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This paper studies undergraduate students' perceptions about using Google Docs® for guided writing of the final assessment in an Academic Writing course at a Higher Education level. Qualitative data have been collected through a Moodle survey and analysed employing Thematic Analysis. The aim is to see if students' perceptions matched with their teacher's aims, which were to reduce assessment anxiety toward a new and complex writing assignment such as a Literature Review; help working more effectively and reduce procrastination; and possibly enhance success rate. Results show that overall, students liked the technical features (autosaving, accessibility), the guidelines and examples contained in the template shared, and the role of the teacher as controller and provider of feedback and feedforward. Yet some few divergences between the teacher's aim and students' perceptions emerged: some students did not like working on-line, expressed preference for Microsoft Word®, found the procedure time-consuming or constraining, or even too easy. Most importantly, some students felt stressed about being watched. Therefore, if teachers want to adopt the same procedure, they should make sure they explain as clearly as possible the aims of the use of technology to maximize effectiveness and minimize students' resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From a critical discursive perspective, this paper analyses the documentary Tourist go home! which produces a populist anti-tourism discourse, in which tourism is framed in terms of cultural and economic anxiety. Cultural anxiety is based on the construction of danger for people and places threatened by the arrival of many mobile Others and echoes anti-immigration discourse, typical of Right-wing populism; similarities can be seen also in terms of discursive strategies such as instilling fear, praising the past, opposing we-locals vs them, personalizing the Other and devices such as metaphors of danger, quantification, and exclusive deixis. Economic anxiety is based on the construction of winners and losers and resonates with a Left-wing populist discourse reclaiming wealth redistribution and popular sovereignty; similarities concern discursive strategies such as opposing we/loser/People vs them/winners/Elite; praising the People and despising the Elite; depersonalizing the Other; and devices such as metaphors, qualification, and inclusive deixis. The analysis also revealed the ideological dilemmas of this anti-tourism discourse, including the conflicting relationship with cosmopolitanism, asymmetry in the right to the city, an economic conception of tourists as resources, the horizontal (elsewhere) and vertical (above) displacement of the outgroup (Elite) to preserve the ingroup (People) homogeneity and inclusiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this paper I critically analyze the work of Shepard Fairey, the street artist better known as OBEY, as a multimodal discourse. After introducing the notion of street art, I analyze Fairey’s aesthetics, inspired in Pop Art and Soviet Constructivism, as well as his accounts on his own art, in order to unveil his ideology. I then discuss a particular case, concerning the pastiche of the Che Guevara’s image. I will show that the seemingly subversive nature of OBEY’s work, is nothing more than marketing. Consequently, by industrially (re)producing and commodifiying dissent, OBEY banalizes and deactivates it. According to the dichotomy between oppositional and emergent discourses, I conclude that OBEY enacts only an oppositional behavior. Moreover, by ‘manufacturing propaganda dissent’, OBEY performs protest, but in doing so he contributes to perpetuating the system he says he fights against. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research note deals with the so-called “political ,” i.e. the use of instead of the or prescribed by standard orthography in the Spanish linguistic landscape. This feature can be linked to the “politics of protest,” indexing writers' anarchist stance or membership in radical, left-wing groups. In 2011, the Spanish bank Bankia used in the tagline of one of its advertisements:hazte bankero(“become a banker”). This re-semiotization of by Bankia has turned urban public spaces into a site of conflict and contestation. On the one hand, the bank trivialized a small but powerful symbol of political, grassroots dissent. On the other hand, it triggered resistance from groups traditionally associated with the use of , namely the 15M Movement (Movimiento 15MorM15M), who renounced to use it in its protests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project consists of the multidisciplinary analysis of the persuasive strategies used in a regional TV commercial to promote GADIS, a Galician (Spain) supermarket chain. The video, which provoked an overwhelmingly positive reaction within Galician society, strategically appeals nationalistic feelings in order to achieve specific commercial objectives. In this commercial GADIS presents itself as a company that defends local attributes (Galician, Galicians, and 'Galicianness') against foreign ones. The speaker, by playing off positive stereotypical features of Galicia and inverting negative ones, builds and conveys a positive image of Galicia which is intended to make Galicians proud of their Galicianness. In order to make the advertisements more acceptable, GADIS praises the Galicians through the use of humor and irony, which serves to mitigate the nationalism presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I will analyze, as an example of political discourse, the songs used by Spain's two main political parties in the 2008 general elections. Just like other texts used in political electoral discourse (such as speeches, interviews, meetings, posters, advertisements or videos), these songs form a part of a public and ideological discourse aimed at the election of a candidate. The whole of the candidate's discourse is aimed at convincing the electorate that she/he and his/her party are the best choice (legitimation), while the opposing candidate is the worst (delegitimation). In this paper, I will analyze how this strategy, quite typical in political ideological electoral discourse, is put into practice in the two songs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]