Daniel Lees Fryer

• Currie, John; Clarke, Ben P. & Fryer, Daniel Lees (2026). Communicating climate change in UK parliamentary politics: Discursive fluctuation over time. Applied Corpus Linguistics. 6(2). doi: 10.1016/j.acorp.2026.100216. Full text in Research Archive
• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2024). Feeling, thinking, acting: An intersemiotic study of empathy and compassion in vegan discourse. Language, Context and Text: The Social Semiotics Forum (LangCT). ISSN 2589-7233. 6(1), p. 122–145. doi: 10.1075/langct.00067.fry. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This article considers the multi- and intersemiotic expression of empathy and compassion in a campaign organised by the Vegan Society. It draws upon insights from ecofeminism and the ethics of care as well as systemic functional semiotics as a way of exploring how instances of attitude (affect, judgment and appreciation) in the campaign’s various texts might be negotiated and shared, creating potentials for empathetic and compassionate responses. The study finds that parts of the campaign represent empathy and compassion as exemplars for readers to follow, while other parts of the campaign, especially social media, provide readers with an opportunity to enact empathy and compassion. The study also identifies gendered and generational dimensions, and suggests that syndromes or clusters of positive and negative attitude can form the basis for empathetic and compassionate responses.

• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2021). #AllCatsAreBeautiful: Ambient affiliation and the visual-verbal representation and appreciation of cats in online subversive discourses. Discourse & Society. ISSN 0957-9265. 33(1), p. 3–33. doi: 10.1177/09579265211048727. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This paper investigates the topics and affiliations associated with the hashtag #AllCatsAreBeautiful on the social media platform Twitter. Drawing on concepts from social semiotics (systemic functional theory) and critical animal studies, the paper identifies a number of potentially overlapping topics or fields, including anti-policing, the commodification of nonhuman animals, gender and sexism, and body image or body-shaming, as well as a more general positive appreciation or admiration of cats. The paper discusses how people position themselves in relation to those topics, through patterns of ideational and attitudinal meanings, and how cats are represented and appreciated visually, verbally and intersemiotically. Cats, in this context, play an important role in struggles for social justice, symbolizing freedom and resistance as well as love and solidarity. #AllCatsAreBeautiful highlights topics or spaces around which bonds can be made and communities of shared values or interests can be co-constructed.

• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2021). Forming a New Song within the Shell of the Old: Processes of Transformation, Recontextualization, and Prefiguration in the Lyrics of Joe Hill’s “The Preacher and the Slave”. In Franzon, Johan F.I.; Greenall, Annjo Klungervik; Kvam, Sigmund & Parianou, Anastasia (Ed.), Song Translation: Lyrics in Contexts. Frank & Timme. ISSN 9783732993345. p. 351–366. Full text in Research Archive
• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2020). Grieg in the Henhouse: 12 Seconds at the Contested Intersections of Human and Nonhuman Animal Interests. In Hannan, Jason (Eds.), Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial. Sydney University Press. ISSN 9781743327104. p. 59–77. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Opening shot: interior, henhouse, low light, hens, two rows of perches and nest boxes. Voiceover, subtitle: ‘That’s why we play music’. Close-up of human hand flicking switch and turning dial on old radio. Cue music: Edvard Grieg’s ‘Morning Mood’. Close-up of hens. Wider frame, man walks slowly between perches and nest boxes. Voiceover, subtitle: ‘They become calm. They enjoy themselves.’ Close-up of single hen shaking feathers. Low-angle shot, hens, man by open door, daylight. Man speaks, subtitle: ‘Ba-pa-pa-pa!’ Fade to black. Caption, white on black, top of frame: ‘GOOD TASTE WITH A CLEAR CONSCIENCE.’ [Producer name], white on black, middle. Green logo, ‘organic’, lower right. Ends.

• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2019). Multiplying Engagement: Visual-Verbal Intersemiosis in an Online Medical Research Article. In Guinda, Carmen Sancho (Eds.), Engagement in Professional Genres. John Benjamins Publishing Company. ISSN 9789027202185. p. 157–178. doi: 10.1075/pbns.301.09fry. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This paper explores how the textual voice in an online medical research article engages and positions itself with respect to other voices in the communicative context. Taking a systemic-functional, social-semiotic approach, I examine engagement intersemiotically, with regard to the deployment and integration of visual and verbal resources; interstratally, from the levels of (lexico-)grammar (‘from below’) and genre and ideology (‘from above’); and logogenetically, as the text unfolds. The analysis suggests a text that variously opens and closes dialogic space as the textual voice seeks to (dis)align the reader with various positions construed in the text. Some of those positionings cannot be fully appreciated without an intersemiotic perspective, making it an essential part of understanding how experts engage through specialized genres.

• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2019). Smell as Social Semiotic: On the Deployment and Intersemiotic Potential of Smell. In Kaltenbacher, Martin & Stöckl, Hartmut (Ed.), Analyzing the Media: A Systemic Functional Approach. Equinox Publishing. ISSN 9781781796252. p. 189–204. doi: 10.1558/equinox.32955. Full text in Research Archive
• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2016). Cut and Paste: Recontextualizing Meaning-Material in a Digital Environment. In Gardner, Sheena & Alsop, Sian (Ed.), Systemic Functional Linguistics in the Digital Age. Equinox Publishing. ISSN 9781781792384. p. 151–165. doi: 10.1558/equinox.26113. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Systemic Functional Linguistics in the Digital Age explores the insights that SFL offers to help us understand and explain the new meanings afforded through digital channels and how they are shaped by and shape their digital contexts. SFL offers a sophisticated architecture for exploring how meanings are construed in context, and this volume focuses on three specific perspectives. Part 1 examines texts that are ‘born digital’ or digitally conceived, such as tweets and blogs. Part 2 focuses on texts that ‘achieve digitality’, or have come to replace or supplement non-digital texts with similar functions, such as an online university lecture or medical consultation. Part 3 examines and interprets texts singly or in corpora using digital tools and allows us to see patterns within and across texts that are generally not visible in single texts. The volume offers contributions from international scholars which both initiate new and sustain current lines of enquiry in SFL research within the unifying context of digitality.

• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2015). Sonifying the Higgs: Choice and Coding Orientation in the Recontextualization of Quantitative Data. In Kvåle, Gunhild; Maagerø, Eva & Veum, Aslaug (Ed.), Kontekst, språk og multimodalitet: Nyere sosialsemiotiske perspektiver. Fagbokforlaget. ISSN 9788232104338. p. 123–137. Full text in Research Archive
• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2014). Story of an image: notes on the recontextualization of a digital research-article figure. In Alsop, Sian & Gardner, Sheena (Ed.), Language in a digital age: be not afraid of digitality. Coventry University. ISSN 9781846000515. p. 50–56. Full text in Research Archive
• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2013). Exploring the dialogism of academic discourse: heteroglossic engagement in medical research articles. In Andersen, Gisle & Bech, Kristin (Ed.), English corpus linguistics : variation in time, space and genre : selected papers from ICAME 32. Brill | Rodopi. ISSN 9789042036796. p. 183–207. doi: 10.1163/9789401209403_011. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In academic research writing, the way in which an author engages with and positions him/herself in relation to other voices in the discourse, e.g. with the literature and the putative reader, is an integral part of the social practice of communicating research. Understanding how this engagement is realized may have important implications for academic literacy programs, particularly in the development of academic writing skills. In this paper, I investigate engagement in written medical research discourse, by applying the systemic-functional framework of APPRAISAL, a model of evaluative language, to a corpus of English- language medical research articles. Specifically, I present how the corpus has been compiled and annotated according to part of the ENGAGEMENT system, a subsystem of APPRAISAL dealing with writer/speaker resources for intersubjective positioning. These engagement resources include what are generally dealt with under the headings of modality, hedging, and attribution, among others, but they are interpreted here in terms of their dialogic functionality; that is, the role they play in construing for the text a background of different voices (the literature, the putative reader) and different value positions. For instance, a modal Finite such as may not only signals a speaker’s/writer’s degree of certainty or level of commitment, but, from a dialogic perspective, it also ‘entertains’ or allows for the possibility of alternative positions or viewpoints in the discourse. (Consider, for example, Reducing LDL cholesterol may reduce the development of vascular disease.) In this paper, I present the different types of engagement features and their interrelations as identified in the corpus, the probabilities of these features being selected, the frequencies of their occurrence, their distributions across the texts, and some of their typical realizations. The findings show that there is considerable variation in the types of engagement resources used as well as in their distributions, both across and within different sections of the medical research article.

• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2012). Analysis of the generic discourse features of the English-language medical research article: A systemic-functional approach. Functions of language. ISSN 0929-998X. 19(1), p. 5–37. doi: 10.1075/fol.19.1.01fry. Full text in Research Archive

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• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2021). Engagement in Medical Research Discourse: A Multisemiotic Approach to Dialogic Positioning. Routledge. ISBN 9780367484682. 220 p. Full text in Research Archive

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• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2026). Talking animals: systemic functional perspectives on activists’ talk about human and nonhuman animals at slaughterhouse vigils. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This paper considers how activists talk about individuals and groups they encounter at slaughterhouse vigils. The study is based on semi-structured interviews, analysed ideationally and interpersonally with a focus on the representation of human and nonhuman animal participants and inscribed forms of appraisal (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014, Martin & White 2005). Findings show that activists talk primarily about chickens, cows, and pigs, and animals more generally; they rarely use terms like nonhuman or other animals (cf. Freeman & Merskin 2016). Nonhuman animal participants are often represented as Carriers in attributive or possessive relational clauses, referred to as victims, as being scared/afraid, and as having rights. They are also part of material clauses, as Actors who peck themselves and others, who rub their sores, etc., and as Goals in processes of killing and slaughtering. There are also instances of mental clauses of perception and cognition, e.g. pigs especially look at you quite a lot. Other, less frequently mentioned participants include fellow activists, slaughterhouse workers, lorry drivers, farmers, police, and passersby. These participants can be Carriers in relational clauses (e.g. the drivers were pretty nice to me), Actors/Goals in material clauses (e.g. they ran him over), Sayers in verbal clauses (e.g. some of them whine), and Sensers in mental clauses (e.g. they think it’s a bit sad). In terms of appraisal, positive judgment is generally reserved for fellow activists, e.g. he’s amazing. It is also used to refer to certain passersby and police officers, despite expectations to the contrary (e.g. they’re actually really nice). Negative judgment is limited; slaughterhouse workers, for example, are generally described as vulnerable or exploited themselves. Negative appreciation is common, however, especially in reference to animal agriculture and society in general, and negative affect is often used when referring to the wellbeing and treatment of nonhuman animals (disgusting, awful, etc.). Some activists also express regret or guilt at not doing more or not acting sooner. Overall, findings suggest possible ways forward for a critical animal linguistics, offering a potential bridge between the work of scholars and activists and between the way we talk about and treat other animals. References Freeman, Carrie P., and Debra Merskin. 2016. "Respectful representation: an animal issues style guide for all media practitioners." In Critical animal and media studies: communication for nonhuman animal advocacy, edited by Núria Almiron, Matthew Cole and Carrie P. Freeman, 205-220. New York: Routledge. Halliday, M. A. K., and Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen. 2014. Introduction to functional grammar. 4th ed. Abingdon: Routledge. Martin, J. R., and P. R. R. White. 2005. The language of evaluation: appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

• Fryer, Daniel Lees; Jewitt, Carey & Rowsell, Jennifer (2025). Speculative exploratory workshop on multimodal engagement with the more-than-human for alternative digital communication. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This speculative workshop seeks to explore and challenge human-centric technological paradigms of digital communication in response to the increasingly narrow one-track trajectory based on wholesale human-centric replication (Springgay & Truman, 2017). Immersive digital communication futures are primarily focused on high fidelity human-centric replication (copying or reproducing normative aspects of human sensing) through techniques of simulation and sensory manipulation of augmented, virtual, and immersive reality. A vision buoyed by industry investment, ambition and marketing exemplified by the metaverse. The dominance of a human-centric replication paradigm for digital communication is problematic as it is grounded in a technical and limited view of the senses, anchors possibilities for digital communication futures to the physical human world and fails to engage with the possibilities of the more-than-human (Barad, 2007), the social implications of which matter in the contemporary era of the Anthropocene. This participatory and exploratory workshop asks, how might a multimodal turn to the more-than-human help unlock new digital modes of relating to one another? To address this question, we will first frame the topic via 3 lightening talks, Q&A, after which we will work together in small groups using speculative methods to explore how a multimodal lens on the modal and sensory capacities of the more-than-human (i.e., living forms - plants, animals, microbes) might inform and inspire new forms of digital communication. The workshop will: Generate multimodal mappings (ideas, network diagrams, sketches) of modal aspects of more-than-human sensorial worlds Consider how such mappings might be creatively translated, reinterpreted or reconfigured for new playful, multimodal, and sensorially extended forms of digital communication beyond human-centric replication Initiate new dialogues between multimodal scholars at the intersection of critical animal studies, post/more-than-human, and digital communication. The workshop will close with group sharing and discussion. References: Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Springgay, S. & Truman, S. (2017). A transmaterial approach to walking methodologies: Embodiment, affect, and a sonic art performance. Body & Society, 23(4), 27-58. Keywords: multimodal communication, sensory, digital, more-than-human, critical animal studies

• Fryer, Daniel Lees; Ulla, Bente & Larsen, Ann Sofi (2025). The air smells blue and squiggly: children’s multimodal mappings of smells and smellscapes in Early Childhood Education and Care. Full text in Research Archive
• Kaarlenkaski, Taija; Fryer, Daniel Lees & Linné, Tobias (2025). Panel: Animals and Exceptionalism in Nordic Culture and Society. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Animals play a vital role in the making of nations, having symbolic as well as material capital. To understand how animals become imagined as forms of Nordic culture, the notion of exceptionalism may be used. Exceptionalism is a term generally used to critically refer to the belief or set of beliefs that someone or something has the quality of being unusually good, outstanding, or atypical. It is often applied to the Nordic region with regard to social, economic, and gender equality, the welfare state, and sustainable development, usually as part of the so-called “Nordic model.” However, the Nordic model or Nordic exceptionalism is today challenged by increasing social and economic disparities, high levels of material consumption, and complex colonial histories. In this panel, we will discuss Nordic exceptionalism critically from the perspective of human-nonhuman animal relations, considering, for example, questions of animal welfare and animal rights. The Nordic relationship to nature and wild animals is often described as a special one although the natural resources are efficiently capitalized on. Moreover, it is commonly claimed that in Nordic countries, the welfare of animals used in food production is higher compared to the rest of the world. At the same time, contemporary Nordic consumption practices are among the most unsustainable on a global scale. In the panel, we welcome papers that deal with these human-nonhuman animal issues in contemporary as well as historical settings, covering a wide range of disciplines, such as cultural studies, social sciences, and human-animal studies.

• Kaarlenkaski, Taija; Fryer, Daniel Lees; Linné, Tobias; Lonkila, Annika & Opset, Barbro Bredesen (2025). Exploring exceptionalism in human-animal relations in the Nordic countries. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In this presentation, we introduce and discuss the concept of exceptionalism in the Nordic region and ask whether or to what extent this might apply to human-nonhuman animal relations. The project “Nordic Animal Exceptionalisms” explores these relations from several perspectives, including culture and media studies, philosophy, law, history, linguistics, literature, Scandinavian studies, and (critical) animal studies. Here, we provide examples and points for discussion concerning how this potential exceptionalism is represented and shaped by popular culture, social media, art and literature, and news reporting. We also ask how ideas of a Nordic animal exceptionalism might be re-imagined in ways that could change and improve human-animal relations in the Nordic countries and beyond. In the presentation, we trace, for example, the background of exceptionalist thinking in the context of farm animals and animal welfare in Finland and how food and drink manufacturers in Norway promote animal welfare and a form of animal nationalism on their food packaging.

