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This article offers an in-depth analysis of the concept of translation in Bruno Latour’s oeuvre – an ambiguous and constantly morphing term. It considers the various conceptual reformulations of translation throughout his writing, concentrating on its fundamental importance for the operation of his modes of existence. A special emphasis is put on the influence of A. J. Greimas’s semiotics on Latour’s theoretical framework. The aim here is to trace how translation is different from transformation, and why it remains a core concept in Latour’s work, despite the fact that he strays far beyond the confines of linguistics alone in his theorisation.

The performance Un violador en tu camino [A rapist in your way] created by the Chilean feminist collective Las Tesis received global media attention during the 2019/2020 Chilean protests against in...

Feminist semiotics is developed to explore Arab women’s self-presentations on Instagram. The novel framework enables interpretive theorising of a corpus Instagram posts by Arab women in the Middle ...

This article analyzes how Offred, the protagonist of The Handmaid’s Tale, reconstructs her fragmented self through storytelling in a dialogic thought process that is connected to the intertextual references. She recollects her memories and engages in a parodic critique of Gileadean propagandistic discourse. This implies a process of transformation that involves both her body and her mind and critically deconstructs the role the regime has assigned to her. The readers are invited to take a stand if this is not the world they want to live in. The novel challenges the narrative of Gilead in an attempt to rewrite it from a female point of view. This process is connected to the disruptive and heterogeneous disposition of the novel, which Kristeva calls semiotic and links to the maternal chora. The dichotomous view is therefore denied at the root and a multifaceted perspective is proposed.

Much of the appeal of advertisements or adverts derives from a capacity to satisfy a primordial wish for pleasurable looking. An advert essentially sets out to impress on its audience a sign with e...

The aim of this study is to surface pragmatic forces and the semiotically constructed self-governed persona in the self-tracking context. In so doing, the article adopts a pragma-semiotic approach ...

This study explores the comparative grounds people employ to understand weather and climate, recognizing weather change while distancing themselves from climate change. It draws on interviews with ...

Semiotics is the analysis of how meaning is created and communicated and it originates from the study of how signs and symbols (visual/linguistic) create meaning. Signs are comprised of a signifier...

This article focuses on the visibility and position of different languages in semiotic space, namely the linguistic landscape provided by textbooks. The aim is to determine to what extent the lingu...

Ateji (当て字) pertains to one of the unique uses of language in the manga that is constructed with two types of Japanese scripts. Its one-of-a-kind structure presents challenges in translation, but f...

“The Unfortunate Lover” (1648–49) by Andrew Marvell has provoked a range of modern interpretations (Berthoff 1966; Patterson 1978; Stocker 1986; Enterline 1987; Klawitter 2009; Hirst and Zwicker 20...

The present study analyzes the influence of culturally charged visuals on the perception of music in Karnatik music videos. The study, using semiotic theories of Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes, arg...

Using data from Zambian Facebook platforms, we argue for the complex intersectionality of the global-local semiotic assemblages for the production and consumption of a contested and unpredictable v...

Although its relevance is widely recognised, the contribution of Umberto Eco’s semiotic theory and cultural analyses to the field of Cultural Studies has yet to be studied extensively. This article...

Since Peirce defined the first operators for three-valued logic, it is usually assumed that he rejected the principle of bivalence. However, I argue that, because bivalence is a principle, the stra...

Lecture prevails as a ubiquitous teaching and learning method across universities worldwide. Whereas lectures have been conceptualized from various text and language-centred perspectives, lecture’s materiality has been scarcely explored, despite the development of “beyond-the-verbal” approaches to communication, practices and learning. To address the gap, this article explores socio-materiality of communication in 10 live recorded lectures, which also had the greatest number of viewers, on the websites or YouTube media channels by “top-ranked” universities in India, Japan, Russia, Egypt, Palestine, Spain, the USA, the UK, Italy and Canada. To do so, a pragmatic semiotic analysis of non-verbal elements of lecture is applied on the videos to “map” its material ingredients and explore related social meanings. The findings point at a few salient things and body characteristics in the sampled lectures, such as the monofocal lecture platform, the omnipresent blackboard, underrepresentation of female lecturers, low diversity and use of technology. We unpack these via “body and thing idiom” and suggest that the lecture needs to be conceptualized as a multimodal, socio-material performance. The article calls for wider acknowledgement and integration of materiality, embodiment, and multimodality in university lectures and the work done to understand and develop teaching at universities.

