WHO SPEAKS? WHO IS SILENCED? A MULTIMODAL ANALYSIS OF TRANSITIVITY, AGENCY AND VISUAL FRAMING IN KENYAN NEWSPAPER DISCOURSE ON FORESTRY

Abstract

Kenyan newspapers narrate forestry through a recurring cast of presidents, cabinet secretaries and conservation agencies, and far more rarely through the loggers, farmers and forest-adjacent residents whose lives the reporting concerns. This paper asks who is granted grammatical and visual status as an actor, and who is reduced to a backgrounded circumstance or an absence. Working from a corpus of 210 forestry articles drawn from three national English-language dailies, The Standard, The Star and the Daily Nation, published between August 2022 and August 2025, the study is grounded in ecolinguistics Stibbe (2015) and the oneness hypothesis Ivanhoe et al. (2018), operationalised through Systemic Functional transitivity, Van Leeuwen (2008) social actor network, and Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) visual grammar. A purposively selected maximum-variation subsample of 39 articles, each paired with its accompanying photograph, was hand-coded and cross-checked against frequency analysis of the full corpus. Within this subsample, state elites and conservation agencies were the most frequently foregrounded, quoted and visually salient actors across destructive, ambivalent and beneficial narratives alike, while forest-adjacent communities, illegalised actors and the nonhuman environment were recurrently rendered through agentless passives, nominalisations and aggregating categorisation. Photographs frequently paralleled this asymmetry, with text-image alignment in 25 of 39 articles (64.1 percent): powerful figures typically appeared close, low-angled and salient, while affected communities appeared, when they appeared at all, as anonymous collectives in long shot. The paper argues that an ecologically beneficial narrative orientation does not by itself guarantee an equitable distribution of voice, and that Kenyan forestry journalism tends toward a spectacle of elite stewardship rather than the relational human-forest connection the oneness hypothesis holds up as an ethical alternative. It contributes a detailed multimodal coding procedure for environmental sourcing in Kenyan journalism.