Social Semiotics Research Papers

The semiotics of the face studies the meaning of the human face in contemporary visual cultures. There are two complementary research foci: widespread practices of face exhibition in social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Tinder; and minority practices of occultation, including the mask in anti-establishment political activism (Anonymous) and the veil in religious dressing codes. The meaning of the human face is currently changing on a global scale: through the invention and diffusion of new visual technologies (digital photography, visual filters, as well as software for automatic face recognition); through the creation and establishment of novel genres of face representation (the selfie); and through new approaches to face perception, reading, and memorization (e.g., the ‘scrolling’ of faces on Tinder). Cognitions, emotions, and actions that people attach to the interaction with one’s and others’ faces are undergoing dramatic shifts. In the semiotics of the face, an interdisciplinary but focused approach combines visual history, semiotics, phenomenology, visual anthropology, but also face perception studies and collection and analysis of big data, so as to study the social and technological causes of these changes and their effects in terms of alterations in self-perception and communicative interaction. In the tension between, on the one hand, political and economic agencies pressing for increasing disclosure, detection, and marketing of the human face (for reasons of security and control, for commercial or bureaucratic purposes) and, on the other hand, the counter-trends of face occultation (parents ‘hiding’ their children from the Internet, political activists concealing their faces, religious or aesthetic veils, writers and artists like Bansky or Ferrante choosing not to reveal their identity), the visual syntax, the semantics, and the pragmatics of the human face are rapidly evolving. The semiotics of the face carries on a comprehensive survey of this socio-cultural phenomenon.

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- Semiotics, Cultural Semiotics, Visual Semiotics, Face Recognition

- by Massimo Leone
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- Semiotics, Social Networks, Internet Studies, Social Networking
- by thea buckle
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- Discourse Analysis, Semiotics, Cultural Studies, Social Change

This essay offers a case study about the Wildwalk museum in Bristol, UK. Wildwalk, originally called Wildscreen, was the brainchild of the internationally renowned wildlife documentary producer Christopher Parsons. Parsons conceived of the attraction as a peripatetic version of wildlife TV; Wildwalk was, in effect, to bring together the best of wildlife films and natural history museums – but also zoos and even botanic gardens – in order to promote a better understanding of biodiversity. Despite some initial success, the museum, which opened in time for Britain's Millennium celebrations, was forced to close less than seven years after it opened. The chapter develops a genealogical inquiry, and employs social semiotic analyses to describe the museum's remarkable innovations, but also to explain its failure to bring to fruition a truly new genre of exhibition.

- by Nils Lindahl Elliot
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- Museum Studies, Visitor studies, Museum Education, History of Museums
- by Kalevi Kull
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- Semiotics, Theories of Meaning, Biology, Biosemiotics

This chapter discusses multimodal approaches to the study of linguistics, and of representation and communication more generally. It draws attention to the range of different modes that people use to make meaning beyond language –such as speech, gesture, gaze, image and writing – and in doing so, offers new ways of analysing language. The chapter addresses two key questions. First, how can all these modes be handled theoretically? What are ‘modes’? How do people use them? Second, how can all these modes be handled analytically? What are the methodological implications if one or more modes are excluded from the analysis? The chapter fi rst highlights the ways in which multimodality is taken up in social linguistic research. It then describes a social semiotic approach to multimodality. The steps taken in such an approach are described and exemplified with case studies of classroom interaction and textbooks. It concludes with a discussion of the potentials and constraints of multimodal analysis.

- by Jeff Bezemer
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- Visual methodology, Interactional Sociolinguistics, Multimodality, Social Semiotics
- by Paolo Peverini
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- Semiotics, Film Studies, Music Video, Sociosemiotics

In the present paper, a genre-based conceptual framework for interpreting and designing content for learning objects is proposed. Learning objects are considered here as multimodal macrogenres. These macrogenres are constituted of content objects which are in fact types of digital microgenres. The successful and coherent information linking of these content objects inside a LO can be achieved through particular rhetorical relations. The knowledge of the several types of digital microgenres as well as the rhetorical relations ...