A majority of animated films incorporate alloanimal characters to some extent, either as primary or secondary protagonists. These characters generate interest in the alloanimals they represent, whi...

This article examines the consecration and transformation of the customary practice of sati (widow burning) in the aftermath of a violent case of immolation in 1987 in Rajasthan, India. Focusing on...

This paper uses a social semiotic approach to analyse the posts of women fitness experts/influencers on Chinese Weibo. On the posts, we find a harmonized world where all parts of life can be manage...

Since 2015, menstruation has become increasingly politicised on social media. This impetus has been driven by activists who strive to destigmatise menstruation and raise awareness of issues such as...

This paper analyses humanitarian security in the framework of Donna Haraway’s political material semiotics. It begins by arguing that targeted violence against health care constitutes a trope: a figure of speech that challenges and disrupts the established narrative of humanitarian security. Drawing on 20 in-depth expert interviews, the paper explores a case study of weaponisation of health care in the Syrian conflict (2011-present). It illustrates how different material-semiotic actors–such as politicians, pathogens, and medical infrastructure–condition and shape the security of humanitarian health workers in the opposition-held parts of the country. Taking medical facilities as its key unit of analysis, the paper shows how armed violence is not only directed towards these material-semiotic entities but amplified and transformed as it passes through them. In doing so, the paper sheds light on the formative role that nonhuman materialities play in the protection of aid workers and other civilian entities in armed conflict. The paper's findings also contribute towards an improved understanding of how previously under-appreciated variables impact the delivery of medical aid in complex humanitarian emergencies.

The installation of remotely-operated service robots in the environments of our daily life (including offices, homes, and hospitals) can improve work-from-home policies and enhance the quality of t...

There has been a longstanding polemic over the meaning and value of literary characters among academic critics. Are literary characters just semiotic effects which exist only on paper, as some form...

Braindraw is a participatory technique in which participants collaboratively design the interface for a proposed solution. Conducting braindraw in different design situations is still a factor of d...

“Urban air makes you free”. This saying progressed from being a confirmation of a medieval customary law stating that a serf who has lived in a city for one year and one day becomes a free person, ...

The "in-fans", who cannot speak, needs a narrator, especially a psychoanalyst in the transference in order to be able to hear again the "silent" language that is expressed in the time of the "Jetztzeit". Through a reflection on Freud's work on aphasias and his exchange of letters with Fliess, it is possible to identify important previews which constitute a sort of pre-semiotics, as well as a theory on memory. In addition, history, sociology, semiotics and the neurosciences are all necessary interlocutors for developing the issue of The Infantile in psychoanalysis.

This article discusses central bank forward guidance as a performative (Austin) and conative (Jakobson) practice – hence, as a form of audience-centred communication that intends to transform their...

This study is the first of its own, which provides a semiotic and a discursive analysis of the Saudi animated YouTube sitcom, entitled ‘Masameer’ (the Arabic word for ‘nails-metal spike’). Data wer...

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 aim of this article is to examine the semiotics of cattle and the beef consumption of the Japanese people in colonial Taiwan. Three aspects of the symbolic world are discussed. First, how did t...

Some pre-service mathematics teachers in South Africa are nervous about the content of Euclidean geometry because they did not study Euclidean geometry in high school but will be expected to teach ...

In March 2020, populations were forced into home quarantine to curb the spread of the coronavirus. Universities moved the majority of their operations to homeworking, with profound implications for...

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 criti...

This paper investigates the semiotic affordances of the visual and linguistic modes employed by Anglophone news brands to create news on the controversial Italian politician, Matteo Salvini. Ground...

The notions of meaning and sense, which are closely related to understanding, play an essential role in educational processes in general and, therefore, in the teaching and learning of mathematics....

Cosmopolitanism theory was mostly developed separately from the study of multilingualism: while language is central to cosmopolitanism as a practice, only a few scholars focusing on cosmopolitanism have taken a language-centred approach. We further theorise the relationship between cosmopolitanism and translingual practice with our focus on morality in relation to the use of the semiotic repertoire. The use of resources of the semiotic repertoire in translingual practice is infused with morality in that resources (such as languages, individual signs, mouthing, fingerspelling alphabets) are value laden and have particular associations or meanings in a given context. We explore and define deaf cosmopolitanism by offering examples from three international settings: deaf tourism in Bali, a sign language conference in Brazil, and a Bible translation centre in Kenya. Deaf people engaging in international mobilities align in communication by what they call ‘calibrating’. In this process, mobile deaf people quickly adopt new semiotic resources by engaging in rapid, immersive and informal (sign) language learning, acquiring (bits of) new sign languages, mouthing, written words, and fingerspelling alphabets, and including them in their practice of calibrating. Our analysis centres language ideologies about these practices, demonstrating moral ideas about what strategies and semiotic resources are most appropriate in specific contexts and/or with/by whom.

