France

industry 4.0

trade unions

attitude

multimodality

## **The Linguistic Construction of Emotional Challenges in a Changing Society**


**Languaging Diversity** is the itinerating conference of the [I-Land Interuniversity Research Centre](https://www.unior.it/index2.php?content_id=14038&content_id_start=1&titolo=i-land-research-centre&parLingua=ENG), an international independent and interdisciplinary center for advanced studies in Linguistics, Social Sciences and the Humanities with a focus on the key notions of identity and diversity, from a linguistic, cultural, and gender studies perspective, in and across cultures. 

Following the six successful events hosted by the Universities of Naples (2013), Catania (2014), Macerata (2016), Cagliari (2017), Antwerp (2018) and Teruel (2019), the seventh edition of the Languaging Diversity Conference (LD2021) will be organized by the University of Lille, France. Due to the COVID-19 ongoing pandemic, the event will be held exclusively online via the virtual conference management platform [Underline](https://underline.io/).


**Focus **

The 7th edition of the Languaging Diversity Conference (LD2021) focuses on the emotional challenges that result from the social innovations of the last two decades, and on the way such experiences are expressed in discourse. Conference convenors invite papers and posters that investigate the intersection of emotion, communication and social change, also within the framework of digital communication. The contributions presented at the LD2021 conference will explore the expression of emotion(s) at the different levels of linguistic description (phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, semantic, pragmatic, discursive), and in texts and contexts related to traditional and digital genres in different domains, including (but not restricted to) health, medicine and science, media, politics, the law, academia, the world of corporate and institutional work, education and learning. 


**Conference convenors**

* Giuditta Caliendo, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Maarten Lemmens, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Mégane Lesuisse, Université de Lille & STL, France

 
**Scientific Committee**

* Giuseppe Balirano, Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘l’Orientale’, Italy
* Henry Hernandez Bayter, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Stéphanie Caët, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Giuditta Caliendo, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Bert Cappelle, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Paola Catenaccio, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
* Emmanuelle Canut, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Stefania D’Avanzo, Università degli Studi della Campania ‘Luigi Vanvitelli’, Italy
* Ilse Depraetere, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Emilia Di Martino, Università degli Studi ‘Suor Orsola Benincasa’, Italy
* Antonio Fruttaldo, Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘l’Orientale’, Italy
* Dariusz Galasiński, Uniwersytet Wrocławski, Poland
* Kim Grego, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
* Siria Guzzo, Università degli Studi di Salerno, Italy
* Geert Jacobs, Universiteit Gent, Belgium
* Samantha Laporte, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Maarten Lemmens, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Mégane Lesuisse, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Jeannette Littlemore, University of Birmingham, UK
* Julien Longhi, Université de Cergy-Pontoise, France
* Corinne Oster, Université de Lille & CECILLE, France
* Paolo Mairano, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Antonella Napolitano, Università del Sannio, Italy
* Maria Cristina Nisco, Università degli studi di Napoli ‘Parthenope’, Italy
* Annick Rivens Mompean, Université de Lille & STL, France 
* Margaret Rasulo, Università degli Studi della Campania ‘Luigi Vanvitelli’, Italy
* Catherine Ruchon,Université Sorbonne Paris Nord -Pléiade, France
* Hans-Jörg Schmid, LMU München, Germany
* Jerome Tessuto, Università degli Studi della Campania ‘Luigi Vanvitelli’, Italy


[**Organizing Committee**](https://ld2021.sciencesconf.org/)

* Giuditta Caliendo, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Justin Duquesnoy, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Océane Foubert, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Lola Marinato, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Maarten Lemmens, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Mégane Lesuisse, Université de Lille & STL, France
* Sayf-Eddine Mohamed, Université de Lille & STL, France

**Keynote Speakers**

**Maïa Ponsonnet**
<iframe width=640 height=360 style="border:0;" scrolling="no" src="https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/crQUbGV6Kgz" allowfullscreen="true"></iframe>

**Jeannette Littlemore**
<iframe width=640 height=360 style="border:0;" scrolling="no" src="https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cr6i2TVX2d0" allowfullscreen="true"></iframe>

**Andrea Scarantino**
<iframe width=640 height=360 style="border:0;" scrolling="no" src="https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/crQUbEV6KgI" allowfullscreen="true"></iframe>

To access the **Languaging Diversity 2021** conference, please remember to [register.](https://ld2021.sciencesconf.org/registration) 

Languaging Diversity 2021

Languaging Diversity  is the itinerating conference of the I-Land Interuniversity Research Centre, an international independent and interdisciplinary center for advanced studies in Linguistics, Social Sciences and the Humanities with a focus on the key notions of identity and diversity, from a linguistic, cultural, and gender studies perspective, in and across cultures. 

