MULTIMODAL ANALYSIS OF DISCOURSES IN INSTAGRAM POSTS FOR WORLD BREASTFEEDING WEEK

Abstract

This article analyzes three posts on breastfeeding on the Instagram social network, created by healthcare professionals who cater to maternal and child audiences between 2019 and 2021 during World Breastfeeding Week. For this purpose, multimodal discourse analysis (Jewitt, 2001; O’Halloran, 2009, 2011) was used with support from visual design grammar (Kress; Van Leeuwen, 1996), as well as discursive understanding from Van Dijk (1985, 2022) and valuation theory (White, 2001, 2015). The evidence suggests that it is possible to identify in the posts that healthcare professional profiles resort to affection and lay knowledge to promote weaning, while posts advocating breastfeeding use scientific and demographic data in their discursive construction.

Keywords:
Breastfeeding; Multimodal Analysis; Weaning