ABSTRACT This paper critically analyzes the linguistic landscape (LL) of the three campuses of Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU), a federally-designated Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) located in Chicago, to examine the role that languages other than English (LOTE), Spanish specifically, play in signage on the campuses vis-à-vis English. This paper argues that despite NEIU’s HSI status, Spanish

(2021). Critical discourse analysis, critical discourse studies and beyond. Social Semiotics. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT Since its inauguration in 1977, the Jordanian Martyr’s Memorial and Museum (called in Arabic Sarh Al-Shaheed) has gained symbolic status as the national army-museum. Its immense and distinctive architectural design, the arrangement of spaces and exhibits allow it to host large collections of exhibits which illustrate the history of modern Jordan, and show the development of its armed forces

ABSTRACT In this article I conduct a multimodal critical discourse analysis of news coverage of the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza by select British and South African print news outlets. The representation of the actors’ legitimacy is the theoretical framework used for the study. Interviews were also conducted with journalists who reported on the war for insights into aspects of news production that

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on how opera rehearsal participants use depictions to accomplish proposals; they use a locally created scene, comprised of concrete embodiments to represent another physically or temporally distant scene. Whereas earlier work investigating depictions in interaction has mainly focused on demonstrations in pedagogical scenarios, this paper will discuss how depictions serve

(2021). Inquiry graphics in higher education: new approaches to knowledge, learning and methods. Social Semiotics. Ahead of Print.

(2021). Becoming and being a camp counsellor: discourse, power relations and emotions. Social Semiotics. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT Few studies have focused on visual representation of crime-related events in news images across national contexts. In this study, eighty-three news images from two hundred Iranian and Dutch news articles published in national newspapers were qualitatively analyzed. These images were scrutinized for their use of semiotic strategies as well as the overall visual pattern. The findings showed

ABSTRACT In any post-disaster contexts, the affected societies will inevitably be involved in tensions between remembering and forgetting the past disaster experiences. They need to forget the disaster in order to return to their daily lives; at the same time, they also need to remember the disaster, which will usually involve canonization programs of the cultural memory of disaster. This study explores

ABSTRACT The article explores the linguistic landscape (LL) of Itaewon, a former American military “camp town” in Seoul, by providing a snapshot of its conflicting portrayals. With the LL serving as a critical index of language-, class-, and ethnicity-related social disparities, this study examines, through the notion of “framing” semiotic resources, (1) the state’s and district’s positions towards

ABSTRACT The present paper focuses on the figurative senses of abstract art, which can be rooted in human bodily experiences, interconnections between cognitive domains as well as mental concepts arising from the perception of colour. We take a closer look at the works of art created by, among others, Wassily Kandinsky, Yves Klein, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and analyse particular uses of colour in

ABSTRACT In Croatia, the war of symbols and the rise of hate speech has been manifested most prominently through Za dom spremni (“Ready for the Homeland”); the official salute of the WWII fascist quisling-state the Independent State of Croatia. The case that triggered a broad public dispute occurred in November 2016, when a memorial plaque containing the inscribed salute was installed near the WWII

(2021). What you see is what you hear: creativity and communication in audiovisual texts. Social Semiotics. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT Recent work on algorithmic bias has shown that understanding the values embedded in technology design processes is important for avoiding social harm. This paper explores the attitudes construed in whitepapers of blockchain technology start-ups. Blockchain technology is a relatively new phenomenon that has informed discourses about the future of governance and economics in relation to the

ABSTRACT Visual representations serve a multitude of crucial functions in the creation and dissemination of knowledge and information. They may take many different forms and refer to different phenomena or processes. Making valid decisions how particular visuals should look like presupposes a thorough insight in the nature of the referent or subject of the visual representation, the complex intermediate

(2020). Human Language: from genes and brains to behavior. Social Semiotics. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT This paper deals with objects that serve as props in political speeches, and examines their role as carriers of symbolic meaning that is constructed during a performance enacted in a political space. It focuses on the use of such objects as rhetorical arguments in three speeches by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu: “the bomb speech,” “the drone-wreckage speech” and the “binder speech

