This paper integrates research on citizenship education and argumentation studies, positing that argumentative dialogue holds the potential to foster dynamic citizenship, which is essential in the co-creation of cities. Our contribution has a dual purpose. Firstly, we discuss the theoretical interrelation between argumentation studies and dynamic citizenship, focusing on the concept of ‘collaborative argumentation’, and taking the Toolkit for Educating to a Dynamic Citizenship project (TEDYC), addressed to young people aged 12 to 18, as an exemplar of this interrelation. Second, based on qualitative results from a test phase of the TEDYC project, we identify empirically what aspects related to argumentation emerge as prominently important for dynamic citizenship. Based on our findings, we discuss the importance of two aspects: promoting ‘inventio’ (discovering arguments) and reflecting on the delicate role of non-canonical third participants in argumentative discussions on the coconstruction of cities.

The concept of heritage preserves and promotes a brand’s storied past to maintain its symbolic appeal in the present and future (Hakala et al., Journal of Product and Brand Management 20:447–456, 2011). Through storytelling techniques, luxury fashion brands draw on their historical narratives to transmit values such as authenticity, continuity, and exclusivity via offline and online channels (Kapferer and Bastien, Digitalization in the luxury fashion industry. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020; Cabigiosu, Digitalization in the luxury fashion industry. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). A strategic use of heritage not only serves to strengthen brand identity but also provides a competitive advantage by linking creative legacy with cultural heritage and creating an emotional bond with consumers (Visconti, Communicating luxury brands through stories. In Morhart et al. (Eds.) Research handbook on luxury branding (pp. 203–221). Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020; Hakala et al., Journal of Product and Brand Management 20:447-456, 2011; Bernasconi et al., Storytelling empresarial: Relações públicas contador de histórias. Intercom, Sociedade Brasileira de Estudos Interdisciplinares da Comunicação, 2011). This study aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the role of heritage in the digital communication of luxury fashion brands Gucci and Louis Vuitton. The types of heritage-related arguments and rhetorical strategies the two brands use to create consistent storytelling are analysed by examining their official websites and Instagram accounts. Introducing the locus from internal authority as a new concept in argumentation studies offers a fresh perspective on how brands can leverage their history as a source of credibility.

In this study, we analyze the calls for action in a corpus of tweets with the hashtag #FashionRevolution, related to the 2020 Fashion Revolution week. We offer a linguistic analysis of the discourse of digital activism, relying on insights from pragmatics, discourse analysis, and argumentation. Our analysis focuses on the calls for action concerning the move towards a more sustainable fashion system, issued by account owners that do not have any impositive force on their audience. This leads us to showing that a variety of actors call for action through an imperative but also through other deontic structures. However, those responsible for carrying out the actions towards a fashion revolution are often left vague, in line with overall campaigning strategies. The motive for the call for action, crucial to convince, appears sometimes in an argument and/or through a reference to social or environmental sustainability. Through this case study, we then contribute to the linguistic analysis of digital activism, and to a better understanding of the challenges of bringing about behavioral change from a non-impositive position.

This paper sets out to analyse why dispute mediators identify disputants' euphoric and dysphoric emotions in the context of mediation discussions, turning them into "said" emotions. Our analysis is based on a corpus of seven role-played mediation sessions, which took place in French. Adopting the notion of strategic manoeuvring from argumentation studies, we consider recurring instances of the presentational device of naming emotions, as used by the mediators. Our findings show that the mediators name emotions in two ways. First, they identify dysphoric emotions that lie at the root of the parties' conflict, making these explicit. Second, they present to the parties a trajectory of their emotions, which moves from dysphoric to euphoric through the discussion that takes place during mediation. These two presentational strategies correspond to three functions that relate to the mediator's goal of helping the parties find a solution to their conflict: clarifying the core of the conflict, empowering the parties as co-arguers and making emotions part of an argumentative discussion.

