Australian Systemic Functional Linguistics Association Incorporated
Past events from the SPCE SIG
October 2024 webinar
Peace, Compassion, and Empathy in Social Media amidst Crises Times: An SFL Approach
Speaker: Dr Yara Abdelsamie, Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport, Egypt
Abstract: Social media platforms serve as crucial spaces for shaping cultural narratives and constructing messages during crises. This webinar presents two studies that explore how users employ linguistic and semiotic resources on social media to promote values like peace, compassion, and empathy.
Through the lens of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), the webinar examines how social media elements convey messages of empathy and understanding. The analysis focuses on linguistic choices, specifically Transitivity processes and visual elements in videos, along with symbols, hyperlinks, and hashtags in textual content, during the Israeli attacks on Palestinians following the October 7th Hamas attacks.
The first study analyses the impact of Mohamed Salah’s video message, showcasing how a globally influential football player can influence his audience’s perceptions and stance.
The second study investigates how hashtags create ambient affiliations by embedding values through an SFL approach (lexicogrammatical and visual elements).
The findings reveal how social media users strategically use language and semiotic resources to spread messages of peace, compassion, and empathy in response to social crises.
Biography: Dr Yara Abdelsamie earned her PhD in Applied Linguistics from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and is a full-time faculty member in the Department of Language and Translation at the College of Language and Communication, Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport, Egypt. She has presented at numerous international conferences and actively contributes to the West African Systemic Functional Linguistics Interest Group (WASFLIG). Dr Abdelsamie is recognised for developing a pioneering model for analysing political tweet genres. Currently, she is collaborating on interdisciplinary projects that integrate Systemic Functional Linguistics with psychology and other fields. Her research interests include Corpus Linguistics, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Political Discourse Analysis, and Pragmatics.
July 2024 webinar
Identifying and analysing language in use: Using the tools of systemic functional semiotics (SFS) in positive discourse analysis
Speakers: Associate Professor Elizabeth Thomson, University of Wollongong, and Dr Awni Etaywe, Charles Darwin University, Darwin, NT
This session was designed as a masterclass for scholars new to SFL in the discourses of empathy and compassion or those who are interested in broadening their repertoire of SFS tools applied to new contexts. The masterclass aimed to demonstrate the practical application of SFL tools in analysing and understanding the role of language in digital activism and empathic discourse, and provide scholars with valuable insights and methodologies for their research.
Dr Etaywe demonstrated appraisal and affiliation analysis—analytical tools for (de)coding the evaluative language in (multimodal) texts to shed light on interpersonal meaning. As Martin and White (2005:1) describe, “appraisal is concerned with the construction by texts of communities of shared feelings and values, and with the linguistic mechanisms for the sharing of emotions, tastes, and normative assessments.” Dr Etaywe illustrated how evaluative language is used in digital activist discourse to enact moral affiliation and urge acts of compassion as a coordinated response to wrongdoing. Additionally, the session highlighted how language reveals the morality of activism and allegiance to the goals and guiding values of particular social movements.
Dr Thomson discussed how to interrogate the textual metafunction, specifically demonstrating Theme/Rheme and Thematic progression analysis methods. The periodic nature of the textual metafunction ‘organises meanings into waves of information’ (Martin and White 2005:19) some foregrounded as New and other chunks of information backgrounded as Given. Dr Thomson demonstrated parsing into clauses, identification of the various kinds of Themes, and how Themes create particular patterns of thematic progression which serve particular rhetorical purposes.
Webinars / reading groups conducted in 2024
Date
Hosted by
Topic
30/05/2024
Dr Claudia Ortu
The place of feelings: Empathetic discourse as a strategy for trade union organising
Webinars / reading groups conducted in 2023
Date
Hosted by
Topic
5/05/2023
Penny Wheeler
Multimodal communication of empathy (Boeriis 2021)
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)