At an overarching level this paper attempts to draw attention to emerging trends in the humanities where alternative ways of doing science reconfigure epistemological traditions and research methodologies, the role of intellectuals and their engagement with current conditions of the world, including ways in which scholars gazes are constituted. Drawing on what we call a Second Wave of Southern Perspectives (SWaSP), that sees the entanglements of two clusters – the first of which comprises contemporary ways of reading anticolonial, postcolonial and decolonial thinkers with offerings of Southern perspectives, and a second where contemporary theories about language and communication that considers their cultural and social dimensions, this paper calls for a mobile global-centric gazing. More specifically this paper actualises ontoepistemological trajectories that feed into the scholarship about multilingualism, looking at its different possible beings and becomings that enable a variety of ways of conceptualising multilingual practices. We do this by first presenting a brief review about recent discussions related to the concept of repertoires in the field of multilingualism and pathways that can move these debates in different directions. After this, we present possible ways to go beyond the sociolinguistics of multilingualism, by considering contemporary challenges in the knowledge production enterprise.

A semiotic approach to Indian epics offers unique perspectives to the epic traditions and their retellings across mediums. Graphic novels provide an enabling space for the retellings of epics like ...

This article explores the complex semiotic meanings embedded in the choice and the representation of food served at the official lunches, dinners and banquets at the Brussels International Expositi...

This article presents a networking of two theories, the Extended Theory of Mathematical Connections (ETC) and the Onto-semiotic Approach (OSA). In particular, concordances and complementarities are...

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...

Understanding how extremist Salafists communicate, and not only what, is key to gaining insights into the ways they construct their social order and use psychological forces to radicalize potential...

This article takes the inquiry into semiotic repertoires beyond their classifications and inventories to analyse their interactions with each other and the way they gain indexicality in situated communication. As previous theorisation suggests that semiotic repertoires are deployed by agentive individuals, this article draws from New Materialism to focus on how social agents, semiotic repertoires, and material ecologies work together in distributed practice for meaning making. Expanding sociolinguistic constructs for this purpose, the article defines the relevant units and objects of analysis, and illustrates the framing of activities in indexing the values, meanings, and relationships of semiotic repertoires. The role of these repertoires in the interaction of an international community of scientists is analysed through the research group meeting of a team of microbiologists. The article demonstrates that though the focal participant from Korea claims limited English grammatical proficiency in his personal repertoire, he draws strategically from the repertoires in the physical setting and those of his disciplinary community to communicate successfully.

Magazines represent a site for cultural contestation, reconciliation, and alienation in visual culture. Adopting social semiotics and cultural discourse perspectives, this study examines the visual...

This article examines the ways in which YouTube’s comedy-driven drama, Ladies Room, set in six women-only toilet sanctuaries across Mumbai, mines the semiotics of unruliness to push against the bou...

This article seeks to reconcile, as well as operationalize, two different methodological approaches on the basis of some important basic affinities: geoethics and Peircean semiotics. For this purpo...

We present a study examining broadcast British Sign Language (BSL) interpreted weather forecasts. These are filmed against a green screen with a superimposed composite image broadcast including maps and satellite information, etc. that can be indexed. We examine the semiotic resources used when interacting with the available visible on-screen information to the viewing audiences. The forecasters and interpreters tailor their multimodal communicative practice to the sensory ecology (Kusters, 2017) of the audiences they serve. That is to say that, speakers/hearers hear the spoken monolingual linguistic resources while seeing the gestural resources of the forecaster; BSL signers/watchers view the multilingual linguistic resources (both categorical and gradient) and co-sign gestural resources, subsequently watching the gestural resources of the forecaster and the interpreter-presenter. We identify that while similar gestural resources are used by the weather presenters and the in-vision interpreter-presenters, the temporal alignment of the semiotic assemblages (Pennycook & Otsuji, 2017) of linguistic and gestural resources are different. The assumed normative practices of the deaf audience appear to significantly contribute to the consecutive use of semiotic resources that we see presented in BSL by in-vision interpreter-presenters. In addition to simultaneous assemblages, favoured by the weather forecaster presenters, they also create consecutive semiotic assemblages.