Multimodal manipulation in travel documentaries: bypassing epistemic vigilance

The concept of manipulation has been a matter of discussion in CDS and pragmatics for more than a decade. Agreement on how to define and analyse the latter has yet to be reached, although most scholars seem to agree that Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995) can provide a useful entry point thanks to its theorisation of variable contexts and individual cognitive environments (de Saussure, 2005; Maillat, 2013; Maillat and Oswald, 2009; Oswald, 2014). Moreover, the concept of epistemic vigilance (Sperber et al., 2010) has been used to investigate the cognitive barriers that need to be bypassed in order for manipulation to work (Hart, 2013; Mazzarella, 2015). This paper begins with an overview of both the concepts of manipulation and epistemic vigilance. Then, drawing on some principles from Relevance Theory and looking at some data from travel documentary programmes from my ongoing PhD research, some examples are offered of how manipulation is attempted and achieved through this particular multimodal genre in individual case studies. The research draws on a novel methodological approach that integrates Audience Research in Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies in order to analyse media interactions in their individuality (Castaldi, 2021).