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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1410

Part of Session 168: Sociolinguistics of revolution in world’s capital cities (Other abstracts in this session)

Street Slogans in Greece: The Genre, Social Practice and Recontextualizations of an Anti-authoritarian Youth Culture.

Authors: Kitis, E. Dimitris
Submitted by: Kitis, E. Dimitris (King's College London, United Kingdom)

The focus of the presentation is a transgressive type of graffiti, which is common in urban environments in Greece and is here termed street slogans. The term ‘street slogans’ is used to differentiate this heterogeneous genre of radical communication from the broader phenomenon of global urban graffiti cultures. Street slogan discourse, however, is also enacted in other formats, such as print media (posters, fliers, banners, placards, newspapers, magazines), electronic media (social media, digital video, blogs, corporate media websites, file sharing and activist networks) or verbally by groups in demonstrations. The data viewed in this presentation consists of a) street slogans in photographic and printed format; b) my own experience from fieldwork; c) digital text/image/video from various online fora. In order to analyse street slogans, I see them: firstly, as texts, secondly, emplaced within urban space and, thirdly, through their various uses in action. Consequently, I have respectively used: a) multiple linguistic tools for their analysis as texts; b) photography and semiotics; and c) videos to analyze street slogans as performances. As a natural extension of this analysis, I also look at the recontextualizations of street slogans in the mass media by adopting a discourse analytic perspective on (video) excerpts from the news. The analysis of the data has led to the following findings: a) street slogans are a hybrid, multimodal genre comprised of short forceful utterances and humorous puns that effectively subvert linguistic norms and widely accepted truths; b) street slogans make use of an array of linguistic and non-linguistic devices of referentiality and indexicality to interact with their immediate context (situation, urban space); c) street slogans constitute embodied, confrontational performances by (hooded) youths and enable sequences of common action and ritual; and finally d) street slogans may undergo numerous recontextualizations, such as attracting media attention in times of social crisis. The first three findings are seen as different facets of negotiating a common ‘anti-authoritarian’ identity by a youth culture. The fourth point examines the nature of the relationship between street slogans, the ‘anti-authoritarian’ youth culture and the mass media.