ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the (re)construction of the educational conflict in mainstream and social media during the highest peak of demonstrations by the Chilean student movement (2011–2013). We explain how the conflict is discursively constructed from hegemonic and counter-hegemonic stances, considering the voices of the collective actors involved. We used two different methodological approaches to address the objectives of this study. First, we built a corpus of the four most-read newspapers of the country including 1,526 news reports, and analysed it using corpus linguistics methods (i.e., keywords and collocations). Secondly, we collected 211 Facebook posts retrieved from a fan page in which university students participate and/or support the student movement and analysed the role multimodal metaphors play in the configuration of antagonistic social actors, actions and objectives. Results show that students elaborate and reappropriate a series of multimodal texts distributed and recontextualized in Facebook (e.g., political posters, cartoons, comic strips and memes) to reframe media criminalization and redefine the ideological scope of the conflict. They generate modes of other- and self-representation both to hold political adversaries responsible for the educational crisis and to legitimize their actions and participation in the public space.
