Protest Signs and #SayTheirNames: Using Multimodal Analysis and Autoethnography to Understand Rural Student Protesters

• In Event: Social Semiotic Approaches to Understanding Emotions, Symbolic Play, Languacultural Landscape, Activism, and Abductive Reasoning

Abstract

In a small, conservative community in the rural Midwest, over one hundred residents stood on the grounds of the county courthouse and publicly protested for Black Lives Matter. On the grounds of the county courthouse lawn, the front row of protesters were almost all teenagers—my former students.

The purpose of this proposal is to closely examine the protest from a multimodal perspective by sharing five photographs of student protesters’ signs, analyzing how students used signs to communicate and the social and cultural influences that shaped their meaning making in an effort to help educators better understand our students and how we can all work together to transform our communities.

Author

• Amy Walker, Indiana University - Bloomington