Representations of diversity, equity, and inclusion in airline safety videos : insights for fostering students’ critical digital literacies

Abstract

Airline safety videos are an interdiscursive corporate genre which blends safety and branding discourses. It is a site where corporate identities are constructed using a range of linguistic and multimodal resources. This article presents a critical multimodal genre analysis of how corporate values of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) are discursively represented in two airline safety videos created 11 years apart to map the diachronic changes in the resources used to realize DEI in corporate materials. The findings suggest that in addition to presenting diverse participants in the videos, specific multimodal resources such as camera angle and distance, sound effects, and the use of space play a role in reinforcing or contesting dominant power relations and ideologies between the airline and passengers. The study provides a case study to showcase how analyzing corporate digital texts can be used as examples in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) training to enhance students' critical digital literacy and equip them with the multimodal composing skills to become ‘future-ready’.