Contagio e contatto tra convergenza a distanza

"Why are millions of dollars worth of orders being left unpaid?". With tweets like this questioning brands' policies, activists advocating for sustainable fashion re-discuss material starting points that are assumed by fashion brands, who argue that they are sustainable because they care about their workers' conditions. This paper argues that activists use tweets to open subdiscussions on material starting points to engage citizens and consumers, re-discussing factual data that brands take for granted, such as the fact that they provide fair conditions for their garment workers. Activists justify their opening of subdiscussions, often through an argumentative pattern that includes an argument based on the locus from effects to cause. They argue that if there are negative effects, the brand cannot claim to care about the conditions of its workers. In discussing how subdiscussions are used by fashion activists, this paper also introduces a conceptualization of Twitter argumentation as a discussion that is not isolated, but is part of a polylogical argumentation that takes place in different venues. For this reason, the argumentation used in tweets is reconstructed as a response to a fashion brand's communication campaigns around sustainability, which extend beyond the confines of Twitter. As an empirical illustration, this paper is based on the campaign targeting fashion retailer Primark; the dataset includes the brand's website as well as activists' tweets.

Examining a multilingual dataset of Twitter and Instagram messages posted by a variety of actors (NGOs and individual activists, small brands, and others) during the 2020 and 2021 Fashion Revolution Week campaigns for a more sustainable fashion system, we analyze frequently occurring discursive representations and self-representations that include individual mentions of persons or small brands. We show that individual mentions are mostly proposed in the tweets and Instagram messages posted by small brands and that they count as argumentation from example. Arguments based on a locus from example are part of two simultaneous argumentative patterns, responding to different issues and using two different maxims, respectively based on induction and from a principle 'from truth to possibility'; in the latter case, brands represent themselves as best practice cases, showing that a more sustainable fashion system is possible because it is already happening. Our findings contribute to explaining how the activity type of digital activism successfully integrates multiple goals of different actors (citizens, NGOs, brands) in the campaigning by offering the possibility of simultaneous argumentation.

We examine how the EU integration is narrated in news about asylum seekers. While extant research has examined representations of refugees in media, little attention has been paid to how the EU integration is imagined in such representations. Narration is of key importance to the ongoing EU integration and its contestation. The area of migration and asylum-seeking, in particular, generates terse conflicts between integration measures and individual member states over authority and power. As the EU attempted to coordinate a response to asylum seeking in 2015, 'media became the locus for institutional and intergovernmental clashes' (Maricut-Akbik, 2020, p.1). We demonstrate the differences and entanglements between ideological ideas in the representation of governments' and the EU's debate about the refugee distribution schema by newspapers in Germany, Italy, Poland and the UK, each differently positioned in respect to the EU and the asylum seekers. Further, we demonstrate the utility of Greimas' (1983) actantial schema to explicating ideological motivators in news narratives shaped by different state interests. We compare and tease out finer ideational points in representation of relations between governments and the EU as well as among the governments themselves and the ideological views informing these representations.

AbstractThis chapter introduces the volume and contextualises its scope, which covers communicative aspects of the current COVID-19 pandemic as well as the epidemic of misinformation from the perspective of argumentation theory. Argumentation theory is uniquely placed to understand and account for the challenges of public reason as expressed through argumentative discourse. The book thus focuses on the extent to which the forms, norms and functions of public argumentation have changed in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. This question is investigated along descriptive, normative and prescriptive research lines at the core of the COST Action project CA 17132: European network for Argumentation and Public PoLicY analysis (APPLY). Contributions are divided into three groups, which (i) examine various features and aspects of public and institutional discourse about the COVID-19 pandemic, (ii) scrutinise the way health policies have been discussed, debated, attacked and defended in the public sphere, and (iii) consider a range of measures meant to improve the quality of public discourse, and public deliberation in particular, in such a way that concrete proposals for argumentative literacy are brought to light.

