Semiotic Material Research Articles

Tattoos as multimodal semiotic assemblages

Abstract Drawing on interviews with, and images from, a selection of female participants, we develop the notion of semiotic assemblages to examine tattoos as mobile semiotic material for embodied meaning-making, with multi-located trajectories linking the tattooed bodies to different spatial networks. In turn, we draw on the social semiotic approach to multimodality by looking at assemblages of tattoos as vibrant material, pregnant with thing-power which, while re-making the bodies of individual tattoo owners, simultaneously shapes and semiotically remediates physical and affective (e.g. emotional and memorial) objects and feelings. We illustrate how corporeal materials and activities, and the incorporeal conceptual, perceptual and affective senses and feelings are remediated across boundaries of language, geography, semiotic modes, media, and chains of mediation to make meaning. We end with a suggestion that multimodal analysis of semiotic assemblages needs to take a multiscalar approach to account for mobilities, movements and flow, and the continuities and disconnections in forms and meanings the dynamics of the connectedness produce across different scales.

Semiotic landscape in a green capital

Abstract In the wake of the ‘climate apocalypse’ global discourse, the environmental agenda of the European Green Deal and the overarching objective for the European Union are to deliver a high level of protection and improvement of the quality of the environment. European cities are under pressure to reinvent urban environments and develop resilience to environmental risks. This paper looks at semiotic material appearing in Essen, a city in Germany awarded the European Green Capital title. Grounded in the multimodal social semiotic approach and ecolinguistics, the paper investigates strategically emplaced ‘green’ semiotic material which shape environmental values and privilege. The paper illustrates the political economy of city clean-ups which every so often result in questionable environmental choices and fail to alleviate social inequalities. The analysis ultimately shows how semiotic forms of sustainability are evidently implicated in the creation of urban eco-arenas accentuating the socioeconomic stratification and privileges of valorized places.

Schools as Solutions, Students as Problems: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Institutional Scripts in High School Websites

Purpose: In this study, we used critical discourse analysis to examine what school websites convey about the expected roles of educators and students. Research Design: We analyzed 13 high school websites from a mid-sized urban district that has implemented several market-based reforms and has a centralized school choice model. We employed the concept of scripts from institutional theory to analyze what messages these websites communicate about the roles of different educational actors, how these messages relate to existing societal power dynamics, and how they relate to the school model or school demographics. Findings: For students and educators, the sites expressed that students had an important problem, while the school and educators were offered as the solution. This common framework manifested in four distinct patterns, which we describe as the savior, cultivation, assimilation, and marketplace scripts. Implications: By critically examining school websites and other semiotic materials, leaders and other stakeholders can work to “root out” potentially harmful assumptions and narratives and envision alternatives that offer empowerment and transformation.

Misrepresenting autism in university promotional videos advocating robot therapy: a multimodal critical discourse analysis

ABSTRACT This paper presents a critical account of the way in which university marketing, public communication of science, and crisis narratives about autism are made to intersect in three promotional videos. The videos highlight research conducted at one UK and two US universities and showcase using social robots to diagnose and treat autistic children. The paper begins by contextualizing how a problematic model of autism informs calls for intervention as well as representations of autism in the videos themselves. Taking a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis Approach, the paper then describes three interrelated processes at work in the university videos: commodification, technologization and codification. Together, these concepts encapsulate the way in which the videos work as both institutional self-promotion and promotion of a particular perspective on communication. Informed by Ledin and Machin’s affordance-based approach in which choices in semiotic materials are first described and then analyzed as multimodal articulations, the video analysis attends to the use of narrative stages, scenes and settings, characters, rhythm and sound, and language and evaluations. What the analysis demonstrates is how the videos are both exercises in university commodification and responses to crisis autism and that this is done so as to make them seem complimentary projects.