ABSTRACT Many researchers agree that awareness of agency and how it is enacted through different participants holds a key role in developing digital literacy. Recognition of the ways in which digital tools can appropriate and shape humans’ semiotic work and even act out roles in communication is part of critical digital literacy. In digital environments, humans interact with the content (not just consume

ABSTRACT While the field of climate change communication has become increasingly interested in visual representations, there has been a lack of research that attempts to capture the breadth and variety of semiotic resources being drawn upon in the contemporary media landscape. In this paper, social semiotic theory is drawn upon for investigating how colour and sound may contribute to the social construction

ABSTRACT Although the interlocking of the British Council with wider political and economic activities and interests is well documented in some parts of the world (Pennycook, A. 2017. The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language. New York: Pearson; Phillipson, R. 2017. “Myths and Realities of ‘Global’ English.” Language Policy 16 (3): 313–331; Rapatahana, V., and P. Bunce. 2012. English

ABSTRACT This introductory paper offers a framing of writing (in) the city as a way of making and knowing cities. We link individual contributions in this collection to earlier research that has examined displayed discourse in urban spaces or considered writing as a metaphor for studying cities.

ABSTRACT Pimple popping videos on YouTube draw a large number of views and comments. Using Critical Thematic Analysis, this paper analyses comments on the videos to understand why these films are so compelling for some viewers. Building on the insights of skin studies, I argue that the satisfaction that viewers experience is linked to (1) the nature of disgust (involving both aversion and fascination);

(2020). The language of patient feedback: a corpus linguistic study of online health communication. Social Semiotics. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT This introductory article lays some theoretical ground that stimulated this special issue: first, the argument that affect is not “in”, or indeed “outside of” the individual or the social, but relates to the circulation of emotion between different sites, objects or bodies; and, second, that how this circulation of emotion works, in and through discourse, has not been sufficiently taken up

(2020). Phonology of Shanghai Sign Language. Social Semiotics. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT Sleep appears to have been of no interest to sociocultural linguistics or communication studies. This is in spite of growing attention to the “ignored third” from sociologists and anthropologists, especially in response to rising public, medical and commercial concerns. Having said which, these cognate fields side-step the classist representational politics of sleep which are exposed nicely

ABSTRACT This paper examines an annual anti-racism event in Bern, Switzerland, which, in 2016, was promoted with three posters designed around a distinctive kind of multimodal writing. In large black and white lettering, the posters voiced real and imagined immigrants in one of three statements including ĭ ŗĕđä õ ɓæřŋ d’űţśĉħ (I also speak Bernese). Each poster thereby combined the regional dialect

ABSTRACT In this article, I demonstrate my visual-material approach to researching the urban built environment as a medium of communication in its own right. Specifically, I discuss my research on second-tier cities with “world-class” aspirations, which highlights the significance of both symbolic and material resources in processes of urban regeneration and redevelopment. A visual-material approach

ABSTRACT Jair Bolsonaro, the unapologetically homophobic and ultraconservative Brazilian president, managed to emerge from the margins of the political system and gained electoral momentum during the impeachment hearing against Dilma Rousseff in 2016. The hearing, which ultimately demoted the first female president of the country, epitomizes the current affective polarization of Brazil in which sexual

ABSTRACT This paper develops a scalar view of affect, with a focus on the intense animosity often found in digital encounters. It argues that affect is an important dimension of sense-making and sustains this standpoint both theoretically and empirically, by resorting to a linguistic-anthropological understanding of scale and by analyzing the hectic transit of texts in viral phenomena on the Internet

ABSTRACT Since Michel de Certeau, it has become feasible, fashionable even, to think of cities enunciatively; that is, to postulate an analogous relationship between the spatial and the discursive. In investigating the idea of urban texts, de Certeau constructs a pedestrian subject who, by way of traversing streets, embodies a practice that is vernacular and agentive, in resistance to the hegemony

