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Using data from a feminist discourse analysis of comments on Facebook news articles, this research outlines backlash and regulatory practices directed towards youth activists Greta Thunberg, X González and Malala Yousafzai. A conceptual framework of semiotic violence highlights how these comments function to silence, delegitimise, vilify and punish sociopolitically active girls who challenge the status quo. The first mode of semiotic violence works to symbolically annihilate girl activists by silencing or rendering their political contributions invisible. The most obvious manifestation of this is instructing girls to shut up and go away. Additionally, their activism is ignored by refusals to acknowledge it as appropriate through suggestions they focus on gender-normative activities, such as domestic chores, playing with dolls and finding boyfriends. Undermining girls’ agency by describing them as puppets, mouthpieces, script readers, pawns and tools is also common. Here, girls’ contributions are rendered invisible through implications that they are being brainwashed and manipulated. The second mode of semiotic violence reinforces ideologies that girls are not politically competent and punishes them for being outspoken. This includes explicitly discrediting girls’ knowledge and abilities. Regulating their emotionality is also prevalent. This is consistent with Liberal political theory which justified women’s exclusion from public life by associating men with reason and women with emotion. Finally, insults degrade them for transgressing into a space demarcated as an adult and masculine realm. The semiotic violence directed towards these ‘girl power’ figures highlights that many people do not believe girls have the right to assert their sociopolitical opinion.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact of leadership development programmes, underpinned by Transformational Learning Theory (TLT).

A corpus-informed analysis was conducted using survey data from 690 participants. Data were collected from participants’ responses to the question “please tell us about the impact of your overall experience”, which culminated in a combined corpus of 75,053 words.

Findings identified patterns of language clustered around the following frequently used word types, namely, confidence; influence; self-awareness; insight; and impact.

This in-depth qualitative evaluation of participants’ feedback has provided insight into how TLT can be applied to develop future health-care leaders. The extent to which learning has had a transformational impact at the individual level, in relation to their perceived ability to influence, holds promise for the wider impact of this group in relation to policy, practice and the promotion of clinical excellence in the future. However, the latter can only be ascertained by undertaking further realist evaluation and longitudinal study to understand the mechanisms by which transformational learning occurs and is successfully translated to influence in practice.

Previous research has expounded traditional leadership theories to guide the practice of health-care leadership development. The paper goes some way to demonstrate the impact of using the principles of TLT within health-care leadership development programmes. The approach taken by The Florence Nightingale Foundation has the potential to generate confident leaders who may be instrumental in creating positive changes across various clinical environments.