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Listen closely... and you will never lose track of the name of the founding mother of significs. This event, commented on by Clara Chapdelaine-Feliciati (Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University) and Zoe Hurley (Zayed University) and chaired by Yulia Nikitenko (Institute for Philosophical Studies), is part of the activities of the 2022 International Open Seminar on Semiotics: a Tribute to John Deely on the Fifth Anniversary of His Passing, cooperatively organized by the Institute for Philosophical Studies of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra, the Lyceum Institute, the Deely Project, Saint Vincent College, the Iranian Society for Phenomenology at the Iranian Political Science Association, the International Association for Semiotics of Space and Time, the Institute for Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Semiotic Society of America, the American Maritain Association, the International Association for Semiotic Studies, the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies, the International Center for Semiotics and Intercultural Dialogue, Moscow State Academic University for the Humanities and the Mansarda Acesa with the support of the FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P., of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education of the Government of Portugal under the UID/FIL/00010/2020 project. *** Susan Petrilli is Professor of Philosophy and Theory of Languages, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy, Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide, SA and 7th Thomas Sebeok Fellow of the Semiotic Society of America. Her main research areas include philosophy of language, semiotics and translation theory. With Augusto Ponzio she has introduced Semioethics as an orientation in semiotics. Her books include: Sign Studies and Semioethics (2014); Victoria Welby and the Science of Signs (2015); The Global World and Its Manifold Faces (2016); Challenges to Living Together (2017), Signs, Language and Listening (2019); Significare, interpretare e intendere (2019); Senza ripari. Segni, differenze, estraneità (2021). Through her work as author, editor, and translator she has contributed to the dissemination of works, among others, by Victoria Welby, Charles C. Peirce, Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Charles Morris, Gérard Deledalle, Emmanuel Levinas, Adam Schaff, Thomas A. Sebeok, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Giorgio Fano, Umberto Eco and Augusto Ponzio. Her numerous essays are published both as book chapters and in journals. These include: Semiotica; Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction; Signata; Chinese Semiotic Studies; Language and Semiotic Studies; Signs & Media; International Journal for the Semiotics of Law; International Journal of Legal Discourse; Calumet; Signs and Society; and The American Journal of Semiotics. Most recently she has translated a collection of writings into Italian by Victoria Welby, Senso, significato, significatività 1879–1911 (2021), and edited Maestri di segni e costruttori di pace (2021), Brian Medlin: The Level-Headed Revolutionary. Essays, Stories and Poems (in collab.) (2021), Exploring the Translatability of Emotions: Cross-Cultural and Transdisciplinary Encounters (with Meng Ji) (2022), and Intersemiotic Perspectives on Emotions Translating across Signs, Bodies and Values (in collab.) (2023). *** Dr. Clara Chapdelaine-Feliciati is Associate Professor at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, and a licensed Lawyer (Barrister and Solicitor) with the Law Society of Upper Canada. She holds a Ph.D. in International Law from Oxford University, where she applied Victoria Welby’s significs theory and Susan Petrilli’s and Augusto Ponzio’s ‘semioethics’ theory. She also holds a Bachelor of Laws and Bachelor of Civil Law from McGill University, and a Master of Laws from King’s College London. She conducts research on legal semiotics and legal significs in English and French and decodes the content of international human rights treaties. Her forthcoming book The Status of the Girl Child under International Law: A Semioethic Analysis will be published by Cambridge University Press. She contributed to the Semiotica Centennial Special Issue for Victoria Welby (2013). *** Zoe Hurley (PhD) is a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and an assistant professor in the College of Interdisciplinary Studies, at Zayed University, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Her work focuses on semiotics, intersectional feminism(s), power and visual communication. She is the President of the Gulf Association for Semiotic Studies, which is an associate member of the International Association for Semiotic Studies. She has published articles in leading academic journals including New Media & Society; Feminist Media Studies; Social Media + Society; Information Communication & Society; Postdigital Science and Education; and Visual Communication, in addition to several chapters, commentaries and blogs on semiotics. Her upcoming monograph - Social Media Influencing in the City of Likes: Dubai and the Postdigital Condition - expands a semiotic critique of social media and its role in the global visual economy. *** Homepage: https://www.uc.pt/fluc/uidief/io2s Auditorium: https://www.uc.pt/fluc/uidief/io2s/auditorium *** Technical support assured by Robert Junqueira. The cover image for the video was designed by Zahra Soltani.

This chapter offers a postcolonial feminist reading of the works of the British-Italian travel writer and adventuress Freya Stark (1893–1993), who travelled extensively throughout the Middle East and North African region. Her impact on travel writing as an unmarried European woman traveler, at the beginning of the twentieth century, without income, local connections or colonial rank is notable. This chapter provides close reading, through a postcolonial feminist lens, of two first edition volumes of Stark’s autobiographical travel books written during 1928–1939. The analysis explores the commercial nexus of Orientalism, which is the term that refers to Western depictions of the ‘Eastern’ world (Said E, Orientalism. Pantheon, New York, 1998). It discusses Stark’s work in relation to conceived reader expectations, as well as her distinctly ambivalent attitude to British colonialism and colonials. I suggest that Stark’s ambiguous role, as insider-outsider both within and between the Arab region and British Empire, poses provocative questions about the interrelationships of gender, self and ‘Other’ within commercialized Orientalist discourse (Ballaster R, Fabulous orients. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005). Stark makes specific discursive moves, not only as a traveler across continents, but in literary, ethnographic and gender terms. These moves manage to disrupt fixed framings, images and descriptions of Arab people, places and gender practices. This chapter therefore makes a unique contribution to theorizing Stark’s work and, also, travel writing more generally, locating it as an import discursive genre that is always underpinned by moving practices of gender, politics and power.