Agrarian learning processes in Switzerland 1918–1939

This paper examines the social impacts of weather extremes and the processes of social and communicative learning a society undertakes to find alternative ways to deal with the consequences of a crisis. In the beginning of the 20th Century hunger seemed to be expelled from Europe. Switzerland – like many other European countries – was involved in a global interdependent trade system, which provided necessary goods. But at the end of World War I very cold and wet summers in 1916/17 (causing crop failure) and the difficulties in war-trade led to malnutrition and enormous price risings of general living-standards in Switzerland, which shocked the people and caused revolutionary uprisings in 1918. The experience of malnutrition during the last two years of war made clear that the traditional ways of food supply in Switzerland lacked crisis stability. Therefore various agents in the field of food production, distribution and consumption searched for alternative ways of food supply. In that sense politicians, industrialists, consumer-groups, left-wing communitarians and farmers developed several strategies for new ways in food production. Traditionally there were political conflicts in Switzerland between farmers and consumers regarding price policies, which led mainly to the conflict in 1918. Consumers accused famers of holding back food to control extortionate prices while the farmers pointed to the bad harvest causing the price rising. The collaboration of these groups in search for new forms of food-stability made social integration possible again. In addition to other crisis-factors, weather extremes can have disastrous impacts and destroy a society’s self-confidence to its core. But even such crisis can lead to processes of substantial learning that allows a regeneration of confidence and show positive influence on political stabilization. The paper focuses on the process of learning and the alternative methods of food production that were suggested by various agents working in the field during the Interwar period. To achieve that goal documents of the various associations are analyzed and newspapers have been taken into consideration. Through the method of discourse-analysis of food-production during the Interwar period, possible solutions that crossed the minds of the agents should be brought to light.

"Two hundred ninety-four": Remediation and multimodal performance in tourist placemaking

We offer here a multimodal discourse analysis of a range of verbal (writing and speech), nonverbal (movement and gesture) and technological (photography and video) resources used by tourists at the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In doing so, we pin-point the recycling and layering of mediatized representations (e.g. guidebooks and official brochures), mediated actions (e.g. climbing the Tower or posing in front of it), and remediated practices (e.g. posting a YouTube video of oneself climbing the 294 steps to the top of the Tower). Through this kind of empirically-based examination of tourists’ discursive and embodied performances – their ways of talking about and behaving in spaces – we witness how people never simply visit places but are always actively shaping and making these places. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is, therefore, as much an emergent production of the tourist imagination as it is a pre-existing, lop-sided construction of stone.

Dialect features indexing hipster identity on social media: the case of the city of Malaga

Identity is a recurrent research interest in current sociolinguistics and it is also of primary interest in digital discourse studies. Identity construction is closely related to stance and style (Eckert 2008; Jaffe 2009), which are fundamental concepts for understanding the language use and its social meanings in the case of social media users from Malaga. As the specific social meanings of a set of dialect features constitute a style, this style and the social (and technological) context in which the variants are used determine the meanings that are actually associated with each variant. Hence, every variant has its own indexical field covering any number of potential meanings. The Spanish spoken in Malaga, as Andalusian Spanish in general, was in the past often times considered an incorrect, low prestige variety of Spanish which was strongly associated with the poor, rural, backward South of Spain. This southern Spanish variety is easily recognised because of its innovative phonetic features that diverge from the national standard. In this study several of these phonetic dialect features are looked at, which users from Malaga purposefully employ (in a textualised form) on social media for identity construction. This identity construction is analysed through interactional and ethnographic methods: A perception and an imitation task served as key data and were supplemented by answers to a series of open questions. Further data stems from visual, multimodal elements (e.g. images, photos, videos) posted by users from the city of Malaga. The program TAMS Analyzer was used for data codification and analysis. Results show that certain features that in spoken language are considered rural and old-fashioned, acquire new meaning on social media, namely of urbanity and fashion. Moreover, these features, if used online, are associated with hipsters. That is, the “cool” social media index the “coolness” of the dialect features in question and, thus, the mediatisation makes their indexical fields even more multi-layered and dynamic. Social media users from Malaga performatively employ these stylised dialect features to project a hipster identity and certain related stances.