Keep our mob safe

Abstract

This paper examines how semiotic resources, including text, song, dance and visual imagery, are utilised in a COVID-19 public health outreach campaign to communicate to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW). Content analysis and multimodal critical discourse analysis are employed to study a corpus of multimodal videos with a visible, speaking social actor published between July 2020 and June 2022 on the official NSW Ministry of Health Facebook page (n=1010), including ‘Keep Our Mob Safe’ public health outreach campaign videos (n=38). The analysis focuses on the discursive representation and recontextualisation of social actors in order to ascertain who the state considers a ‘linguistic and cultural asset’, a term used in NSW language and health policies. The findings indicate that social actors use creative and transformational material processes and through their actions reveal covert language policy mechanisms.