MULTIMODAL CONSTRUAL OF SOCIAL CRISIS IN PRESENT-DAY ANGLOPHONE DISCURSIVE SPACE

Abstract

The article offers an insight into multimodal construal of social crisis in present-day Anglophone discursive space. It outlines social crisis as the one embracing a number of crisis situation, such as terrorism, sustainable development, consequences of climate change, pandemics, migration crisis, problems of global security, gender inequality, and information fakes. Social crisis creates impedes settlement of urgent social and political, economic and financial, as well as humanitarian issues. Political arena turns into show politics that the article analyses on the example of the debates in the USA within the presidential elections of 2024. Generally, the research takes a transdisciplinary stance in combination of theoretical and methodological postulates of general semantics, media ecology discursive and multimodal studios, transmediality and transcontextuality. In this vein social crisis with all its components is interpreted as cognitive and discursive, communicative, multimodal and transmedial phenomenon construed in present-day Anglophone discursive space via symbolic and/or technological semantic environments in transcontextual links. Moreover, the article uses a number of software to analyse the material under scrutiny. The article puts special emphasis on construal of migration, or refugee crisis. It represents construal of images of migrants-refugees crisis in poetic and media symbolic and technological environments in integration of verbal and visual modes. The verbal mode includes media and literary verbal images of refugee crisis. Audio-visual mode is represented by audial and/or visual elements, static and dynamic pictures or graphs accompanying poetic or media texts. In the analysed discursive space transcontextual links are established between migrants-refugees crisis and ecological crisis.