Everyday acts of social-semiotic inquiry

Abstract

The chapter presents the results of a participatory analysis conducted in the collaborative research initiative PanMeMic: Communication and Interaction in the Pandemic and beyond. It analyses a sample of exchanges that took place on the PanMeMic social media spaces. Designed to understand the dynamics of sharing and co-constructing semiotic knowledge in a time of radical changes in communication, the analytical framework integrates social semiotics with key principles of citizen sociolinguistics (Rymes, 2021), ethnography and van Leeuwen’s (2008) framework for analysing legitimation in discourse. Findings show people’s role as socio-semioticians themselves, in not only creating but also observing, describing, labelling, supporting or opposing, and legitimating and negotiating semiotic practices and thereby co-creating semiotic knowledge. They also reveal the potential of an engaged, participatory approach to research on multimodality to open spaces for forms of collective inquiry towards social change.