Representation of Environmental Activism in Pakistani News and Social Media: Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis
Nabeel Hassan
Докладчик
студент 2 курса
Национальный исследовательский университет «Высшая школа экономики»
Национальный исследовательский университет «Высшая школа экономики»
Ключевые слова, аннотация
This study investigates the representation of environmental activism in both Pakistani traditional news and social media. A corpus of 200 articles from 2022 to 2026, drawn from news and social media posts, will reveal differences in how environmental activism is represented in news and on social media. Using van Leeuwen’s approach to social actor representaion it will find out the most prevalent verbal means of representation.
Тезисы
Keywords: CDA; news discourse; media discourse; representation; social actors
This study aims to uncover the most dominant verbal means used to represent Pakistani environmental activism in Pakistani news and digital media discourse. This research will use a mixed approach of corpus linguistics tools and van Leeuwen’s approach to the representation of social actors. A sample of 200 articles and Facebook*, X and TikTok posts within the period of 2022 to 2026 from six national news outlets will be analyzed. The anticipated results of the study will determine that traditional Pakistani news media is attributing the activism narrative to nature by highlighting the disaster and catastrophe it has created. While social media constantly questions the failure of government and institutions involved in tackling environmental issues. The research indicates that it is pertinent to make and design a solution-oriented environmental activism narrative both in the news and on social media.
Pakistan is ranked among the top five climate-vulnerable countries in the world (Climate Risk Index, 2025). Recent years, particularly 2022, brought catastrophic monsoons, floods and heavy rainfalls in the country despite its less than 1 % contribution to global warming. According to a World Bank report (2023), during these floods 1700 people lost their lives, eight million people were displaced and 9.1 % of households were forced to join people living below the national poverty line. Both news and social media play a pivotal role in representing environmental activism particularly in a country such as Pakistan with diverse audiences and reach. However, the representation of this activism might not be the same in both platforms due to limitations, restrictions, goals and target audience. The primary analytical framework which will be used for this research is Van Leeuwen’s (2008) framework of social actor representation, which is based on CDA principles to investigate how social actors are textually excluded, included, passivated, activated and categorized. The taxonomical categorization in this theory will act as a tool for exploring environmental discourse in both news and digital media. This research will adopt both quantitative and qualitative research methods. It will apply Theo van Leeuwen’s socio-semantic categories to examine the representation of environmental activism and corpus-based lexico-semantic analysis of the data using two corpus managers. The data of the research will be collected manually using an online thematic search based on keywords for the print media and a hashtag search to collect data from social media. The finding will reveal that news media uses activation for government linked organizations and passivation to convey info about activists and movements working on grassroots level. On the contrary, social media is engaged in highlighting the activists’ milestones and success stories of those working in the communities. It always leaves a question for those responsible using passivation.
This study aims to uncover the most dominant verbal means used to represent Pakistani environmental activism in Pakistani news and digital media discourse. This research will use a mixed approach of corpus linguistics tools and van Leeuwen’s approach to the representation of social actors. A sample of 200 articles and Facebook*, X and TikTok posts within the period of 2022 to 2026 from six national news outlets will be analyzed. The anticipated results of the study will determine that traditional Pakistani news media is attributing the activism narrative to nature by highlighting the disaster and catastrophe it has created. While social media constantly questions the failure of government and institutions involved in tackling environmental issues. The research indicates that it is pertinent to make and design a solution-oriented environmental activism narrative both in the news and on social media.
Pakistan is ranked among the top five climate-vulnerable countries in the world (Climate Risk Index, 2025). Recent years, particularly 2022, brought catastrophic monsoons, floods and heavy rainfalls in the country despite its less than 1 % contribution to global warming. According to a World Bank report (2023), during these floods 1700 people lost their lives, eight million people were displaced and 9.1 % of households were forced to join people living below the national poverty line. Both news and social media play a pivotal role in representing environmental activism particularly in a country such as Pakistan with diverse audiences and reach. However, the representation of this activism might not be the same in both platforms due to limitations, restrictions, goals and target audience. The primary analytical framework which will be used for this research is Van Leeuwen’s (2008) framework of social actor representation, which is based on CDA principles to investigate how social actors are textually excluded, included, passivated, activated and categorized. The taxonomical categorization in this theory will act as a tool for exploring environmental discourse in both news and digital media. This research will adopt both quantitative and qualitative research methods. It will apply Theo van Leeuwen’s socio-semantic categories to examine the representation of environmental activism and corpus-based lexico-semantic analysis of the data using two corpus managers. The data of the research will be collected manually using an online thematic search based on keywords for the print media and a hashtag search to collect data from social media. The finding will reveal that news media uses activation for government linked organizations and passivation to convey info about activists and movements working on grassroots level. On the contrary, social media is engaged in highlighting the activists’ milestones and success stories of those working in the communities. It always leaves a question for those responsible using passivation.