Who has to take action in order to reach fashion sustainability: an analysis of the use of deontics in tweets concerning the #FashionRevolution

In this paper, we analyze who is represented as having to take action to reach fashion sustainability in a corpus of tweets containing the hashtag #FashionRevolution. The corpus contains messages produced by experts, companies, NGOs and consumers in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish. We focus on tweets that contain a concrete call for action through the use of a deontic form. First, we look into the type of action that is presented (e.g. changing consuming behavior, changing production, getting informed,…) and its link with sustainability. Furthermore, we analyze which actors are being presented as having to take action (consumers, producers, governments,…), establishing the connection with the action type and the deontic strategy used. Through a combination of this analysis with an argumentative perspective, we will analyze whether these deontic forms appear in the expression of a standpoint or an argument, thus showing how the use of deontic contributes to creating an online campaign. Finally, we will analyze which type of justification (if any) is given for this call for action towards more sustainability in fashion. In addition to this analysis of the content of the tweet itself, we also look into the production of the tweet by analyzing the types of account owners who post (fair fashion brands, fast fashion brands, NGOs, specific media outlets…). The combined analysis of the content of the tweets and the account owners will allow us to discuss how community building is realized through tweets with #FashionRevolution, creating joint values related to fair fashion and sustainability. By analyzing a multilingual corpus, we wish to show how this community building is realized at the European level aim and which differences may occur across linguistic communities