The pending narrative is an important macrostructure of persuasive speech. With it, the speaker not only describes the world and its social phenomena, but also lays a foundation for transforming the world to conform with the objective imposed in the narrative. The rhetorical force of the pending narrative comes from its sudden interruption: as soon as the motivation for an action has been created and as soon as identities have been established for the actors involved in the action, the story is interrupted, brought to a halt. This article outlines the basic mechanisms of the pending narrative and illustrates them using one alcohol policy editorial and two introductory chapters from scientific texts: Erik Allartd's The Structure of Society and Social Pressure and C. Wright Mills' The Sociological Imagination.

- by Jukka Törrönen
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- Discourse Analysis, Semiotics, Sociology, Rhetoric
- by Jukka Törrönen
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- Semiotics, Rhetoric, Social Research Methods and Methodology, Narrative

Ventriloquo è colui che parla col ventre, che simula uno slittamento della voce dalla bocca allo stomaco, da un’interiorità che si apre all’altro attraverso l’inter-faccia del volto, a un’intestinità che nega l’altro nella figura dell’in-volto, dell’in-viso, da una parola nutrimento a una parola escremento, e non quello della sua eiezione naturale ma quello di una parola-vomito, borborigma che parla a sé stesso, che inverte la traiettoria del bolo dal dentro al fuori. Ma ventriloquo è anche colui che parla al ventre, nel senso che non si rivolge al viso, alle orecchie, alla bocca, al volto dell’altro, ma spinge l’interlocutore a dismettere il proprio volto per farsi ventre, per rimanere nel chiuso del proprio io, nel rimuginare la parola ricevuta dal ventriloquo finché essa non diviene a sua volta sterco, e non viene eietta come natura vorrebbe ma vomitata verso il volto altrui, negandone la purezza fenomenologica, frustrandone la funzione di volto, oppure spingendolo a diventare anch’esso pancia, in una asemiosi illimitata che spegne il senso invece di accenderlo, che chiude l’esistenza nell’angolo buio dell’essere, che restituisce i corpi alla natura e li rende ferini, invisi gli uni agli altri, nemici, barbari.

- by Massimo Leone
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- Semiotics, Cultural Semiotics, Visual Semiotics, Cognitive Semiotics
- by Jan Blommaert
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- Discourse Analysis, Semiotics, Sociology, Cultural Studies

This article explores the cultural association of modality in relation to Japanese art. It identifies the modality configurations between a set of Superflat images by Takashi Murakami and a set of Edo era images by three seventeenth and eighteenth century painters. The analytical framework employed in this study is Kress and van Leeuwen’s concept of the modality of images, which was developed in their book Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2006 [1996]). A focus on modality allows for a bottom-up investigation of the key aesthetic elements that act as a visual foundation for the images. The research reveals aesthetic similarities between the two sets of images and shows potential for creating historical and cultural associations with an artist’s determined manipulation of certain modality features within images.

- by James Nobis
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- Modality, Japan, Social Semiotics, Fine Arts

In this article, we explore writing as a recurring and structured practice in the teaching of history. A teacher and her Grade 6 students were followed for 12 weeks’ teaching about the Vasa era. The material consists of field notes, transcribed voice recordings, teaching material, and samples of students’ writing. Drawing on the sociology of education, functional theories of writing, and concepts of historical thinking, the result shows that the teacher prioritized organizing information about the era while also, through writing based on images, creating opportunities for imagining, exploring and participating in content-related interaction. Social semiotic analysis highlights how the students employed different ways of taking notes explicitly modelled by the teacher. While the writing practices created some opportunities for learning about important events, understanding the historical significance of the Vasa era, and approaching a historical perspective, ethical dimensions and critical examination of evidence were de-emphasized. Implications for using writing in critical literacy practices of school history are discussed.

