Human rights campaigns: Raising awareness via multimodal argumentation

The Council of Europe, the European leading human rights organization, has been engaged in the promotion and protection of human rights since its foundation. In addition to legal actions, over the years it has undertaken a number of awareness-raising campaigns. The analysis is conducted on a corpus collected from the Council of Europe’s website. It includes different text types – posters, leaflets and booklets – which belong to the most significant campaigns launched in 2006. This study focuses on the linguistic and visual manifestations of argumentation across a range of different genres looking at the way in which they interact to produce a persuasive message. Against the theoretical framework of visual argumentation, in particular Roque’s classification of mixed media argumentation (2012), and multimodal discourse analysis, the research aims to explore how the Council of Europe promotes human rights issues through argumentative-persuasive techniques and to what extent these strategies interact in the campaign material allowing for an expansion of the theory of argumentation.