Argumentative Style discusses the various ways in which the defence of a standpoint is given shape in argumentative discourse. In this innovative study the new notion – ‘argumentative style’ – introduced for this purpose is situated in the theoretical framework of the pragma-dialectical approach to argumentation. This means that the choices involved in utilising a particular argumentative style do not only concern the presentational dimension, but also the topical selection and the audience adaptation of the strategic manoeuvring taking place in the discourse. In identifying the functional variety of the argumentative styles utilised in the political, the diplomatic, the legal, the facilitatory, the academic, and the medical domain, the point of departure is that these argumentative styles manifest themselves in the discourse in the argumentative moves that are made, the dialectical routes that are chosen and the strategic considerations that are brought to bear.

This article reviews The quest for argumentative equivalence. Argumentative patterns in political interpreting contexts

In light of the ongoing public controversy surrounding fashion sustainability, this paper sets out to identify misalignments that relate to the definitions of sustainable fashion. It does so by examining the discourse of different agents in this polylogical argumentation - fashion companies and the European Parliament as well as citizens, small brands and NGOs - as revealed through documents and tweets published online. Our findings show misalignments in the opening stage of the argumentative discussion at the level of explicit and implicit definitions of sustainability as well as in how the agents responsible are discursively portrayed. We argue that the existence of these misalignments may explain the ongoing controversy surrounding sustainable fashion: the different actors do not share univocal starting points and representations of this phenomenon. Methodologically, this paper also advances research on argumentative polylogues, by demonstrating a method for comparing argumentation by different actors using different data sources.

While these lines were written, Taliban were conquering Afghanistan, establishing a regime of terror in the country, while concurrently provoking a wide conflict in the Western public sphere about responsibilities and consequences of this situation. More specifically, Europe witnesses a racist and xenophobic wave of discourses against a new possible escape of refugees toward Europe; presently such discourses abound in politics and the media. It is more than a truism nowadays that, in crisis-stricken Europe, there is an increasing politicization of migration, which takes place against the background and mutual overlapping of diverse crises. More specifically, migration has become a focal and quite polarizing issue in the European public sphere especially since the numbers of refugees, escaping from conflict territories of the Middle East (e. g., Syria), crossing the Mediterranean, dramatically increased starting in 2014 (Bevelander & Wodak, 2019a). The so-called “refugee crisis,” as this movement was portrayed by mainstream media and powerful political figures in Europe (Krzyżanowski, Triandafyllidou, & Wodak, 2018), contributed to social and economic tensions (such as the Eurozone “debt crisis”) that took place in the European Union and played into Brexit that followed.

The present paper analyses discursive representations and standpoint-arguments pairs, realized in articles of four mainstream Italian newspapers that report on migrants’ and refugees’ mobilization at the perceived peak of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ (2015–2017). We draw on the scholarly agenda of Critical Discourse Studies, employing tools from corpus linguistic perspectives, which allow us to generalize over the way in which the relevant minorities are represented in our corpus. Then, focusing on a smaller sample of negative representations, we outline a methodological synthesis in order to scrutinize instances of representational meaning in newspapers articles and trace what is argumentatively inferred in discursive representations. To that end we exploit tools from systemic functional and cognitive linguistics as well as the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT) for the analysis of inference. In this sense, we demonstrate how discriminatory representations do not only portray migrants and refugees in a negative light but also justify discrimination through the argumentative dynamic they develop.

This paper shows that reframing of conflict can be considered as a constitutive element of a "reconciliatory argumentative style" (van Eemeren, 2019), which is typical of dispute mediators, whose aim is to steer parties towards the resolution of their conflict. On the basis of a systematic empirical analysis of mediation cases, we first show that reframing encompasses a change of issue, which may or may not be justified by arguments. Then, we show how it is functional to the three aspects of mediators' strategic manoeuvring, being used consistently by mediators in their effort to help parties solve their conflict on the basis of reasonable discussion.

This paper analyzes the social media debate on sustainable fashion on the basis of a multilingual dataset of Instagram posts and tweets. We focus on how women are discursively represented in terms of agentivity and how this is associated to different argumentative strategies. Our findings reveal a clear link between an argumentation denouncing the “ill” of the fashion system and women represented as victims; and between arguments proposing a “cure” to the problem and women represented either as recipients of a positive action or as agents bringing about change. Positive representation of women as agents is often made through arguments based on concrete examples, which show that change is already happening.