Misrepresenting autism in university promotional videos advocating robot therapy: a multimodal critical discourse analysis

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper presents a critical account of the way in which university marketing, public communication of science, and crisis narratives about autism are made to intersect in three promotional videos. The videos highlight research conducted at one UK and two US universities and showcase using social robots to diagnose and treat autistic children. The paper begins by contextualizing how a problematic model of autism informs calls for intervention as well as representations of autism in the videos themselves. Taking a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis Approach, the paper then describes three interrelated processes at work in the university videos: commodification, technologization and codification. Together, these concepts encapsulate the way in which the videos work as both institutional self-promotion and promotion of a particular perspective on communication. Informed by Ledin and Machin’s affordance-based approach in which choices in semiotic materials are first described and then analyzed as multimodal articulations, the video analysis attends to the use of narrative stages, scenes and settings, characters, rhythm and sound, and language and evaluations. What the analysis demonstrates is how the videos are both exercises in university commodification and responses to crisis autism and that this is done so as to makes them seem complimentary projects.