A Semiotic Analysis of Lecturers Labour Protest Discourses in Kenya

world such as Belgium, Lebanon, Canada, Israel, Netherlands and Taiwan. The Government of Kenya too was not spared either following the number of protests in the country. In 2017, the government of Kenya was faced with both political and economic strikes in form of labour strikes. There was a major political unrest in the country when presidential elections were nullified but this was towards the end of the year. There were numerous labour protests throughout the year protestors taking to the streets to demonstrate became the order of the day. This study was concerned with labour protests in Kenya in 2017. Some of the strikes that took place in 2017 include: The doctors’ strike which took place from December 5 th 2016 and spilled over to 14 th March 2017, the nurse’s Abstract: Protesting or dissent has been a common phenomenon globally for many years and most countries worldwide have experienced at least one type of protest. Kenya has not been left out and was badly hit in 2017 where there were numerous political and labour protests. This paper looks at the semiotic resources that were used in public university lecturers’ strikes in the genres of protest and their underlying meaning. Critical Discourse Analysis theoretical framework was used to analyse data using Fairclough’s three-dimension approach and Kress and Van Leeuwen's approach to Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Four genres of protest namely: slogans, placards, press conferences and banners were studied. Data was collected by downloading information from Kenya’s Daily Nation, the Standard’s news print media websites, You Tube, National Television and Citizen TV stations. 84 texts were purposively sampled and analysed descriptively. The findings of the study revealed that genres of protest are created using both linguistic and semiotic resources. Protestors made use of semiotic resources mainly framing, salience and information value to communicate to relevant stakeholders in the protest. Semiotic resources helped to enhance the linguistic resources hence making lecturers’ communication powerful. some were handwritten. The font size of this writing varied with some words having a larger font size compared to others and the study found out that words with the largest font size either had UASU written on them or had the main messages on the banners. The study found out that Pwani and Masinde Muliro University Chapters and UASU had their banners with the words UNIVERSITY ACADEMIC STAFF UNION written in the largest fonts. The two university chapters identified themselves with the University Union by recognizing the union before putting across their central message. For four banners writing was at the top of the banner. The rest of the university chapters had the main message on the banners written in the largest font size and these were: Wahadhiri Wamechoka, No Cba, No Learning, Strike, Silence Never Wins Right, Uasu National Strike On – Going. Quality Education For A Better Kenya.University Academic Staff Union. The words with the largest font were the most prominent words on the banners and this made them stand out to catch the viewers’ attention on what the protestors were demanding for. The use of large font size made the message on banners to be most salient. An important finding too was that the prominent words on the banners were also written in intense red colour except for two where the green colour was used and it was also intense. Machin (2007) states that the most salient features are often accomplished by the use of big size, intense and rich colour, tone (brightness), focus (background and foreground) or overlapping of visual elements.