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Multimodality is a new developing approach in linguistic studies which investigates various modes of meaning — from images to text and music. Women’s empowerment is the process where women are able to have greater choice and to seize more opportunities to improve their quality of life. However, sexual harassment, in particular, is a serious obstacle to achieve it and to women’s full realization of their human rights, because it restricts their freedom to move, study and work. Thus, this study sought to apply the principles of Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar (2006) to conduct a multimodal analysis of a selection of anti-harassment posters published online and designed by Women between 2011 and 2017 in three different campaigns to observe the verbal and visual manifestations of women’s empowerment discourse. It aimed to study how these posters promote women’s self-confidence to encourage them to liberate themselves from patriarchal domination and to believe in their capabilities to overcome sexual harassment as one of the most oppressive dangers that threaten their participation in their societies.Keywords: Multimodality, Visual Grammar, posters, women’s empowerment, sexual harassment, Feminism. Received: 08 November 2022 Accepted: 04 September 2023 Published: 12 September 2023

This study investigates diasporic identity in Arab– American autobiographies. It particularly tackles the question of diasporic identity representation and its impact on the projection of individual self-perception in accordance with the different social contexts and ideological leaning; it aims at explaining how different social contexts, that the authors encounter and experience, affect their own identity. The study employs insights from autoethnography and socio-cognitive inquiries to examine two Arab- American memoirs; Leila Ahmed’s (1999) “A Border Passage” and Edward Said’s (1999) “Out of Place”. The research adopts the “Interpretive Autoethnography” approach, postulated by Denzin (2014), to engage with the question of self-perception and identity representation through an analysis of the self- writings of the authors. The study also adopts van Dijk’s (2016) Socio-cognitive discourse studies framework to analyze the authors’ language to reflect their self-perception, and by extension, identity. Received: 06 November 2022 Accepted: 15 March 2023Published: 01 May 2023

This paper investigates the representation of the Syrian human crisis through the conceptual metaphor of the “Other”. It particularly examines how conceptual metaphor plays a role in the representation of the Syrian human crisis in British Newspaper Articles. It also highlights the use of “Us” vs. “Them” dichotomy in the representation of both groups in the selected newspaper articles. Utilizing Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and cross-domain mapping, along with Van Dijk’s (1995) Ideological Square (IS), the paper examines the use of conventionalized and novel conceptual metaphors in the representation of the Syrian human crisis in British newspaper articles. 100 newspaper articles about the crisis are collected from three British newspapers (The Guardian, The Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph) between 2014 and 2016. The paper concludes with a discussion of how these newspapers make use of conceptual metaphor to portray Syrian refugees as THREAT, OBJECTS, WATER, ANIMALS and ILLNESS/DISEASE. Moreover, the use of “Us” vs. “Them” dichotomy indicates social distance and contributes to the representation of Syrian refugees as the “Other”. Words like “immigrants” and “asylum seekers” are also used in addition to “refugees” to refer to Syrians. The oscillation between these labels highlights the strategy mainstream media follows to strip Syrian refugees from the official rights identified by the United Nations.

This paper tackles the problematics of domesticating the Islamic identity-strand of the Arab Middle East in metropolitan translation in post-Arab Spring Egypt. The researcher particularly engages with the changing politics of cultural translation (from Arabic into English) and their ramification with respect to the changing parameters of both the top-level process of cultural representation of the non-Western Other, and the production conditions enabling the transposition of Ibrahim Essa’s مولانا [Maulana] (Essa 2012) into its English translation The Televangelist (2016) by the Journalist-turned literary translator, Jonathan Wright. Written by the Egyptian journalist-writer, Ibrahim Essa, the novel signals the journalistic entry into Arabic literary production and patronage nuanced by the changing cultural politics of the post-revolutionary context. The novel fictively dramatizes the Egyptian Muslim preacher movement—what has been academically codified in terms of politics of piety and ‘satellite piety’ (Mahmood 2005; Abou Bakr 2013) – and the movement’s enmeshment in the new media technology, power-politics, and the changing political and social identity of contemporary Egypt. The English translation The Televangelist (2016) augurs a similar turn in the production and promotion of Arabic literature in translation marked by the journalistic identity of the translator and the new American University of Cairo Press imprint (AUCP), Hoopoe Fiction (2016), through which the translation (debut production) is launched and promoted. The research aims to address the question of the political impact of carving a niche market for a transfigured cultural politics for the Arab Middle East through the new AUC imprint, Hoopoe Fiction, and its implication for both the politically induced cultural branding of the New Middle East and the interfaith agenda of global governance. This is done through instrumentalizing 'translation from the margin' and 'marginal translation' (Yuste Frías 2012, 2015) to enable the decolonizing of Euro-centric parameters of translation studies and thence the decoding of the political instrumentalization of translation geo-historical location in the global matrix of power and forthcoming imperial designs.

This paper investigates the different verbal and non-verbal meaning making resources manifested in the speeches of Akron, Ohio and Phoenix, Arizona delivered by Donald Trump during his presidential campaign in 2016. The way verbal and non-verbal resources combine or interact intersemiotically unravels how Donald Trump attempts to affect his audience and reveal his populist leadership. For that end, the researcher carried out an analysis that is divided into two sections. Section one is devoted to a ‘themes’ analysis to isolate the overarching themes and illuminate the major topics addressed by President Donald Trump to seek his audience’s support. Section two follows SF-MDA which relies on Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (Halliday, 1978, 1994; Halliday Matthiessen, 2004/2014) for the analysis of verbal meaning- making resources and Kress and Van Leeuwen’s visual grammar (1996/2006) for the analysis of non-verbal resources. The analysis reveals that both verbal and non-verbal meaning-making resources, in terms of representational, interactive and compositional meanings, work intersemiotically to deliver a full account of meaning and unravel Donald Trump's populist leadership.