ABSTRACT Although it may appear quite obvious the natural link between migration and emotions, it has been largely ignored in migration analyses that tend to focus on the neo-liberalist projects that restructure sites of production and consumption [Brooks, Ann, and Ruth Simpson. 2013. Emotions in Transmigration: Transformation, Movement and Identity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan]. There can be no overemphasizing

ABSTRACT Sociolinguistics has an intricate relationship with the city and with objects and queries pertaining to the specificity of urban language. Cities have not only acted as sites of sociolinguistic research but have simultaneously provided tools and frameworks that have proven useful in this research. This heuristic mode has subsumed the object of language under a specific body of ideas, facts

ABSTRACT In this study, I analyse a commemorative gathering “The White Armbands Day” which works as the reperformance of dehumanizing practices dating back to the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia–Herzegovina. The commemoration specifically presents a request for the construction of a monument for the 102 killed children in Prijedor, the third largest municipality in the Serb Republic entity. The study is structured

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the emergence of “speculative architecture” as a distinctive strand within the professional field of urban studies, one that is future-oriented and claims to “create narratives about how new technologies and networks influence space, culture, and community [with the aim of] imagining where new forms of agency exist within the cities changed by these new processes”.

ABSTRACT This article is an ethnography of an investigation of an under-explored sociolinguistic phenomenon, namely handwritten signs in public spaces, against a context of urban regeneration and socio-cultural transformation. These signs are a subset of urban communicates that involve handwriting, lettering or the painting of letters and text using different materials and serving different functions

ABSTRACT This article examines the emergence and design of letter-based city logos in order to discuss what they reveal about writing and cities, and the dynamics between them. Developing a political economic and social semiotic analysis, I suggest that these letter-based logos respond to an increased competition for attention in society—strongly linked to new media technology and patterns of mobility

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to analyze the reactions of some mainstream Israeli politicians to a celebrity marriage between Tzahi Halevi, a Jewish Israeli actor, and Lucy Aharish, a Palestinian Israeli TV personality. Drawing upon the notion of stance, we unveil the affective trouble generated by this heterosexual union vis-à-vis the Israeli national project. More specifically, we tease out

ABSTRACT This article examines the affective practice of applause at the 2019 Holocaust Memorial Day national ceremony in Britain. Every year, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust organises a ceremony to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, all other victims of Nazi persecution, in addition to those killed in subsequent genocides perpetrated in Bosnia, Cambodia, Darfur and Rwanda. At the start of

ABSTRACT Party island tourism is construed as a type of tourism that heavily relies on sensory and intimate encounters that evince structures of inequality. In this paper, I investigate how the notion of the party influences the negotiation of sociolinguistic relations on party islands. By employing a linguistic ethnographic approach, this paper attempts to examine the affective dimensions of the narratives

ABSTRACT This study focuses on public signage on Wilton Drive in Wilton Manors, Florida – a homonormative space that privileges the representation of the experiences and needs of particular groups of gay men to the exclusion of other sexualities. I use a linguistic landscape methodology to conduct a multimodal critical discourse analysis in which I identify prevalent affective regimes discursively

ABSTRACT Departing from Lefebvre’s work on the social production of space, this paper explores the intersection between perceived and lived space from the perspective of spatial discourse analysis. Empirically, the paper studies how the spatiality of international airports performs affective discursive work and establishes prerequisites for air travelers’ feelings of being “in control” and “excited”

ABSTRACT The objective of this study is to investigate the visual construction of meaning within the semiotic resource of stock photography. Since the popularity of this product seems to affect the production, perception, interpretation and social internalization of the units of discourse included in the images under discussion, it is this author’s understanding that it can thus spread the ideological

ABSTRACT Fashion shows in built heritage despite being ephemeral can be viewed as events that are composed of semiotic elements, in which these elements when combined can generate a variety of meanings that configure an overall impression of the show. Interpretation can be diverse, depending on the extent of including the elements of the built heritage to the event, or how much relation or relevance