Challenging Misrepresentations of Roma Through Queer Romani Visual Self-Representations

This article considers, in social semiotic terms, the visual self-representations created by lesbian, gay, bi, trans, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ, thereafter queer) Romani visual activists and artists, and some of the processes used in the course of a transdisciplinary, collaborative research project. Undertaken in 2019, its aim was to investigate, through queer intersectional research-informed interventions, the potential of this semiotic material – photographic renditions of the lived experiences of queer Roma – to challenge dominant stereotypical misrepresentations and an overall lack of visibility of queer Roma. Another goal was to further enhance the impact and accessibility of the knowledge co-produced with and by the queer Romani visual activists and artists by giving a visual form to their lived experiences of antigypsyism intersecting with homophobia, transphobia, sexism and other forms of oppression. This approach to co-producing knowledge enabled the queer Romani visual activists and artists not only to exercise control over the process of creating the visual self-representations, but also to spell out, in a visual form, the terms in which queer Roma wish to be represented.

A multimodal critical discourse analysis of city as text: investigation of meaning metafunctions of Rasht’s Imam Khomeini Street

Studying the city as text is influenced by a phenomenon called the linguistic turn. This is because the text of the city is composed of different semiotic systems. This study employs multimodal discourse analysis as its theoretical framework. Through a close examination of the organizational, interactional and representational metafunction of the city text, the authors aim to highlight its characteristics as a communicational resource to provide a multimodal reading of the city. They demonstrate how applying a social semiotic approach to the physical dimensions of a street contributes to a particular understanding of how this public space is used or navigated and how the formal management of the flow of cars and people is materialized. Here the city is classified into different levels of resolution based on urban morphology’s description of the urban tissue. The text of the city is constructed through dialogue among meaning metafunctions on one level and among different levels. Examining different aspects of meaning in the text of Imam Khomeini Street and the city of Rasht indicates how, in such a text, the producers and participants communicate through the material aspect of the city. Uses of semiotic materials are ideological and their affordances have evolved in specific socio-political moments. In this street, the city as an institution and as a place of authority having the biggest share in the production of this text persuades other participants to follow and reproduce a certain narration of the reality. Controlling and training the body, on one hand, and using the urban space for advertising the dominant discourse, on the other hand, are the boldest motives of this street’s design, and the formation of the different dimensions of meaning is somehow at the service of the consolidation of a particular kind of everyday life.

‘I especially loved the little Nana dancing on the balcony’: The emergence, formation, and circulation of chronotopes in mass-mediated communication

AbstractIn this article I focus on the formation and evaluation of chronotopes in social media. More specifically, I analyze the case of a ‘chronotope of the balcony performance’ that emerged in Italy in 2020 during the Covid-19 lockdown. The corpus of the study is constituted by 125 top postings resulting from a Twitter search based on the words Italy, lockdown, and balcony. In line with other scholars (see Goebel 2020), I argue that chronotopes in mass-mediated environments are formed through repetition and recycling of the same or similar semiotic material. I show how in social media expanded participation and the use of trans-semiotic and trans-medial resources ensure wide circulation of images and texts. I also point to the central role of stance taking by users in the constitution of the chronotope as a cultural object, particularly through generalizations and upscaling. (Chronotopes, Covid-19, discourse circulation, stance, scales)*

Active and passive transductions—definitions and implications for learning

To move between different semiotic systems, such as graphs and formulas, is a necessary step in learning physics or solving problems. In social semiotics, this movement of semiotic material is called a transduction and during a transduction a student must unpack, filter, and highlight different aspects of the concept or problem. Unpacking, filtering, and highlighting have been shown to be important to the meaning-making process and transductions should be seen as indicators of meaning-making and learning. However, in this paper we argue that not all transductions performed by students requires unpacking, filtering, or highlighting, and hence the definition of transduction needs to be refined in its description. We introduce the ideas of passive and active transductions that separates transductions that may lead to meaning-making from transductions that may not. This separation is done through shown engagement with the semiotic material of the transduction. We connect shown engagement with the semiotic material to the already established anatomy of disciplinary discernment to create a useful tool when evaluating student engagement and discernment. In the paper, we showcase examples of passive and active transductions and provide a short description of how to identify them in different learning situations.

