#alleyesonwetsuweten

An Analysis of the Wet’suwet’en protest on Twitter

  • Anna Mongibello University of Naples L'Orientale
Keywords: Wet’suwet’en, activism, corpus, discourse, hashtags, Twitter

Abstract

The present study aims at analyzing Indigenous online activism in Canada by focusing on how the Wet’suwet’en people have recently remediated on Twitter their protest against the 2019 Coastal GasLink pipeline project. The project implied the construction of a 670-kilometre-long natural gas pipeline crossing their ancestral and unceded territories. An investigation of the discursive strategies underpinning the usage of microblogging by the Wet’suwet’en people as part of their online protest is provided through a combination of methodological and theoretical frameworks, that is Corpus Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis and Social Media Studies starting from the quantitative analysis of the GTEN Corpus. The research findings show that discourses of solidarity, mobilization and sovereignty intersect in the corpus and that the discourse of Indigenous protests on social media is a decolonizing social practice leading to empowerment, self-determination, and legitimation of Indigenous protests.         

Author Biography

Anna Mongibello, University of Naples L'Orientale

Anna Mongibello, PhD, is Associate Professor of English Language and Translation at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” (Italy). Her research interests include digital activisms, New Media Discourse, Digital Discourse and Social Media Discourse analyzed from a multimodal and discursive perspective; computer-mediated communication; Media and News Discourse; the intersections of language, ideology and power explored through corpus-based critical discourse analysis. She is a member of the Board of the Italian Association for Canadian Studies. In 2012 she was awarded the Doctoral Student Research Award issued by the Government of Canada and the International Council for Canadian Studies. She has published two books and numerous articles in national and international journals. She is the author of Indigenous Peoples in Canadian TV News: A Corpus-based Analysis of Mainstream and Indigenous News Discourses (2018). In 2021 she organized the international conference “Indigenous resistance in the digital age: the politics of language, media and culture.”

Published
2022-12-15