- by Robert Walldén
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- Sociology of Education, Writing, Teaching History, Social Semiotics
- by Giorgia Aiello
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- Visual Studies, Visual Anthropology, Visual Culture, Visual Rhetoric
- by Jessica Cadwallader
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- Cultural Studies, Biopower, Social Semiotics, Growth Hormone

This study aimed to demonstrate how South Korean news media routinized and sensationalized the face mask amid two recent public health crises: the fine-dust crisis and the COVID-19 epidemic. News media appropriated the mythologized meaning of the face mask as a symbol of individual safety during the two crises. This study analyses news articles to answer three questions: (1) How was wearing the face mask mythologized as a routinized practice in days of uncertain risk? (2) How was the face mask politicized as a mythologized sign indicating China as an external threat? and (3) How was the face mask politicized as a symbolic code of the government's responsibility for the crisis? Once signified as the primary means of individual protection in the context of Korean risk society, the face mask became politicized amid the shortage of the face mask. Placed in the context of the recent disastrous crises in Korea, China was identified as the culprit not only in the epidemic but also in the shortage of the face mask. The meaning of China as KEYWORDS COVID-19 face mask Korean news media risk society Sino-Korea relations news and myth

- by Taesik Kim
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- Discourse Analysis, Social Semiotics, Masks, Risk society

Este libro es una recopilación de escritos elaborados durante varios años, en diferentes plataformas digitales. Leerlos resultará de utilidad para cualquier persona interesado en la vida social y política, porque representan esquemas analíticos que pueden ser aplicados a la realidad cotidiana de cualquier sociedad; estos se enfocan concretamente a la Guatemala contemporánea y son ejercicios semiológicos que buscan compartirse con la comunidad académica del área de comunicación, y a la vez con quienes deseen iniciarse en este apasionante campo de esta aplicación teórica. Se abordan temáticas culturales, sociales y políticas, porque la semiótica permite estudiar, como dijo Eco, cualquier hecho cultural (en el amplio sentido de la palabra) como proceso comunicativo, pues prevalece todo un sistema de significación que lo soporta. La semiótica es una disciplina que bucea y escudriña en las redes simbólicas de la vida diaria, apoyándose en diversas áreas del conocimiento. Aplicar el escáner semiótico a estos temas fue una tarea fascinante, para resignificar los andamiajes de los poderes dominantes (y sus resquicios) siempre con la actitud académica de búsqueda.
El autor es Ramiro Mac Donald, reconocido semiólogo guatemalteco, doctorando en comunicación por UNIACC, Chile, profesor de semiótica, Opinión Pública y teorías de comunicación en universidades guatemaltecas. Autor del libro Funciones de Roman Jakobson en la Era Digital. Utiliza un agudo escáner semiótico en sus análisis. En la actualidad preside el Círculo Guatemalteco de Estudios Semióticos.

In this working paper we will present a research methodology for describing and comparing corpus of video productions diffused and shared on social media platforms (here: You Tube). The objective of this research is: 1. to study and interpret the cultural representations of the figure of the migrant/immigrant and refugee in virtual local and global communities viewing, commenting and remediating (rewriting) such video productions and 2. to interpret these cultural representations as belonging to a diversity of (new) folk cultures offering especially people from the younger generations (the so-called Millennials and Post-Millennials also sometimes called Homelanders) an epistemic framework for thematizing and narrating the (social) Other (here: the migrant, the immigrant and the refugee). This paper constitutes the principal support of our course entitled “Cultural visions of (im)migrants and (im)migration in the digital social mediasphere”. This course is part of the EMICC (European Master in InterCultural Communication) program offered by a network of European universities and coordinated by the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Lugano . The methodology and results discussed in this paper will also be presented in the First Eurocampus Conference “Advances in Intercultural Communication” in January 2018 and hosted by the Universidade Aberta in Coimbra (Portugal). Finally, we would also like to stress that this is a first uncorrected version of a research article to be published in the Cambridge Handbook of Intercultural Communication, edited by Guido Rings and Sebastian Rasinger (expected publication date: end of 2018/first half of 2019).

