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During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, British social media influencers posted pictures and stories from Dubai. As a result, the emirate faced an intense backlash from the British media. This study considers the British media's motivations for constituting Dubai as Orientalist 'other' while uncovering earlier imagined geographies of the Orient. The study develops the novel concept of 'intermedia geographies' to trace intertextual links, tales, texts, content, audiences and discourses, as dynamic constellations of the postdigital condition. Unique methods of postdigital critical discourse analysis are developed to map a corpus of 20 British magazine, tabloid and broadsheet newspaper articles, which are the jumping-off point to intertextual references to television, film and earlier Oriental narratives. Theorizing levels up from description to nuanced analysis to illustrate that the themes of content, stance and social actors' positioning within the corpus are indicative of Britain's siloed mainstream audiences and postdigital reinforcements of colonial discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Performances of self on social media are mediated via platform interfaces and social rituals while dramaturgical or theatrical perspectives of frontstage/backstage identity are frequently drawn upon in scholarship. However, emphasis on face and self-portraiture tends to background other forms of representation exhibiting objects, places and the various people that could be viewed as facets of the extended or disembodied self. In this article, Instagram is taken as a case to illustrate self-(re)presentations, beyond icons or selfies (the popular term for photographic self-portraiture), to include the symbols and indexical signs of subjectification. To this purpose, the author draws on the semiotic philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) in order to develop an analytic table of sign correlates. The Peircean sign doctrine is applied to systematically analyse observable elements as well as to consider the routine, abstract and conceptual sign phenomena constituting meanings in an interpreter's mind. The analytic framework helps to unravel a series of densely stitched compound-signs, interweaving Instagrammers' self-(re)presentations. Importantly, the sign typology does not dispense with performative ontologies entirely but suggests that signs of self cannot necessarily be removed 'backstage'. Conversely, considering self-(re)presentations, beyond facial displays, is fruitful for theorizing what is shown, inferred as well as obscured. In turn, this illuminates self-(re)presentations orchestrated within broader sociomaterial constructs and the symphony of signs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Dubai, the small emirate in the United Arab Emirates, tends to be associated with luxurious social media images of elite social actors, startling architecture, and consumer status symbols, this study addresses migrant, domestic, and service workers' everyday digital placemaking. To explore these issues, a global semiotic framework reorientates traditional notions of the geopolitical context in terms of Dubai's social mediascape. TikTok is taken as a case to explore a corpus of Dubai-related hashtags and content being shared by migrant, domestic, and service workers. The central argument of the article is that, while Dubai's social media cultures reflect hegemonies of Gulf governance and TikTok's algorithms, they are also infused by workers' affective digital-placemaking as a form of neoliberal resilience to communicative capitalism and deterritorialization in the social media age. Overall, the article provides much-needed insights into how social mediashapes and is shaped by transnational social actors' digital placemaking in the Middle East region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This feminist semiotic study explores the folkloric imaginary of the jinn in the context of children's and young adults' Arab Gothic literature. Across the Middle East, the jinn is a common trope in literature, folklore and oral storytelling who, in diegetic terms, can manifest as the Gothic figure of an aging female, deranged older woman or succubus (known as sa'lawwa in Arabic). In this study, a novel feminist semiotic framework is developed to explore the extent to which the Gothic female succubus either haunts or liberates Arab girls' coming-of-age fictions. This issue is addressed via a feminist semiotic reading of the narratives of Middle Eastern woman author @Ranoy7, exploring the appeal of her scary stories presented on YouTube. Findings reveal tacit fears, ambivalences and tensions embodied within the Arab Gothic sign of the aging female succubus or jinn. Overall, the research develops feminist insights into the semiotic motif of the female jinn and its role in constituting Arab females as misogynistic gendered sign objects in the context of the social media story explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subjectification has been defined as the formation of the subject via discourses while social media bundles audio-visual discourses that afford subjectification. However, what is meant by the 'subject' is not neutral and subjectification can differ according to cultural context. This study takes Middle Eastern women influencers' subjectification on TikTok as a case to illustrate postdigital transnational subjectification. The novel framework of feminist postdigital transnational inquiry is applied to the corpus assisted study of three Middle Eastern women influencers' short-form TikTok videos. The findings reveal observable audio-visual elements while embedding conceptual meanings surrounding subjectification. Discussion postulates subjectification on TikTok as living postdigital practices with transnational meanings both within and beyond their immediate context. It is suggested that subjectification could occur beyond regional, generational, traditional, fixed or essentialist terms. Theorising offers nuanced insights into the curatorial potential of TikTok for subjectification as consecutively interdependent with contextual issues, trends and deeper traditional audio-visual ontologies. At the same time, it suggests that platforms' transnational affordances in Global South contexts occur independently to Northcentric frameworks and interpretations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores relationships between environment and education after the Covid-19 pandemic through the lens of philosophy of education in a new key developed by Michael Peters and the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA). The paper is collectively written by 15 authors who responded to the question: Who remembers Greta Thunberg? Their answers are classified into four main themes and corresponding sections. The first section, 'As we bake the earth, let's try and bake it from scratch', gathers wider philosophical considerations about the intersection between environment, education, and the pandemic. The second section, 'Bump in the road or a catalyst for structural change?', looks more closely into issues pertaining to education. The third section, 'If you choose to fail us, we will never forgive you', focuses to Greta Thunberg's messages and their responses. The last section, 'Towards a new (educational) normal', explores future scenarios and develops recommendations for critical emancipatory action. The concluding part brings these insights together, showing that resulting synergy between the answers offers much more then the sum of articles' parts. With its ethos of collectivity, interconnectedness, and solidarity, philosophy of education in a new key is a crucial tool for development of post-pandemic (philosophy of) education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technological determinism has been driving conceptions of technology enhanced learning for the last two decades at least. The abrupt shift to the emergency delivery of online courses during COVID-19 has accelerated big tech's coup d'état of higher education, perhaps irrevocably. Yet, commercial technologies are not necessarily aligned with dialogic conceptions of learning while a technological transmission model negates learners' input and interactions. Mikhail Bakhtin viewed words as the multivocal bridge to social thought. His theory of the polysemy of language, that has subsequently been termed dialogism, has strong correlations with the semiotic philosophy of American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce's semiotic philosophy of signs extends far beyond words, speech acts, linguistics, literary genres, and/or indeed human activity. This study traces links between Bakhtin's dialogism with Peirce's semiotics. Conceptual synthesis develops the semiotic-dialogic framework. Taking augmented reality as a theoretical case, inquiry illustrates that while technologies are subsuming traditional pedagogies, teachers and learners, this does not necessarily open dialogic learning. This is because technologies are never dialogic, in and of themselves, although semiotic learning always involves social actors' interpretations of signs. Crucially, semiotic-dialogism generates theorising of the visual literacies required by learners to optimise technologies for dialogic learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]