Affect as a multimodal practice

This paper sets out a framework for analyzing affect as a multimodal practice. The overall objective is to contribute to the theoretical development of how affect can be approached as an object of semiotic enquiry. The framework is based on the assumption that affect is semiotically materialized through discourse, and with the ambition of taking multimodality seriously, subject formation, strategic perspectivation and affordance are proposed as conceptual starting points for the study of affective meaning-making. Examples are drawn from artifacts and images that represent the Sámi as desirable objects to consumers and tourists. Through a detailed semiotic analysis of a pair of jeans described as being Sámi inspired, and through an analysis of images that promote Sámi tourism experiences, the paper demonstrates how affective ways of being emerge in a relationship between the affordance of semiotic materials and different subjectivities. These insights point to the possibility of further investigating affective subject formation as materialized in diverse semiotic materials in relation to other social phenomena, political issues and ideological concerns.

ПОЛИТИЧЕСКАЯ ПРОБЛЕМАТИКА НАСЛЕДИЯ Ф.М. ДОСТОЕВСКОГО: АМЕРИКАНСКАЯ РЕЦЕПЦИЯ

The article explores the American reception of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s political ideology. The relevance of the study is due to the interdisciplinary character of modern literary criticism and perception of Dostoevsky not only as a talented writer, but also as an original philosopher and political thinker. It is for the first time when the reception of Dostoevsky’s political ideology is revealed on the basis of works by American philologists and political analysts; namely, the study unveils the image of Dostoevsky as a political thinker formed within American scientific discourse. In addition, the analysis of the reception of Dostoevsky’s writings in a foreign scientific culture contributes to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of cultural interaction. The analysis of literary works on the basis of comparative-historical and comparative-cultural approaches, as well as modern semiotic concepts, reveals the basic periods and trends in the reception of Dostoevsky’s writings on political issues in the USA in the 20th and the 21st centuries. The evolution of scholars’ views on the writer’s political ideology is disclosed. In the 1950s–1960s, Dostoevsky’s political philosophy is primarily analyzed in terms of its fictional representation. In the context of cultural interaction, this period can be termed as a preliminary one followed by the period of active transmission of the texts that explore the essence of Dostoevsky’s political ideology. Indeed, an intensive study of political views of the writer started in the 1970s–1980s. At this time, scholars addressed Dostoevsky’s opinion journalism, incorporating the writer’s political ideology into his social and religious views. A new period started in the 2000s. It is characterized by the synthesis of the most characteristic features of Dostoevsky’s artistic method, his philosophical and political ideas. Thus, the image of Dostoevsky as a political thinker in American literary studies is characterized by analyzing the writer’s political philosophy within his religious and social thoughts and considering Russian literature closely connected with the state policy. The most negative evaluation of Dostoevsky’s political ideology, accusatory statements on writer’s nationalism, imperialism, and chauvinism are found in the works whose authors investigate Dostoevsky’s political ideology beyond his religious views. The interest of American scholars in Dostoevsky’s political ideology is registered at all stages of Dostoevsky studies development. The changes in diplomatic relations between Russia and the Western world stimulate American scholars to address political issues in Dostoevsky’s writings. However, besides pure political circumstances, the alteration of periods in addressing political issues in Dostoevsky’s writings is due to the mechanisms of cultural interaction when the period of passive saturation with new semiotic material is followed by the period of active transmission of new texts.

Interfejsy intymności. Tendencje intymistyczne we współczesnych grach wideo

The article concentrates on a specific tendency that can be observed in some video games created in recent years. This trend is that more and more video games present an intimate perspective and focus on the individual experience of the protagonist. The author of the article approaches the phenomenon in question mainly from the interpretative and genological perspective, since video games are not a media form commonly identified with the expression of intimate, formative or identitycreating experiences. The author starts with an analysis of the reasons why video games and intimistic texts are commonly perceived as very distant genre forms. Then he analyzes those video games that represent the intimistic tendency: Bury me, my Love (The Pixel Hunt, 2017), A Normal Lost Phone (Accidental Queens, 2017) and Wanderlust: Travel Stories (Different Tales, 2019). The analysis leads to the following conclusions: what is common for all the three discussed games is i.a. a particularly important role of the text as the basic semiotic material in which the game is realized. Even though Interfejsy intymności this concentration on the word is not a necessary condition of intimistic poetics – it definitely helps introducing such a dimension into the work. What is more, two of the three discussed games use the strategy of remediating a smartphone. In both cases, the creators designed new interfaces modeled on the real ones and turned navigating on the phone screen into basic game mechanics. This, in turns, means that intimistic tendencies in video games stimulate reaching for new genre forms. This process of remediation is possible mainly because modern intimacy has shifted very clearly towards the digital, and smartphones have become its basic tool. This phenomenon, which the author of the article calls ‘intimacy 2.0’, is a result of the fact that: (a) contemporary culture is deeply anchored in the digital and its interfaces, and (b) the importance of smartphones in everyday communication and media consumption has been growing enormously in recent years. The final conclusion of the paper is as follows: all the discussed games use an intimate perspective to evoke empathy, which was not a typical video game design goal. This is especially interesting, given the fact, that all the analyzed games remain primarily commercial products that are driven by the laws of the market.