The technological changes in the sphere of production that we have witnessed in the last 10 years have been of such significance as to be called “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (Industry 4.0), thus an important step beyond the “Digital Revolution” of the late 20th century. Innovations such as robotics, artificial intelligence, the internet of things, and the development of algorithms, all point in the same direction: that of reducing human intervention in the production process to a minimum. 
Indeed, fears have emerged that artificial intelligence will create a huge reserve army of labour. The working and middle classes worry that computers and machines will end up taking their jobs and this will leave individuals and families with no possibilities of earning a leaving for themselves. These fears are very real and create growing anxiety among workers. 

Nonetheless, human labour is still needed in many different moments in the process of production and distribution of the goods that we consume. Thus, we are now in a situation in which human and artificial intelligence interact, with the latter taking up the role that once was of the line manager in the Fordist factory – dictating the speed and quality of work required – in many “traditional” industries, or directly as a substitute for the employers, as it is the case in the uberised ones, such as food delivery. This situation has serious implications for workers’ rights as well as for the construal of their identity as workers. Indeed, “workers governed by AI […] often fall through the cracks of employment legislation both with respect to their employment status as well as protections from discrimination and unfair dismissal.” (Walker et al., 2021, p. 29). 

The issues of identity referred to above constitute a major problem for organising resistance to unfair practices in the “workplace”, but recently some new forms of organisation have started to emerge. 
A case in point is the attempt at organising the workforce of one of the most famous and powerful tech giants, Alphabet, which is the corporation that owns Google, among many other enterprises. Indeed, on January 4th, 2021 the new Alphabet Workers Union was launched to combine “the struggle for the soul of Alphabet with the broader working-class struggle in America and around the world” as the organisation states in its website (Alphabet Workers Union, 2021, p. Section Meet CWA). Issues of identity are addressed in the homepage of the union, with relational clauses (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) such as “we are empathetic workers”, and “we are technologists who trust each other” (Alphabet Workers Union, 2021, sec. Home), that attach emotions and feelings to the members of the Union. 
Using language that does not shy away from feelings is something unusual in the history of organised labour, so we could say that innovation in the production process has finally produced innovation in the language of union mobilisation and its communicative techniques. 

This paper aims at describing this new, emotional language of the Alphabet Workers Union as a form of resistance to the dehumanising rule of the algorithm. It is expected that, in the process, the anxieties and fears of the workforce will be highlighted and defined. At the same time, positive feelings and emotions attached to the re-humanising experience of pursuing a shared and collective goal are also bound to emerge.
The corpus analysed in the paper is made up of texts belonging to different genres so as to fully represent the social practice of union organising in all its semiotic aspects, from the most public to the ones used for internal communication (Askehave & Swales, 2001; Bhatia, 2008, 2015; Martin, 2014; Swales, 1990). The ideational and textual aspects of individual texts are analysed in depth through Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004), while the analysis of the interpersonal aspect, i.e. the way in which social relationships are enacted through linguistic choices, is undertaken through the ‘appraisal’ paradigm developed by Martin and White (2005) as a system that accounts for the use of “semantic resources used to negotiate emotions, judgements, and valuations” (Martin, 2000, p. 145). 

References

Alphabet Workers Union. (2021). Alphabet Workers Union. Alphabet Workers Union. /
Askehave, I., & Swales, J. M. (2001). Genre identification and communicative purpose: A problem and a possible solution. Applied Linguistics, 22(2), 195–212. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/22.2.195
Bhatia, V. K. (2008). Towards Critical Genre Analysis. In V. K. Bhatia, J. Flowerdew, & R. H. Jones (Eds.), Advances in Discourse Studies (pp. 166–177).
Bhatia, V. K. (2015). Critical Genre Analysis: Theoretical Preliminaries. HERMES - Journal of Language and Communication in Business, 27(54), 9–20.
Halliday, M., & Matthiessen, C. (2004). An Introduction to Functional Grammar (3rd ed.). Hodder Education.
Martin, J. R. (2000). Beyond Exchange: APPRAISAL Systems in English. In S. Hunston & G. Thompson, Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse (pp. 142–175). Oxford University Press.
Martin, J. R. (2014). Looking out: Functional linguistics and genre. Linguistics & the Human Sciences, 9(3), 307–321. https://doi.org/10.1558/lhs.v9i3.307
Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. R. (2005). The language of evaluation: Appraisal in English. Palgrave Macmillan.
Swales, J. (1990). Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge University Press.
Walker, M., Fleming, P., & Berti, M. (2021). ‘You can’t pick up a phone and talk to someone’: How algorithms function as biopower in the gig economy. Organization, 28(1), 26–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508420978831


Organising in the Industry 4.0: the rise of the "Empathetic Union"

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Organising in the Industry 4.0: the rise of the "Empathetic Union"

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