- by Peter Stockinger
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- Semiotics, Communication, Media Studies, New Media
- by Mary Rasmussen
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- Cultural Studies, Secondary Education, Young People, Gender Identity

The article proposes a typology of meaninglessness based on the semiotics of Charles S. Peirce: meaningless as indecipherable; as incomprehensible; and as uncanny. Each type is exemplified with reference to anecdotic semiotic experience gained while riding Japanese buses. Meaninglessness, however, is not insignificance. Insignificance is a much more disquieting anthropological condition, which the article describes with reference to two symmetrical processes: on the one hand, the euphoric passage from significance to insignificance, a passage meant as the “birth of new meaning”; on the other hand, the dysphoric passage from significance to insignificance, a passage which coincides with the alienation of human existence. Through several examples take from present-day societies, the article advocates for an active role of semiotics in warning human communities against the “emergence of insignificance” and its potential of violence and exploitation.

- by Massimo Leone
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- Semiotics, Philosophy, Cultural Semiotics, Theories of Meaning
- by Sophia Diamantopoulou
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- Sociology, Didactics, Multimodality, Social Semiotics

Desde escolas a teatros populares, clubes sociais ou centros comunitários, equipamentos coletivos são fulcrais para diversos movimentos sociais e organizações populares por todo o mundo. Equipamentos coletivos dão consistência a processos políticos transformativos, e é-lhes reconhecido impacto sobre saúde mental, e empoderamento social. Equipamentos coletivos são vitais para promover autogestão e formas de democracia radical, tal como é exemplificado pelo municipalismo radical que se encontra hoje em dia em expansão tendo como referência Barcelona, Rojava ou Rosário. Mas, como funcionam os equipamentos? Há pouco trabalho que se debruce sobre equipamentos coletivos, e principalmente sobre o modo como os equipamentos são usados ou vivenciados. Muitas vezes o esforço por parte das organizações para ter um espaço é tal que, atingido esse objetivo, todo a atenção recai sobre o seu programa principal (cultural, administrativo, social), mas pouca reflexão é dada ao uso e programação do equipamento no seu sentido mais alargado. Isto é, o dia-a-dia das relações internas ao equipamento. Por estas relações serem pouco pensadas, muitas vezes, convertem-se em mecanismos identitários que cristalizam relações de poder, promovem separações hierárquicas e de género, e micro-fascismos de todos géneros. Isto são patologias demasiado comuns mesmo em organizações progressistas. Do nosso ponto de vista, é essencial pensar os equipamentos coletivos como mecanismos cuja programação permite trabalhar relações ao nível do coletivo ele mesmo. Isto, na nossa perspetiva, implica primordialmente uma abordagem ambiental à sua programação. Para desenvolver esta ideia, vamos recorrer ao trabalho sobre equipamentos coletivos realizados por Félix Guattari e pelo centro de estudos CERFI. Vamos olhar para o caso da clínica psiquiátrica La Borde, equipamento coletivo em ato, lugar de teste e experimentação deste

- by Godofredo Pereira and +1
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- Architecture, Felix Guattari, Social Semiotics, Institutional analysis

The present paper is concerned with the problem of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic depictions of countries in its diachronic evolution. Relevant terms and their definitions are subject to review, seen through the prism of semiotics. Interdisciplinary nature of the research presupposes accumulation of achievements in different scholarly fields. Apart from that, the article features case studies of three major country symbols (Uncle Sam, British lion and Russian bear), exemplifying author's ideas.