Concept of a transductive link

This theoretical paper defines and explores the concepts of transductive links and transductive chains, as part of the theoretical framework of social semiotics. Social semiotics stems from the multimodal framework, which provides a theoretical perspective, constructs, and a language to describe a shift of semiotic material within or between semiotic systems, such as rewriting a text or moving from a function to a plot. Within this framework a shift of semiotic material between two such systems is referred to as a transduction. This paper aims to expand on the concept of transduction by identifying a theoretical contribution to the modeling of this process, referred to as a transductive link. This link is suggested to affect the transduction process and the resulting learning experience. For example, when plotting measurement data, a computer program can be employed to read the data and to transform the data into pixel information. In this case, programming, or the act of programming, acts as a link between the two resources in the transduction process—a transductive link. In other cases, multiple transductions can be performed one after another resulting in these links creating what we define as a transductive chain. By observing and analyzing the use of different semiotic systems in different learning situations, transductive links and chains can be identified and examined. From this identification one has the possibility to find weak links in the transductive chain and address them accordingly. As such, we suggest that transductive links and chains are powerful tools to be able to understand students’ learning experiences.2 MoreReceived 17 July 2020Accepted 23 November 2020DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.16.026101Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by Bibsam.Published by the American Physical SocietyPhysics Subject Headings (PhySH)Research AreasConcepts & principlesResearch methodologyPhysics Education Research

Resemiotisations across time, space, materials and modes: an analysis of political signage in Venezuela

ABSTRACTIn this article, I apply the notion of resemiotisation to the study of a political sign in Venezuela, to explain its salience and seemingly contradictory meanings. I focus on the sign commonly referred to as “los ojos de Chávez” (the eyes of Chávez), which was initially circulated by government officials in 2012 and has since permeated Venezuela’s landscape. Drawing on photographic data retrieved from Instagram, I track the resemiotisation trajectories of the sign, throughout time across different modalities, materials and spaces and as taken by different actors. The analysis shows that resemiotisation with its historical emphasis and comprehensive approach to language, provide a useful analytical tool for foregrounding the different historical layers of meanings present in the changing semiotic landscape of Venezuela. Yet, I argue that the understandings of materialities that the notion encompass need to be expanded to include not only the semiotic materials of which signs are made of, but also the materials on which they are inscribed.

How Mangroves Story: On Being a Filter Feeder

The relationship between gravity, the moon and the ocean translates into the regular rhythm of tides, which provide a powerful energy, both productive and destructive, across intertidal zones. Mangroves, like other intertidal ecologies, negotiate the regularities and disturbances of tidal energies through many processes and build up complex worlds. One of these processes is filter feeding, which transforms incoming detritus into many kinds of bodies, while mucus covered faeces are excreted into the bacterial-rich mud, to be transformed again. Filter feeding stories the relationship between the moon and the sea into thick embodied mangrove narratives. This paper demonstrates and explores an account of relationality as narrative within a semiotic material ontology, as told in the storying of the relationship of the moon and the sea within the materiality of mangroves.

