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.

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

Our next webinar

Our next webinar is on Thursday 30 May 2024 (4 pm, Australian Eastern Standard Time), and will be presented by Dr Claudia Ortu.

The place of feelings: Empathetic discourse as a strategy for trade union organising

Speaker: Dr Claudia Ortu, researcher and lecturer at the Università degli Studi di Cagliari | University of Johannesburg

In 2021, a group of workers employed by the tech giant Alphabet Inc. launched a new trade union: the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU). The event was considered particularly relevant both in the IT sector and in the international trade union movement, as this was the first time that tech workers seemed to have overcome the reciprocal lack of trust and the limits of an individualistic work environment that are considered endemic to the industry (Woodcock and Hughes 2023).

AWU responded to the environment of isolation, lack of trust and work-related anxiety by devising an empathetic discourse based on positive feelings and, consequently, by projecting an empathetic collective identity.

The study describes the semiotic resources deployed to shape and develop AWU’s initial identity as one of “empathetic workers who believe in social justice” (Alphabet Workers Union 2021). The analysis of the homepage of AWU’s website through the prism of the textual metafunction in the visual mode (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2001; Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006), together with the analysis of the interpersonal metafunction in the verbal mode according to the “appraisal” paradigm (Martin and White 2005), shows how the union assigns a central position to positive feelings of togetherness.

Up next: 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 2 May 2024 at 4 pm AEST.

2024 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 will be published in the journal Language, Context and Text, special issue 6.1, in July 2024. 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.

Update: Articles which use, critique and develop understanding of the social semiotics of peace, compassion and empathy within the tradition of Systemic Functional Linguistics have been developed and peer reviewed, and are with the journal editors for a pre-publication check.

ISFC49 Conference: A/Profs Daniel Fryer (SIG member) and Shoshana Dreyfus have proposed a colloquium, ‘Linguistics as social action: SFL scholar-activism’ for the International Systemic Functional Congress, including papers on Letters to government that are successful in bringing about change (Dreyfus); 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). [upcoming, 1-5 July 2024]

SPCE Reading Group and Webinars

Topics for the SPCE webinars for 2024 are being considered. Please let us know if you would like to propose a webinar session. Proposed dates are:

18/07/2024

17/10/2024

See the call for expressions of interest.

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 Statemen

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.

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