A Semiotic Analysis of Lecturers Labour Protest Discourses in Kenya

Abstract

Protesting or dissent has been a common phenomenon globally for many years and most countries worldwide have experienced at least one type of protest. Kenya has not been left out and was badly hit in 2017 where there were numerous political and labour protests. This paper looks at the semiotic resources that were used in public university lecturers' strikes in the genres of protest and their underlying meaning. Critical Discourse Analysis theoretical framework was used to analyse data using Fairclough's three-dimension approach and Kress and Van Leeuwen's approach to Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Four genres of protest namely: slogans, placards, press conferences and banners were studied. Data was collected by downloading information from Kenya's Daily Nation, the Standard's news print media websites, You Tube, National Television and Citizen TV stations. 84 texts were purposively sampled and analysed descriptively. The findings of the study revealed that genres of protest are created using both linguistic and semiotic resources. Protestors made use of semiotic resources mainly framing, salience and information value to communicate to relevant stakeholders in the protest. Semiotic resources helped to enhance the linguistic resources hence making lecturers' communication powerful.