Stance-taking towards chronotopes as a window into people’s reactions to societal crises

Abstract

The focus of this article is the analysis of stance taking vis-à-vis a chronotope born during the Covid-19 pandemic as a window into how people react to global crises and into the kinds of values that get an uptake and become widely shared in periods of unrest. I focus on Twitter users’ reactions in relation to a “chronotope of the balcony performances” that developed in Italy during the national lockdown. I analyze the stances that participants express towards the chronotope itself and a variety of objects related to it, and the semiotic resources that they recruit to do so. I show how a general positive reaction to the chronotope is related to the balcony performances being seen as expressing solidarity. Data for the paper come from 110 top tweets resulting from a search based on the presence of chronotope-related words and 95 tweets responding to one of the original tweets.