ABSTRACT This study explores tension between different modes from a social semiotic perspective. Tension and cohesion are viewed as two poles on a continuum of meaning relations ranging from oppositeness to similarity, and image-text interplay is analysed as a balance between tension and cohesion. Focusing on the device of evaluative dissonance, the multimodal analysis of two verbal-visual combinations

(2020). Towards a psychosemiotics of journalism, mental distress and Covid-19. Social Semiotics. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT Departing from the synchronic trend dominant in social semiotics research, this study examines the diachronic interplay between semiotic cues governing power relations, and global political power dynamics. It examines thirty years of photographic coverage given to Iran in Time Magazine, focusing specifically on diachronic interaction analysis (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, Reading Images: The

ABSTRACT In the past four years, Australia has undergone a major change in the way it funds supports and services for people living with disability. Part of this change has, of course, occurred in the discourse of disability, and the emergence of the term “support” rather than “care” has been a feature of this discursive shift. In this paper we used aspects of Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) theory

ABSTRACT Israel’s April 2019 elections witnessed the use of unprecedented tactics by some politicians seeking to promote their political agenda. This study focuses on one of the most remarkable examples of these radical campaign ploys, the controversial TV ad released by the New Right party in which Ayelet Shaked, Israel’s Minister of Justice at the time, appears to be modeling a perfume labeled “Fascism

ABSTRACT Illocutionary force indicating devices are something of a neglected topic in visual/multimodal intercultural pragmatics, although a number of scholars have observed that some non-verbal speech-act markers have the characteristic that by employing them in a certain way one can actually accomplish the speech act itself. These not only provide a “catalog” of salient types of visual interactions

ABSTRACT Highlighting a number of perspectives from critical social theory and research as well as critical language and discourse studies, this paper explores conceptions of normalisation particularly relevant to the analysis of its dynamics and trajectories in public discourse. Starting by disentangling the complex relationship between norms, normality, normalization and discourse, the article argues

(2020). Review of The Poetics of Digital Media. Social Semiotics. Ahead of Print.

(2020). Multiculturalism as multimodal communication: a semiotic perspective. Social Semiotics. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT Looking at mediated, political and wider public discourses on immigration in Poland since 2015 and exploring these in the context of the country’s right-wing populist politics, the paper develops a multi-step normalisation model which allows analysing how radical or often blatantly racist discourse can not only be strategically introduced into the public domain but also evolve into an acceptable

ABSTRACT In 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

ABSTRACT Newly set-up social heritage museums have attempted to counter the anonymous and stereotyped presentations of migrants in the public sphere. Drawing on the tension between media and museum representations of human mobility, this paper offers a multimodal analysis of de-marginalization strategies in museum discourses of migration. We argue that in contrast to contemporary news media and their

ABSTRACT On October 1st, 2017 the Spanish government deployed the police in Catalonia to prevent people from voting in what the Spanish government considered an “illegal” referendum. The police actions resulted in 893 [1] reported unarmed citizens injured in an event described by some international media as a case of police brutality. This paper drags from Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) to analyze

ABSTRACT This paper critically explores how contemporary practices of commercialised self-mediation by “celebrity mothers” increasingly normalise a strongly commodified and consumption-driven vision of motherhood. Drawing on the affordances of mediatisation and self-mediation embedded in the wider neoliberal and celebrity culture mindset, the article analyses how motherhood becomes increasingly linked

ABSTRACT Focusing on the salient case of news interviewing, this paper investigates the role of journalism in the normalization of radical right-wing politics and the discourses of nationalism and nativism. Normalization is related to transformations in the socio-political landscape, the discursive strategies of political actors, the professional norms of journalism, and the discursive positioning

ABSTRACT This article looks at discourses of masculinity in the social media performance of US President Donald Trump. The article discusses the implications of these for the normalisation of regressive forms of masculinity in public discourse, where normalisation is the process of co-opting otherwise deviant behaviours by integrating them into institutional practice. The article begins by exploring