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Well-being in academia is obviously tied to levels of burnout experienced by academics. Why are these levels increasing and how is their increase related to the marketization and neoliberalisation of universities? What should we, as academics, do in order to counter this trend and improve both our well-being and that of our students as well as society? These questions are addressed through experimental writing, employing techniques that are unusual for linguistics, namely autoethnography, in order to reflect on academic careers and the problems of mental health and harassment experienced by PhD students. Drawing inspiration from “transformative praxis”, this paper describes the approach of social justice teaching and conscientization. Focusing in particular on the theme of environmental education, the paper reflects on how introducing social justice teaching in academic courses is likely to prove helpful to prevent burnout and dissatisfaction. The second part of the paper describes the author’s experience with university courses about ecolinguistics and the feedback received from students, including a selection of their comments.

The climate crisis, migration and urbanization may appear as three separate crises, but under Sheller’s paradigm of Mobility Justice, they become part of a coherent whole that should be tackled as a single, complex and interconnected predicament. This paper observes rhetorical strategies employed in texts about the climate crisis, about cycling advocacy and about the “climate lockdown” conspiracy theory, which developed in Oxford, UK, in 2023. The metaphors, deictic pronouns and identity categories used are the main discourse features analysed through a qualitative approach, showing how mobility-related issues are often discussed through spatial metaphors, while deictic pronouns play a central role in the creation of identities. The findings are employed to contribute to the beneficial reframing of mobility-related discourses, whether global or local, and to react to climate inaction. The overall aim of this approach is to reveal the links between discourses about the climate crisis on a global scale and those on a local, urban scale concerning urban mobility policies. The prism through which both global and local discourses are observed is that of space and access to mobility. The aim of this investigation is to identify new patterns of language that can help us finding “new stories to live by”.

The inaugural speech of the new President of The United States is one of those rare cases in news translation in which it is possible to identify a Source Text (ST) and compare it to several Target Texts (TTs). This paper focuses on what was reported in eight Italian national daily newspapers concerning the inaugural address of Donald Trump in 2017 on the day following his inaugural address. It provides an overview of the different choices and levels of translation visibility that were observed in the selected newspapers, observing full translations, paratexts and migrated segments embedded in articles describing the inaugural. Through a focus on the ST-TT comparison – employing Selective Appropriation (Valdeón, 2008) and Munday’s Evaluation paradigm (2012) – this investigation shows how the comparative analysis of translations can also be employed to enrich the textual analysis of the inaugural itself. Ideological translation choices are explored, focusing in particular on a case of omission in the right-wing Libero – which openly appreciated the election of Trump – and a case of addition in the communist Il Manifesto – which openly deplored Trump.