Establishing authenticity and commodifying difference: a social semiotic analysis of Sámi jeans

This article investigates a semiotic phenomenon within the global fashion industry: the branding of designer jeans as ‘authentic’ and ‘genuinely local’, focusing on the Swedish brand Sarva. Drawing on a social semiotics approach, the authors see authenticity as a discursive construct and look at the ways in which Sarva authenticate their jeans as Sámi in multimodal texts. The aim is: (1) to reveal how places and narratives are commodified in texts that accompany the jeans; and (2) to explore how authenticity is materially instantiated in the jeans by using different resources. The article focuses on the connotative provenance and affordances of different semiotic materials for the rendering of authenticity. The analysis of the jeans as semiotic entities reveals how the thickness of the garment, texture and leather details, and the choice of materials, languages as well as iconography, evoke ideas about historical and local ‘Sáminess’, whilst at the same time indexing a global ideology that regiments what quality jeans are. The analysis shows how authenticity can be reinvented and relocated in ways that allow a commodity to travel between the local and the global. It also shows how this movement is not neutral or straightforward, but rooted in power relations that underlie globalization and advanced capitalism.

Um guia para a análise crítica multimodal

Resumo Nesta resenha, apresentamos o livro de Per Ledin e David Machin (2018) que expõe um modelo de análise visual abrangendo diferentes tipos de material semiótico, desde fotografias, documentos e vídeos até embalagens, design de espaços e apresentações de dados. Com base em conceitos da semiótica social e da análise crítica do discurso, os autores propõem um modelo de análise de viés crítico, para compreender não só como os sentidos são construídos a partir de cada um desses materiais, mas também que sentidos são produzidos, tendo em vista os contextos sociais e as disputas de poder que condicionam as visões de mundo. A obra constitui um bom guia introdutório para pesquisadores que se interessam pela análise semiótica, por demonstrar, com exemplos práticos, a aplicabilidade do modelo teórico-metodológico e sua relação com questões de investigação.

Translating the University

This article explores the use of indexicality for understanding the emergence of social-cultural habits. Based on the work of Parmentier, it works on a methodology in which social-cultural artefacts or patterns are regarded as traces of the semiotic processes through which they were formed. It proceeds from a definition of translation as the imposition of constraints on semiotic material, i.e. semiotic work, and explores the effects of this work as indexes of the work. The article then considers data from the University of the Free State (UFS) in a demonstration of the possibilities of this kind of analysis, suggesting that the UFS is mostly constructing its identity around foreignizing influences and excluding indigenous links.

Neoliberal multiculturalism and the discourse of primitivism at Walt Disney World’s Pandora

ABSTRACTTaking a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis approach, this paper examines the myriad ways in which the Walt Disney World attraction, Pandora – The World of Avatar, exemplifies neoliberal multiculturalism. The different signifying elements and the manner in which they are being put to use are initially described to account for their affordances and the discourses they index. Particular attention is given to the use of materials, texture, and colours and the ways that they represent the ecology of Pandora, the past mining, and the current conservation activities. Having described the chosen semiotic materials, the representation of the Na’vi in relation to the discourses of primitivism, progress and sublimity is then analysed. Constituted as noble savages, it is argued that the Na’vi are both held up as an ideal, untainted by the corruption of the modern world, and at the same time rejected as monocultural Others who have failed to progress.

Review of Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space by Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow

Although the volume was published in 2010, it still remains one of the most important contributions to a new field of enquiry in the study of language and signage in public spaces initially conceptualised and institutionalised by Landry and Bourhis (1997) as linguistic landscapes (LL). They defined linguistic landscapes as “[t]he language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings combine to form the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region, or urban agglomeration” (p. 25). As the title of the volume suggests, the aim was to extend the study to consider other semiotic material in place rather than linguistic ones alone. Jaworski and Thurlow prefer the term semiotic landscapes to LL to account for the fact that descriptions of space are not just about language, image and space, but more so about how interlocutors engage with semiotic material including objects in place.

Recontextualisation and reappropriation of social and political discourses in toilet graffiti at the University of the Western Cape

Applying notions of interdiscursivity, commodification of discourse (Fairclough 1993) and semiotic remediation (Bolter and Grusin 2000), this paper analyses toilet graffiti in men’s and women’s toilets at the University of the Western Cape in order to capture how the toilet walls become platforms where texts associated with other genres and discourses are appropriated, remediated, and transformed for expanded production and consumption of meaning. In turn, it explores the ideological and identity manifestations of the inscriptions in the transformed and remediated semiotic material, and the dialogicality and the trajectory of the texts across space and time. Thereafter, a discussion is presented of the implications of the expanded meaning potentials resulting from blended and recontextualized discourses from other genres and cultural contexts.