• Currie, John; Fryer, Daniel Lees & Clarke, Ben (2025). 'We are nature defending itself!' Communicating climate change in times of rebellion. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This presentation explores how climate change is communicated by a sample of the UK environmental movement, a group which has received surprisingly little attention both in terms of SFL and corpus assisted discourse studies (CADS) research. A corpus of around 700,000 words has been compiled from UK versions of the websites for Extinction Rebellion, Friends of the Earth, and Greenpeace in 2019: the year which saw mass mobilisation of climate activist groups across the world, including in the UK. Taking a CADS approach (Baker, 2023) and drawing on ecolinguistics (Stibbe, 2021; Poole, 2022), we examine the extent to which these activist groups communicate climate change in novel ways, contrasting with hegemonic views found in political (Currie & Clarke, 2022) and media discourses (Gillings & Dayrell, 2024), for example. Transitivity patterns (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014) point to alternative uses of conflict metaphors in the data, where natural referents are given both value beyond the instrumental as something to be ‘defended’ and agency as ‘allies’ in the ‘fight’ against climate change. These patterns may represent a beneficial discourse, countering the human-nature dichotomy which is found in much communication (Goatly, 2017; Stibbe, 2021).

• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2025). Constructing the national: animal welfare and environmentalism on Norwegian food packaging. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The term “animal nationalisms” is often used to examine and interrogate the ways in which nonhuman animals are used to construct or represent particular national identities and/or ideas of the nation state (Gillespie and Narayanan 2020). In this presentation, I examine the case of Norwegian food packaging (milk cartons and pizza boxes) and its representation of cows and the dairy industry. Using a dialogic, social-semiotic perspective (Bakhtin 1981 [1935], Kress and van Leeuwen 2006), I consider how the packaging acknowledges and responds to concerns about animal welfare and the environment while simultaneously constructing an idea of Norwegian uniqueness or exceptionalism. In the examples I will discuss, the products are presented as environmentally friendly and safe, referring among other things to recycled packaging materials, emissions connected to production and distribution, cows’ health, nutrition, and comfort, and a brief history of the animal welfare act. Together, visual and verbal resources on the packaging combine to present the products as high quality (“maybe the world’s finest milk”) and the dairy cows as “among the world’s healthiest”, reassuring and encouraging the consumer to “enjoy Norway”. References Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. 1981 [1935]. The dialogic imagination: four essays. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Edited by Michael Holquist. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. Gillespie, Kathryn, and Yamini Narayanan. 2020. "Animal nationalisms: multispecies cultural politics, race, and the (un)making of the settler nation-state." Journal of Intercultural Studies 41 (1):1-7. doi: 10.1080/07256868.2019.1704379. Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. 2006. Reading images: the grammar of visual design. 2nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge.

• Maiorani, Arianna & Fryer, Daniel Lees (2025). The nature and role of dance performance in public protests: a kinesemiotic case study of Frye’s A Black Man’s Heart. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  From the kickline at Stonewall to the dabke in Palestine, dance in street protests and social movements has acquired more and more importance (Carter 2004, Rowe 2010, Gunn et al. 2023), to the point that it can be considered as a “mode of spatial disobedience” (Blanco 2013 in Daniel 2023). We propose the case study of Michael Frye’s dance performance (from 00.00 to camera change at 1.23), “A Black Man’s Heart,” at a widely broadcast Black Lives Matter protest in New York City in June 2020. Although this might look like an improvisation, the ‘danced march’ shows a recognisable structure. While evoking the words of Cynthia Erivo’s song Stand up from Harriet, the biopic of abolitionist and civil rights activist Harriet Tubman, the performer develops meaningful individual choreographic sequences where he interacts with the participants around him, thus drawing traditional marching protesters into the context of his performance (Poggi and D’Errico 2023). In this way, the performance becomes an integral part of the message foregrounded by the march. Drawing on the Functional Grammar of Dance (FGD, Maiorani 2021) and on its application in studies beyond the context of dance like videogames and political speeches (Maiorani and Hawreliak 2024, Maiorani and Bucy 2024) our paper proposes a kinesemiotic approach to the study of this type of movement-based protest. This involves an adaptation of the notions of Move and Minimal Ballet Sequence (Maiorani et al. 2023), as well as that of Movement Turn Construction Unit (Maiorani and Bucy 2024), and a focus on the merging of physical and contextual space that underpin the theoretical basis of the FGD, and the difference between instantiation and realisation (Maiorani and Wegener 2023). Our aim is to develop a methodology to analyse this new type of performance and its function within the street protest context.

• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2024). "That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet": Om lukt, språk og det multimodale. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  I denne presentasjonen tar jeg for meg noen av sammenhengene mellom lukt, språk og multimodalitet. Presentasjonen er delt i to. I den første delen begynner jeg med å spørre om lukt kan betraktes som en modalitet. Svaret på dette kan være avhengig av hvem vi spør og hvilke erfaringer og interesser vi har (van Leeuwen 2005: 51). Ved å bruke perspektiver fra parfymeri, aromaterapi og «environmental fragrancing» utforsker jeg spørsmålet gjennom stratifisering, rang/nivå, metafunksjon og akse (jf. Martin 2011 om multimodal semiotikk). Jeg vurderer også luktens intersemiotiske potensial og hvordan lukt som en del av et multisemiotisk ensemble eventuelt kan utfylle, supplere eller kontrastere med andre semiotiske ressurser (Norris 2013, Fryer 2019). Et viktig poeng her er at lukt sjeldent (eller aldri) skaper mening alene. Selv om vi noen ganger må isolere den for analytiske grunner, må den allikevel forstås i samspill med andre materielle og semiotiske ressurser. I andre del av foredraget presenterer jeg funn fra en pilotstudie og starten på et nytt prosjekt som undersøker lukt i barnehagen og hvordan barn og voksne opplever og snakker om ulike lukter. Luktens mellompersonlige potensial (positiv og negativ evaluering, felleskap og tilhørighet, osv.) er spesielt interessant her og hvordan luktesansen (eller hvordan vi uttrykker oss om den) utvikler seg ontogenetisk. Prosjektet har også som mål å kartlegge og undersøke forholdet mellom lukt og det spatiale («smellscape», Porteous 2006) og hvordan dette endrer seg over tid. Presentasjonen avsluttes med noen tanker om utfordringene ved å beskrive og definere modaliteter. For eksempel: Hva skjer når vi prøver å passe ikke-verbale meningsmåter inn i våre modeller for språk, tekst og kontekst (jf. Batemans «multimodal lingvistikk»; Bateman, Delin og Henschel 2004, Bateman 2008)? Og hva kan økt forståelse av ikke-verbale meningsmåter lære oss om språk og det multimodale, og våre konseptualiseringer av dem? Referanser Bateman, John A. 2008. Multimodality and genre: a foundation for the systematic analysis of multimodal documents. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bateman, John, Judy Delin og Renate Henschel. 2004. "Multimodality and empiricism: preparing for a corpus-based approach to the study of multimodal meaning-making." I Perspectives on multimodality (red. Eija Ventola, Cassily Charles og Martin Kaltenbacher), 65-87. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fryer, Daniel Lees. 2019. "Smell as social semiotic: on the deployment and intersemiotic potential of smell." I Analyzing the media: a systemic functional approach (red. Martin Kaltenbacher og Hartmut Stöckl), 189-204. Sheffield: Equinox. van Leeuwen, Theo. 2005. Introducing social semiotics. Abingdon: Routledge. Norris, Sigrid. 2013. "What is a mode? Smell, olfactory perception, and the notion of mode in multimodal mediated theory." Multimodal Communication 2 (2):155-169. Porteous, J. Douglas. 2006. "Smellscape." I The smell culture reader (red. Jim Drobnik), 89-106. Oxford: Berg.

• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2024). Bearing witness: social semiotic perspectives on animal vigils outside slaughterhouses. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Animal vigils are a common practice in animal rights and animal liberation movements, where activists gather outside slaughterhouses to document and make visible the lives of animals sent to slaughter, in a process often referred to as “bearing witness” (see, for example, Animal Save Movement 2023). In this presentation, I consider some of the texts and activities that make up animal vigils: stopping animal transport vehicles, displaying signs/placards, consoling and comforting, photographing and videoing, etc. I am particularly interested in the role silence plays in these vigils (cf. Miller 2017: 22-23 on action-oriented registers) and in the kinds of roles and relations that are enacted by activists, nonhuman animals, and other participants such as passers-by, slaughterhouse workers, and potential viewers of live-streamed actions. I explore these potential roles and relations primarily through the frameworks of APPRAISAL and IDEATION by considering how bonds between participants might be created, maintained, disrupted, and/or avoided (Stenglin 2004, Martin 2004b, Knight 2010). I also consider the role vigils play alongside a broader set of strategies used by or available to activists, which include media campaigns, “die-ins” and other public performances, undercover surveillance, sabotage, and animal rescues.

• Fryer, Daniel Lees & Dreyfus, Shoshana (2024). Symposium: "Linguistics as social action: SFL scholar-activism". Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  As a “socially accountable linguistics”, SFL not only considers language in context, but also linguistics in context, as “a mode of intervention in critical social practices” (Halliday 1993: 223; see also Halliday 1985, 2001). As such, SFL has been fundamental to the development of critical linguistics, critical discourse analysis, and positive discourse analysis (Kress & Hodge 1979, Fairclough 1992, Martin 2004a, inter alia) and their applications to a wide range of semiotic practices (see examples in Matthiessen 2012). All of these approaches attempt in various ways to highlight inequalities and injustices and/or “contribute to a fairer and more harmonious world” (cf. ISFC49 conference theme). In this colloquium, we consider some of the ways in which SFL (and related theories) can be applied in different contexts, with a view to critically examining and potentially transforming those contexts. The colloquium comprises five papers covering activism related to disability, animal rights/liberation, LGBTQIA+ teachers, forced labour, nonviolent resistance, and humanitarian aid, highlighting how SFL scholars critically engage with the texts, institutions, and individuals associated with those contexts. While each presentation focuses on a different area of activism, many use the interpersonal metafunction across different strata to analyse their data. Others engage with different areas of the theory, casting a light back, as it were, on those aspects of the theory. The colloquium also focuses on some of the more personal challenges and triumphs of engaging in this kind of scholar activism.

• Fryer, Daniel Lees & Hansen, Jessica Pedersen Belisle (2024). Forord. ELLA – Education, Literature, Language – Utdanning, litteratur, språk. 2(2), p. 1–3. doi: 10.58215/ella.125. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Forord for spesialnummer av ELLA – Education, Literature, Language – Utdanning, litteratur, språk, "SFL og sosialsemiotikk: lokale og globale utfordringer"

• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2023). Empathy and compassion in Gruen (2013) and Curtin (2014): ecofeminist approaches to animal ethics, and their relevance for the semiotics of empathy and compassion. Full text in Research Archive
• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2023). La beauté est dans la rue: multi- and intersemiotic expressions of positive attitude in protests and riots. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Anger, rage, and frustration are often central to the grievances that drive protests and riots (e.g. Waddington, Jones, and Critcher 1989, D'Arcy 2013). Feelings and expressions of joy, happiness, and playfulness, while sometimes present, may be less salient and/or more transient (see, for example, Reicher and Stott 2011 on the carnivalesque crowd). When they do appear, these positive emotions or activities are often used by detractors as a way of depoliticizing and/or delegitimizing protests, riots, and even social movements, but their potential role in encouraging or inspiring action and hope is often overlooked (ibid., Popovic and Miller 2015). In this paper, I consider verbal, nonverbal, and intersemiotic expressions of positive emotions in selected protests and riots, including the Stonewall riots/uprising of 1969, the London riots of 2011, and the Cairo protests and riots of 2011. Drawing primarily on systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and systemic functional semiotics (SFS), I use appraisal and related frameworks (Martin and White 2005, Economou 2009, Stenglin 2009, Knight 2010, McMurtrie 2017, inter alia) as a way of identifying instances of positive affect, judgment, and appreciation and exploring their potential for creating and maintaining bonds among protesters and rioters. The examples I focus on include dance and song; clapping, chanting, and whistling; and various forms of property damage. Interviews with and accounts by participants are also part of the analysis (e.g. Carter 2004, Reicher and Stott 2011, Soueif 2011). References Carter, David. 2004. Stonewall: the riots that sparked the gay revolution. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. D’Arcy, Stephen. 2013. Languages of the unheard: why militant protest is good for democracy. London: Zed Books. Economou, Dorothy. 2009. "Photos in the news: appraisal analysis of visual semiosis and verbal-visual intersemiosis." PhD thesis, University of Sydney. Knight, Naomi K. 2010. "Laughing our bonds off: conversational humour in relation to affiliation." PhD thesis, University of Sydney. Martin, J. R., and P. R. R. White. 2005. The language of evaluation: appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. McMurtrie, Robert James. 2017. The semiotics of movement in space: a user’s perspective. New York: Routledge. Popovic, Srdja, and Matthew Miller. 2015. Blueprint for revolution: how to use rice pudding, lego men, and other nonviolent techniques to galvanize communities, overthrow dictators, or simply change the world. New York: Spiegel & Grau. Reicher, Steve, and Cliff Stott. 2011. Mad mobs and Englishmen? Myths and realities of the 2011 riots. London: Constable & Robinson. Soueif, Ahdaf. 2011. "An eyewitness account of the Egypt protests." Guardian, January 28, 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jan/28/eyewitness-account-egypt-protests. Stenglin, Maree Kristen. 2009. "Space odyssey: towards a social semiotic model of three-dimensional space." Visual Communication 8 (1):35-64. Waddington, David P., Karen Jones, and Chas Critcher. 1989. Flashpoints: studies in public disorder. London: Routledge.

• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2023). "Love One, Love All": Empathy, Compassion, and the Ethics of Care in Vegan Discourse. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Following on from Elizabeth Thomson’s recent IDEAS seminar on empathy, this presentation looks at empathy, compassion, and the ethics of care in vegan discourse and the Vegan Society’s Be AnimalKind campaign (Vegan Society 2022a). Using systemic functional work on appraisal (e.g. Martin and White 2005, Economou 2009, Feng and O’Halloran 2013, Ariztimuño et al. 2022), I consider the campaign’s multi- and intersemiotic construal of how we might feel, think, and act in relation to others, both within and across species. I’ll begin with a short introduction to veganism and the Vegan Society and give a brief summary of (eco)feminist animal ethics (Donovan 1990, 1996, Curtin 1991, inter alia) and how it contrasts with and/or supplements rights-based and welfarist approaches. The main focus here will be on Gruen’s (2007 [2004], 2009, 2012, 2013, 2014) entangled empathy and empathetic engagement and Curtin’s (2022 [2014]) distinctions between empathy and compassion. I’ll then use the appraisal framework, and especially the attitudinal categories of affect, judgment, and appreciation, to investigate how, in the Be AnimalKind campaign, affect might negotiate empathy and the sharing of emotions, judgment might negotiate character and the sharing of principles or ethics, and appreciation might negotiate taste and the sharing of preferences (Martin 2004, 329; Stenglin 2004, 403; Martin and White 2005, 42). I’ll also consider the importance of the distinction between judgment and appreciation in the way our relations with other animals are instantiated and negotiated—are we appraising someone or something?—as well as how the textual voice(s) engages with different voices in the discourse. This is especially important here since the Be AnimalKind campaign is aimed primarily at “non-vegan animal lovers” (Vegan Society 2022a, emphasis added), so the textual voice, presumably a “vegan animal lover”, needs to shape the dialogic space in such a way as to align the viewer around a particular set of values, some of which might not initially be shared with or acted upon by the viewer. This talk is based on a work in progress for a special issue of Language, Context and Text on the “Semiotics of Peace, Compassion, and Empathy”, edited by Etaywe, Thomson, Wijeyewardene, and Wheeler. My contribution will be part of the section on compassion. References available on request

• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2023). Systemic Functional Semiotics and Critical Animal Studies: Intersections and Applications. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In this talk, I’ll be considering how systemic functional theory might contribute to the field of critical animal studies (CAS). I’ll begin by introducing CAS and some of its key concepts, e.g. speciesism, animal liberation, and intersections with other liberatory struggles (e.g. Adams 2003 [1990], Nocella et al. 2014, Ko and Ko 2017, Taylor 2017). I’ll also highlight previous systemic functional work related to (critical) animal studies (e.g. Benson and Greaves 2005, Knight 2006, Benson and Thibault 2009, Moore 2014) and how that and SFS more generally might be used as a starting point for reexamining a particular CAS work, a commentary and analysis by Adams (2015) of a Super Bowl TV commercial. Here I want to show how SFS can inform and supplement critical social studies of speciesism and misogyny through detailed multi- and intersemiotic analyses. I’ll then present some recent examples from my own work (Fryer 2020, 2022) in which these and other forms of oppression or discrimination (including state violence, nationalism, racism, commodification, and body-shaming) appear to overlap or intersect, and how these might be confronted from a systemic functional perspective (cf. linguistics as social action; Halliday 1985, 1993, 2001, 2013, Martin 1992, 2000, inter alia). My work here takes a primarily interpersonal approach, drawing on appraisal, among other things, as a way of identifying communities of shared values and feelings. This presentation is part of a work in progress intended for publication in Social Semiotics and the Animal Other (Routledge 2024; co-edited with Alison Moore). My contribution aims to highlight some of the complementaries between SFS and CAS and to suggest tools for the (critical) study and transformation of human-nonhuman animal relations. References available on request

• Currie, John; Clarke, Ben & Fryer, Daniel Lees (2022). Towards understanding trends in climate change discourse in UK institutions 2015-2021. Full text in Research Archive
• Currie, John; Clarke, Ben & Fryer, Daniel Lees (2022). Tackling climate change: investigating transitivity patterns in UK institutions. Full text in Research Archive
• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2022). «The Internet Is a Series of Tubes Filled with Cats»: Sosialsemiotikk, (kritiske) dyrestudier og digitale medier. Full text in Research Archive
• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2022). "Language of the Unheard": Rioting and Community from a Multisemiotic Perspective. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In this presentation, Daniel Lees Fryer will be considering Martin Luther King Jr’s reference to riots as the “language of the unheard”, and asking how we might think of riots and rioting in terms of language or text. He’ll be doing so from a multimodal systemic functional perspective, distinguishing first between riots or rioting as process (as they unfold in time and space) and riots as artefacts (as contested histories and their potential relevance for later struggles). He’ll go through some features and resources (a)typical of riots—including confrontations with police and property damage—and then consider their meaning-making potentials. One aspect of rioting he is particularly interested in, and will talk about in this presentation, is how and where people bond in what appear to be on-the-fly, often short-lived forms of community, e.g. people coming together to overturn vehicles or to de-arrest protesters. Daniel Lees Fryer will be drawing on examples from a variety of different riots, but, since June is Pride Month, he thought it might be interesting to include some material from the Stonewall riots/uprising of 1969.

• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2021). Beauty in the Streets: Attitude and Bonding in Uprisings and Riots. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In this paper, I focus on the multi-/intersemiotic expression of attitude in uprisings and riots, considering how participants bond around shared senses of affect, judgment, and appreciation. Based on examples from the Stonewall Uprising (1967), the Battle of Seattle (1999), and the London riots of 2011, among others, I want to show that, in addition to frustration, anger, and rage, riots and uprisings can also contain moments of pleasure and joy (jouissance?), as well as a whole host of other feelings and emotions. Together, these ostensibly divergent attitudes, and the sources or targets of those attitudes, are important for creating a sense of solidarity and community. Participants can bond or rally around their support for and/or opposition to (and perhaps even ambivalence to) various people, artefacts, events, institutions, and conditions. These might include flashpoints such as an arrest or murder, as well as wider structural or systemic forms of discrimination and oppression (classism, racism, sexism, etc.). They can also include more immediate material-symbolic elements such as flags and banners, as well as emergent, on-the-fly acts of de-arresting, property damage, and looting. This paper considers how community is instantiated through patterns of ideational and attitudinal meanings and the relevance those patternings have for understanding riots as a form of collective action.

• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2021). Ghosts of Finnskogen. Full text in Research Archive
• Fryer, Daniel Lees & Moore, Alison Rotha (2021). Symposium: "Social Semiotics and the Animal Other". Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In recent years, the humanities and social sciences have witnessed an “animal turn”, an increasing interest in and centering of the lives of nonhuman animals and human-animal relations (Ritvo 2007, Pedersen 2014, inter alia), more recently situated within the context of social justice (Celermajer et al. 2021). We might expect this animal turn to have been taken up with gusto in systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and social semiotics (SFS), given their focus on language, representation, ideology and identity, but although some important work has been produced (e.g. Benson and Greaves 2005, Benson and Thibault 2009, Knight 2006), this has not yet led to a sustained subfield of SFL/SFS such as we see, for example, in educational semiotics. Inspired by the theme of ESFLC 2021 and building on the above work, we propose this symposium to explore new ways that SFL and SFS can contribute to improving human-animal relations and the actual lives of individuals regardless of species, by critically addressing the statuses, roles and interests of nonhuman animals in society and the part that semiotic scholarship can play in understanding and acting. Our plan is to bring selected papers from the symposium together with some invited pieces to produce a special issue or edited volume. Topics for discussion ● Inter- and intraspecies communication ● Animals and multimodality ● Language and animal agency ● Glottocentrism ● Linguistics and the moral status of animals ● Animals and social justice ● Animals and the climate predicament ● Animals, nationalism and cultural stereotypes ● Animal advocacy and animal liberation ● Animal agriculture ● Animals and the media ● Animals and education ● Ontogenetic and phylogenetic change

• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2021). “Language of the Unheard”: Riots and Rioting as Multisemiosis. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  If “riot is the language of the unheard” (Martin Luther King Jr, 1967), what do riots say, and how do they say it? In this paper, I draw on spatial discourse analysis (Ravelli and McMurtrie 2016, McMurtrie 2017, see also Stenglin 2004, Stenglin 2009) and social-semiotic accounts of visual, verbal, auditory, and olfactory resources (e.g. van Leeuwen 1999, Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, Martin and Rose 2007, Fryer 2019) to consider how rioters (the unheard?) move through and interact with the physical environment, with each other, and with other participants.* The kinds of meanings these movements and interactions imply can be thought of broadly in metafunctional and semogenic terms (Halliday and Matthiessen 1999, 2004). Rioting is, after all, about something; it involves various actors or participants, certain actions, activities, and ways of being. Rioting is a response to something, part of an exchange, an enactment of and potential challenge to social roles and relations, as well as an expression of feelings and emotions around which communities of shared values can be co-constructed. Rioting unfolds over time and space, as a sequence of more or less interconnected events and activities, precipitated and influenced by local conditions and wider social, political, and/or economic issues. Using historical and contemporary examples, such as the Peasants Revolt (1381), the Stonewall uprising (1967), the Battle of Orgreave (1984), the London Poll Tax riots (1990), the Battle for Seattle (1999), and the Paris riots (2005) (e.g. Dobson 1983, Burns 1992, Hilton 2003, Carter 2004, Meckfessel 2016, Moran and Waddington 2016), I map riots as multisemiotic acts of meaning-making, focusing in particular on the contested spaces and places through and in which participants move, interact, and bond. Key words: riots, rioting, multisemiosis, spatial discourse analysis, bonding *There is a long history of describing crowds as “senseless” or “irrational” (so-called “mob mentality”) and the members of those crowds as “thugs” and “criminals”, often as a way of delegitimising or depoliticising certain types of collective action (Moran and Waddington 2016, 2-7). I acknowledge that the term riot/rioter, as applied by the state, media, and others to certain forms of protest or protesters, carries with it some of those connotations as well as various legal implications.

• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2020). Er staten løsningen? Klassekampen. ISSN 0805-3839. p. 20–20. Full text in Research Archive
• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2020). Koppskattopptøyene 30 år – protestene som felte Thatcher. Full text in Research Archive
• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2020). Love and Mutual Aid in the Time of Corona. Full text in Research Archive
• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2020). #AllCatsAreBeautiful: Resisting State Power and Other Forms of Oppression on Social Media. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  “All Cats Are Beautiful” is a commonly used acrostic for ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards). In this paper, I explore the use of the hashtag #AllCatsAreBeautiful on the social media platform Twitter. Analysis of c. 1500 ‘tweets’ from April 2011 to April 2019 reveals a variety of themes associated with the hashtag. These include negative evaluations of the police and a broader critique of policing, the punitive justice system, and state power, as well as comments on the commodification and exploitation of animals, gender discrimination, body image and body shaming, and (perhaps unsurprisingly) the positive appreciation of cats. The hashtag is also used by law enforcement agencies in an apparent attempt to challenge or deride anti-police sentiment. I present each of the above-mentioned themes, focusing on their verbal and visual representations, and discuss the potentially overlapping forms of oppression that are highlighted and confronted by the hashtag #AllCatsAreBeautiful. I also discuss what makes cats such an important metaphor or representamen for these interconnected struggles and for liberatory movements more generally.

• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2019). Anti-universitet nå! Khrono.no. ISSN 1894-8995. Full text in Research Archive
• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2019). Ludditter? Klassekampen. ISSN 0805-3839. p. 21–21. Full text in Research Archive
• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2019). Peterloo: «Dere er mange, de er få». Full text in Research Archive
• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2019). Friske, rene, hardt arbeidende, norske kuer: dyrevelferd, miljøvern og det nasjonale på melkekartonger og pizzaesker. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Forbruket av kumelk har gått stadig ned siden slutten av 1950-tallet (Roll-Hansen 2001, SSB 2013). Det er flere grunner til denne utviklingen (se Linné 2016, 721-722), men mange har i de siste årene redusert sitt forbruk av hensyn til miljøet, helse og/eller dyrevelferd. I denne presentasjonen ser jeg nærmere på hvordan ulike deler av denne utviklingen kommer til uttrykk på melkekartonger og pizzaesker. Jeg er spesielt interessert i de verbale og visuelle ressursene som inngår i dialog med denne utviklingen, hvor deler av produktemballasjen fungerer som respons eller svar fra produsentene på antatte bekymringer eller spørsmål fra forbrukerne. Analysen tar utgangspunkt i sosialsemiotiske tolkninger av dialogisk teori, hvor multisemiotiske uttrykk forstås som del av en større utveksling (Kress and Hodge 1979, Hasan 1992, Martin 1992, Martin and White 2005, Economou 2009, inter alia). Jeg bruker også perspektiver fra kritiske dyrestudier («critical animal studies»), hvor forholdene mellom mennesker, andre dyr og miljøet settes i både et kritisk-akademisk og aktivistisk lys (f.eks. Best et al. 2007, Nocella II et al. 2014). Som det framgår av analysen, er det flere temaer som kommer til uttrykk på disse produktene: dyrevelferd, biodrivstoff, industrielt arbeid og produksjon, tradisjoner, det nasjonale, biologisk mangfold, gjenvinning og bærekraftig utvikling. Mange av disse temaene framstår ikke bare som generell informasjon, folkeopplysning eller underholdning om melk og melkeproduksjon, men også som direkte svar på eller forsvar mot kritikk mot meieriindustrien. Referanser Best, Steven, Anthony J. Nocella II, Richard Kahn, Carol Gigliotti, and Lisa Kemmerer. 2007. "Introducing critical animal studies." Journal for Critical Animal Studies 5 (1):4-5. Economou, Dorothy. 2009. "Photos in the news: appraisal analysis of visual semiosis and verbal-visual intersemiosis." PhD thesis, University of Sydney. Hasan, Ruqaiya. 1992. "Speech genre, semiotic mediation and the development of higher mental functions." Language Sciences 14 (4):489–528. Kress, Gunther, and Robert Hodge. 1979. Language as ideology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Linné, Tobias. 2016. "Cows on Facebook and Instagram: interspecies intimacy in the social media spaces of the Swedish dairy industry." Television & New Media 17 (8):719–733. doi: 10.1177/1527476416653811. Martin, J. R. 1992. English text: system and structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Martin, J. R., and P. R. R. White. 2005. The language of evaluation: appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nocella II, Anthony J., John Sorenson, Kim Socha, and Atsuko Matsuoka. 2014. "The emergence of critical animal studies: the rise of intersectional animal liberation." In Defining critical animal studies: an intersectional social justice approach for liberation, edited by Anthony J. Nocella II, John Sorenson, Kim Socha and Atsuko Matsuoka, xix-xxxvi. New York: Peter Lang. Roll-Hansen, Hege. 2001. Mindre melk og brød. In Tallenes fortellinger. Oslo: Statistisk sentralbyrå. SSB. 2013. Miljødimensjonen ved maten under lupen. Oslo: Statistisk sentralbyrå.

• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2019). #AllCatsAreBeautiful: Visual-Verbal Representations of Cats in Online Liberationist Discourses. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Hashtags are a form of user-generated metadata that generally indicate the content or topic of an utterance. They are also important markers of ambient affiliation, allowing users to co-construct communities of shared values and experiences around different topics (Zappavigna 2012, 2018). In this paper, I examine the use of the hashtag #allcatsarebeautiful on the social media platform Twitter. The hashtag is used as a metadiscursive marker for several interrelated topics, most commonly as an acrostic for the abbreviation ACAB, All Cops Are Bastards. It is also used in reference to pet rescue and animal shelters and, less frequently, to sexism. One of the points of connection between those different topics is their potentially abolitionist or liberationist positions, i.e. anti-police, anti-breeding/anti-ownership, and anti-sexism (cf. Vitale 2017, Dunayer 2001, 2004, Francione and Charlton 2016, Mills 2008). Across each of these topics, I look at how cats are represented visually and verbally, and the kinds of experiences and emotions expressed by users (Baker 2001 [1993], Martin and White 2005, Kress and van Leeuwen 2006). References Baker, Steve. 2001 [1993]. Picturing the beast: animals, identity, and representation. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press. Dunayer, Joan. 2001. Animal equality: language and liberation. Derwood, Maryland: Ryce Publishing. Dunayer, Joan. 2004. Speciesism. Derwood, Maryland: Ryce Publishing. Francione, Gary L., and Anna E. Charlton. 2016. "The case against pets." Aeon September 8, 2016. Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. 2006. Reading images: the grammar of visual design. 2nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge. Martin, J. R., and P. R. R. White. 2005. The language of evaluation: appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mills, Sara. 2008. Language and sexism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vitale, Alex S. 2017. The end of policing. London: Verso. Zappavigna, Michele. 2012. Discourse of Twitter and social media: how we use language to create affiliation on the web. London: Bloomsbury. Zappavigna, Michele. 2018. Searchable talk: hashtags and social media metadiscourse. London: Bloomsbury.

• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2017). Brexit: Hvor ble det av venstresida? Full text in Research Archive
• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2017). ¡No pasarán! (Re)enacting the Battle of Cable Street on Social Media. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The Battle of Cable Street is a key event in the history of the British antifascist movement (Kushner and Valman 1998, Copsey 2000, German and Rees 2012). On 4 October 1936, an estimated 100,000-250,000 demonstrators took to the streets to stop Oswald Mosley’s “Blackshirt” British Union of Fascists marching through London’s East End. Under banners of “They Shall Not Pass”, demonstrators erected barricades and fought with mounted police until the march was finally abandoned. At a recent rally to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, several speakers, including the leader of the British Labour Party, drew parallels between the events of 1936 and the apparent rise of right-wing populism and extremism in contemporary Britain and elsewhere (see also http://cablestreet80.org.uk). In this paper, I explore how some of those parallels are manifest in social media, by examining the comments section accompanying a video-documentary of the Battle of Cable Street, posted on the video-sharing website YouTube. My main aim is to examine how commentators position themselves, verbally and visually, in relation to the battle, the documentary, and each other. I use Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal framework (and models developed by Economou 2009, Chen 2010, Tan 2010, Feng and Wignell 2011, inter alia) to identify and compare communities of shared values and feelings, and to discuss how the ideologues and ideologemes of those communities (Bakhtin and Medvedev 1978, Freedman and Ball 2004) relate to wider fascist and antifascist discourses, many of which are reminiscent of, or make direct reference to, social and political events of the 1930s. References Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich, and Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev. 1978 [1928]. The formal method in literary scholarship: a critical introduction to sociological poetics. Translated by Albert J. Wehrle. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Chen, Yumin. 2010. “Exploring dialogic engagement with readers in multimodal EFL textbooks in China.” Visual Communication 9 (4):485-506. Copsey, Nigel. 2000. Anti-fascism in Britain. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Economou, Dorothy. 2009. “Photos in the news: appraisal analysis of visual semiosis and verbal-visual intersemiosis.” PhD thesis, University of Sydney. Feng, Dezheng, and Peter Wignell. 2011. “Intertextual voices and engagement in TV advertisements.” Visual Communication 10 (4):565-588. Freedman, Sarah Warshauer, and Arnetha F. Ball. 2004. “Ideological becoming: Bakhtinian concepts to guide the study of language, literacy, and learning.” In Bakhtinian perspectives on language, literacy, and learning, edited by Arnetha F. Ball and Sarah Warshauer Freedman, 3-33. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. German, Lindsey, and John Rees. 2012. A people's history of London. London: Verso. Kushner, Tony, and Nadia Valman. 1998. “Introduction: minorities, fascism and anti-fascism.” Jewish Culture and History 1 (2):1-22. Martin, J. R., and P. R. R. White. 2005. The language of evaluation: appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Tan, Sabine. 2010. “Modelling engagement in a web-based advertising campaign.” Visual Communication 9 (1):91-115.

• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2016). Coffee and cinnamon buns: on the deployment and intersemiotic potential of smell. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Our sense of smell is mediated by complex physicochemical and biological interactions. This sense is part of the material basis for what we might call a mode of smell, a socially mediated semiotic system (van Leeuwen 2005, Norris 2013, Fryer 2013). The resources of such modes or systems, to the extent that they are recognized as such, are rarely if ever deployed alone, but as part of a multisemiotic arrangement (van Leeuwen 2005, Kress 2010, Norris 2013). In this paper, I discuss the meaning potential of smell by considering how social actors produce, manipulate, combine, and organize certain smells to create sophisticated ‘messages’ that can be interpreted and evaluated by others. As an example, I examine the case of a real-estate agent’s use of specific smells, created among other things by preparing coffee and cinnamon buns, as part of a house viewing. I consider the potential meanings encoded by those smells in that particular context of situation. I also discuss the relative semantic weight of those resources as part of a multisemiotic event or activity that includes the co-deployment of verbal, visual, and spatial resources. By considering the relative amounts or degrees of meaning potential instantiated through those different semiotic systems, I demonstrate how smell might be deployed to make meanings that are potentially complementary to as well as incongruent or inharmonious with those committed verbally, visually, and spatially (see, for example, Hood 2008, Martin 2011, and Painter, Martin, and Unsworth 2013 on ‘commitment’). Reasons for making those particular semiotic choices and the kinds of values social actors might assign to them will also be discussed.

• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2016). Slaget ved Cable Street – en seier for antifascismen. Full text in Research Archive
• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2015). Samuel Beckett og akademisk skriving: Fordeler med å skrive på et andre- eller fremmedspråk. In Jonsmoen, Kari Mari & Greek, Marit (Ed.), Språkmangfold i utdanningen. Gyldendal Akademisk. ISSN 9788205460263. p. 97–108. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Det kan være vanskelig å skrive vitenskapelige tekster, spesielt når man skriver i et andre- eller fremmedspråk. Ulempene kan være mange, men finnes det noen fordeler med å skrive vitenskapelige tekster på et andre- eller fremmedspråk, og hvordan kan disse eventuelle fordelene utnyttes? I denne artikkelen undersøker jeg disse spørsmålene i lys av forfatteren og dramatikeren Samuel Beckett sitt valg om å skrive på et andrespråk, nemlig fransk. Noen av grunnene til at han begynte å skrive på fransk, og resultatene av dette valget, kan ha direkte relevans for hvordan man skriver (og hvordan man underviser i skriving) i en akademisk sammenheng, ikke minst når man skriver i et andre- eller fremmedspråk. «Prøv igjen. Feil igjen. Feil bedre.» Samuel Beckett: Videre verstover

• Fryer, Daniel Lees & Patel, Tulpesh (2014). Conference organizers for Norwegian Forum for English for Academic Purposes (NFEAP) 8th Summer Seminar. Full text in Research Archive
• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2014). Review of Verdaguer, Isabel, Natalia Judith Laso, and Danica Salazar (Eds). 2013. Biomedical English: A Corpus-based Approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Nordic Journal of English Studies (NJES). ISSN 1502-7694. 13(3), p. 218–227. Full text in Research Archive
• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2014). Review of "Reading Visual Narratives: Image Analysis of Children’s Picture Books" (2013) by Painter, Martin, and Unsworth. Linguistics and the Human Sciences. ISSN 1742-2906. 10(3), p. 312–321. doi: 10.1558/lhs.v10i3.19618. Full text in Research Archive
• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2013). "Music is in everything": using sound to present (and perform) data in academic-literacies research. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Empirical data, particularly quantitative data, are typically presented visually in the form of figures. In this presentation, I explore the potential for presenting data in the form of sound. As an example, I will use findings from an academic literacies (AL)-related project to describe some of the processes, choices, and challenges involved in creating “sound-figures.” With reference to similar data-as-sound projects from other fields, e.g., the sonification of data from the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, I will discuss what insights sound-figures might provide that visual figures do not and how the two might complement each other, particularly in AL research. The presentation will also include a live performance of a sound-figure.

• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2013). Story of an image: notes on the recontextualization of a digital research-article figure. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Figures such as graphs, illustrations, and photographs play important epistemological and pedagogic roles in the communication of science. In this presentation, I take as a case in point a figure from a research article published in 2001 in the paper and online editions of the New England Journal of Medicine. The figure represents a cross-section of a blood vessel and depicts the proposed response of a certain protein in regulating inflammation and coagulation in severe sepsis. The figure includes verbal resources, and is a hybrid of schematic and (semi-)naturalistic elements. In its original digital environment, the figure (like others in the journal) is not only part of a composite text, i.e., the research article; it is also a discrete text in its own right, one that can be searched, downloaded, read, and redistributed in various formats. Since its original publication in 2001, the figure has been reused and adapted for use in a number of different contexts. In this paper, I present and discuss some of these recontextualizations by examining changes in selection, arrangement, foregrounding, and social repositioning (Bezemer and Kress 2008) and by considering variations in the field, tenor, and mode of discourse. I investigate these recontextualizations (and their inevitable “recotextualizations”) more-or-less chronologically, starting with the figure’s origins in the New England Journal of Medicine before examining online repurposing of the figure in other research articles, in blogs, and in videos. Despite there being only minor transformations of the original figure, some of the recontextualizations suggest radically different readings from those of the original publication.

• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2013). Heteroglossic engagement and generic staging in English-language medical research articles. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In this presentation, I investigate how medical research writers engage with the dialogic background of their discipline. Specifically, I use the Appraisal framework (Martin & White 2005, White 1998, 2003) to examine how heteroglossic engagement is encoded in a collection of highly cited English-language experimental medical research articles. I explore the patterns and variations in the types, frequencies, selection probabilities, distribution, and scope of a wide range of linguistic resources, across and within different sections of the texts (Introductions, Methods, Results, and Discussions), paying particular attention to the role of engagement in the generic stages and phases (Martin & Rose 2003/2007, 2008), structural/rhetorical moves (Swales 1990), and discipline-specific organizational requirements (ICMJE 2010) associated with this text-type. In each section, and in each of the stages and phases that comprise those sections, medical research writers engage with a background of prior and anticipated utterances in distinct ways, opening and closing the dialogic space for alternative propositions, and variously aligning and disaligning their readers as the text unfolds. For the purposes of this presentation, I focus primarily on two main features, the dialogically expansive ‘entertain’ feature (typically signaled by markers of projection and modality) and the dialogically contractive ‘deny’ feature (expressed through the resources of negation). As I will show, there are not only distinct variations in the frequencies and selection probabilities of these features across different sections, stages, and phases of the text; there are also interesting differences in the types and scope of the linguistic resources that encode these features in different parts of the text.

• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2013). Review of Painter, Martin, and Unsworth (2013) "Reading Visual Narratives: Image Analysis of Children's Picture Books". Linguistlist. ISSN 1068-4875. 24(2565). Full text in Research Archive
• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2013). Review of Pérez-Llantada (2012) "Scientific Discourse and the Rhetoric of Globalization". Linguistlist. ISSN 1068-4875. 24(565). Full text in Research Archive
• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2013). Samuel Beckett og akademisk skriving: mulige fordeler med å skrive på et fremmedspråk i en akademisk kontekst. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Samuel Beckett skrev mange av sine mest kjente verk på fransk. Han mente at teksten ble mer presis, mer økonomisk og uten det han kalte for "Anglo-Irish exuberance and automatisms" når han skrev på et andrespråk. Opplever du det samme? Kan det virkelig være en fordel at du ikke har engelsk som førstespråk når du skal skrive vitenskapelig på engelsk?

• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2013). Sonifying the Higgs: choice and coding orientation in the sonification of data. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In July 2012, the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced the discovery of a Higgs-like particle, based on data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). A team of researchers sonified these data, translating the visual display of data points into a piece of music, i.e. a sonification or sound-figure. In this presentation, I examine some of the choices made in the transduction (Bezemer and Kress 2008) and sonification of the LHC data. Specifically, I explore choices in timbre, pitch, duration, and intensity from a systemic-functional perspective (van Leeuwen 1999) and discuss how these might relate to a possible scientific abstract-sensory coding orientation (Bernstein 1981, Halliday 1978, van Leeuwen 1999, Kress and van Leeuwen 1996/2006, inter alia) through which certain paradigmatic and probabilistic choices (part of the “sonic register”) are more highly valued than others. References Bernstein, Basil. 1981. “Codes, modalities and the process of cultural reproduction: a model” Language and Society 10, 327-363. Bezemer, Jeff and Gunther Kress. 2008. “Writing in multimodal texts: a social semiotic account of designs for learning” Written Communication 25, 166-195. Halliday, M. A. K. 1978. Language as social semiotic: the social interpretation of language and meaning. London: Edward Arnold. Kress, Gunther and Theo van Leeuwen. 1996/2006. Reading images: the grammar of visual design. Abingdon: Routledge. van Leeuwen, Theo. 1999. Speech, music, sound. London: Macmillan.

• Gulden, Ann Torday; Patel, Tulpesh & Fryer, Daniel Lees (2013). Conference organizers for Norwegian Forum for English for Academic Purposes (NFEAP) 7th Summer Seminar. Full text in Research Archive
• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2012). Whose voice is it, anyway? Voice, positioning, and expectation in academic writing. Full text in Research Archive
• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2011). Exploring the dialogism of academic discourse: appraisal in a multimodal corpus of medical research articles. Full text in Research Archive
• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2011). Tale + skrift ≈ sant. Klassekampen. ISSN 0805-3839. Full text in Research Archive
• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2011). Engaging with the literature, engaging with the reader: evaluation in academic writing. Full text in Research Archive
• Gulden, Ann Torday; Fryer, Daniel Lees & Solli, Kristin (2010). 'Not too happy, but I just have to do it':Challenges in using English as method of instruction. Full text in Research Archive
• Fryer, Daniel Lees (2019). Engagement in Medical Research Discourse: A Multisemiotic Discourse-Semantic Study of Dialogic Positioning. Göteborgs Universitet / University of Gothenburg. ISSN 9789178333349. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This study investigates how medical researchers engage with a background of prior and anticipated utterances in a collection of highly cited English-language medical research articles. Taking a multisemiotic, systemic-functional approach, I examine the verbal, visual, and mathematical resources used by medical research writers to construe, engage with, and position themselves in relation to a dialogic background of different voices, positions, and propositions. I explore the dialogic functions of those resources and how they are integrated or combined. I also consider how those resources are distributed across different parts of the medical research article and to what extent their use might reflect some of the disciplinary practices of medical research. The study shows that engagement can be realized by a broad and diverse set of verbal, mathematical, and visual resources. Verbal modality, projection, and concession, visual prominence and depiction-style, and mathematical probability, approximation, and prediction combine to construe a dialogic space that, on the whole, is more ‘heteroglossic’ than ‘monoglossic’ (i.e. multi- or other-voiced rather than single-voiced) and more dialogically ‘expansive’ than ‘contractive’; that is, it opens up rather than closes down the dialogic space for alternative positions and propositions in the discourse. From a genre perspective, engagement resources have different distributions across the various stages and phases of the medical research article, which tend to construe a dialogically ‘expansive’ Introduction and Discussion and a dialogically ‘contractive’ Methods and Results, although there is considerable variation across generic stages and phases and among individual research articles. The intersemiotic analysis shows how verbal, visual, and mathematical engagement resources are generally integrated to complement and reinforce the meanings construed by each semiotic. Less commonly, they diverge or they combine to make meanings that are not explicitly carried by any one semiotic, creating moments of potential dialogic tension. These changing dialogic spaces are crucial to building and maintaining alliances with the reader. They are also part of what makes the medical research article a hybrid text, one that, from a disciplinary perspective, construes varying writer–reader relations and knowledge structures (e.g. hard–soft, regional–singular, hierarchic–horizontal) as the text unfolds. The implications of this study are three-fold. Firstly, the study contributes to theoretical developments in the fields of social semiotics, systemic functional theory, and discourse analysis more generally. Secondly, it contributes to the growing body of discourse- and corpus-analytic studies of medicine and medical research discourse. Thirdly, the findings may have practical applications in academic literacy programmes. Key words: engagement, medical research discourse, social semiotics, systemic functional theory, dialogic theory, linguistics, semiosis, multisemiosis, multimodality, intersemiosis, intermodality, corpus analysis, genre, disciplinarity, ideology

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