching and training.

Mission Statement

To realise our vision, we will:

• Identify, analyse and instantiate genres of peace, compassion and empathy
  – by, for example, reading, discussing and creating texts in different professional, disciplinary and community contexts
• Share our findings on the semiotics of peace, compassion and empathy
  – through research, conference sessions, special issues, community outreach and other means of dissemination
• Apply our findings to inform the development of curricula, courses, and training resources oriented towards the language and other semiotic resources of peace, compassion and empathy and mentor junior researchers and teachers in the implementation of these resources.
• Extend and help resource the work on meaning-making practices and the communication of peace, compassion and empathy
  – by, for example, mentoring junior colleagues, researchers, students, and communities in writing grant proposals; conducting linguistic/discourse/semiotic analyses; collaborating in research projects; hosting reading–writing groups
• Connect and collaborate with other disciplines, groups, organisations, and communities of practice that practise, research and promote peace, compassion and empathy 
• Provide professional commentary on matters relevant to public discourses of peace and compassion.

The PCE SIG wishes to acknowledge Professor Jim Martin and his foundational thinking on positive discourse analysis, first published in his 2004 article ‘Positive Discourse Analysis: Solidarity and change’, Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, 49:179-200, that makes this work of the SIG possible.

Glossary

We are working towards a linguistic description and definition of each of these terms.

Peace – towards a linguistic description

Compassion – towards a linguistic description

Empathy – towards a linguistic description

Statement: Towards sustainable development goals: The members of the SPCE SIG dedicate this work towards the achievement of the United Nations’ sustainable development goal number 16: Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels