Abstract

The phenomenon Guerilla Gardening, which originated in the 1970s, is a form of activism that uses gardening as a means of environmental action. The activists often go beyond planting illegally flowers and vegetables and present their activities in the social media. The article adopts a comparative perspective and investigates linguistic as well as multimodal strategies used by German and French Guerilla Gardening activists on X and on Instagram in order to promote their activities. The methodological approach is thus a double contrastive one, combining the linguistic and cultural comparison with a media comparison. The analysis is based on the critical and multimodal discourse analysis and on text linguistics. The data show that there is evidence for culture-specific forms of the users’ self-presentation. The empirical analysis furthermore reveals that the focus of the users in their posts lies on specific communicative functions, and that hybrid text types tend to emerge.