An ecostylistic investigation of the online communicative practices within grassroots environmental activism in India

A corpus of nineteen posts collected from the social media platform X was analysed using an integrated theoretical and methodological approach. By combining ecostylistics with ecolinguistics, multimodal critical discourse analysis and multimodal studies, the study investigates the online communicative practices of the grassroots environmental movement #SaveBuxwahaForest, in order to gauge their stylistic traits and communicative strategies, functions and effects. The contribution will also explore the link between environmental activism and protection of indigenous peoples’ rights. The analysis shows that background knowledge about (post)colonial policies towards – or against – indigenous peoples in the Indian subcontinent is necessary to fully decode more than one text in the corpus; that verbal and non-verbal figurative language and non-conventional oppositions are major stylistic traits in the digital communication of this environmental movement; that engagement, mobilisation and persuasion are their main communicative functions; and that most of the strategies used are beneficial rather than ambivalent or destructive, as per Stibbe’s ([2015] 2021) classification.