- by Gleb Toropchin
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- Semiotics, Cultural Studies, Russian Studies, American Studies

The aim of this paper is to investigate the portrayal of women and men in the visual discourse of Moroccan English as a Foreign Language (MEFL, henceforth) textbooks employing a bi-modal analysis comprising qualitative content analysis alongside Giaschi (2000), Kress and Van leeuwen (2006), and Newfield's (2011) newly developed concept of critical image analysis. This bi-modal approach attempts to address a number of themes recurrent in the visual contents of the selected textbooks. Relying on this combination, pictorial images featuring both women and men indoors (in domestic settings) and outdoors either in the job market or undertaking some outdoor activities are interrogated. The results of this inquiry prove very convincingly that the visual discourse of MEFL textbooks is fraught with an array of cultural misconceptions in discrimination of women. The paper ends up with a conclusion along with some recommendations.

- by Driss Benattabou
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- Applied Linguistics, Social Semiotics, Women and Gender Studies
- by Han-liang Chang
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- Environmental Studies, Hazards (Disaster Studies), Social Semiotics

Türk halk anlatılarından efsaneler bugüne kadar birçok açıdan incelenmiştir. Temelde sözlü bir anlatı türü olan efsaneler yazıya geçirildiğinde edebîlik vasfı olan metinler olarak var olmaya devam eder. A.J.Greimas tarafından geliştirilen ve değişik temellere dayandırılan bir yazınsal göstergebilim yöntemi olan “aktansiyel model” tüm metinlere uygulanabilen bir yöntemdir. İncelememizde bu yöntemi bir efsane metnine uygulayarak yöntemi halkbilimsel bakış açısıyla beslemeye çalıştık.
Abstract
Many Turkish folk narratives have been studied from different perspectives. The legend that is basically an oral narrative form, achieves literary value when transferred into written form. A.J. Greimas has elaborated the actantial model for semiotic analysis that can be applied to all types of written texts. This paper uses Greimas’s ‘Actantial Model’ through a folkloristic perspective in interpreting a legend.

- by Ftmgl Kçk Trsn
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- Semiotics, Cultural Semiotics, Folklore (Literature), Social Semiotics

Review by Lauren Carr: "I was particularly intrigued by the essay entitled 'Gaming in Context: How Young People Construct Their Gendered Identities in Playing and Making Games' by Caroline Pelletier, and based on a study conducted with high school students in the United Kingdom. After engaging with students in group interviews and individual questionnaires, some striking insights were discovered on the use of games beyond actual game play. Pelletier found that gaming preferences were “not a reflection of some inner essence, but rather a way of situating oneself in relation to others in a particular situation” (152). She explains this by assessing the difference between student’s individual answers, and their explanations on game choice and game play in the group discussion. The students became influenced by social context, and both girls and boys would assert their knowledge of a particular genre or style of game that was stereotypically associated with their own gender, despite having listed alternate games and knowledge on their questionnaire. The research found that social context was an important factor in influencing how students discuss and even construct games and that young people are “highly aware of norms relating to gender” and seek to align themselves with behaviors and tastes that reflect this norm (158). It seems as though gender is a culturally perpetuating practice, with Pelletier suggesting that in order to move away from definitions of “girl” and “boy” in gaming, we need to make game creation and design more accessible. " http://reviews.media-culture.org.au/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3391

- by Caroline Pelletier
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- Discourse Analysis, Gender Studies, Media Studies, Video Games and Learning

This paper takes as its starting point conclusions that I reached in a paper for the Teaching of Writing Division at the 2005 MLA convention (concerning attempts at curricular reform of freshman composition in the 23-college Virginia Community College System and at my own college, which revealed the fault lines between compositionists and literaturists), but this paper will develop its defense of the inclusion of literary texts in composition courses through a theoretical argument. Specifically, I will argue that rhetorical theories of discourse, generally speaking, and social semiotic theory in particular, because they situate all texts as nodes in a discursive web or network, can mediate between the conflicting positions in the debate, literature versus composition. Thus a poem, a play, and a short story, along with an essay, an advertisement, an editorial, and an article are equally instances of logonomic systems, the term used by Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress in Social Semiotics (1988). This paper hopes to demonstrate the pedagogical utility of Hodge and Kress’s concepts of production regimes and reception regimes, as well as their distinction between the semiosic plane and the mimetic plane in cultural representation, articulated in both in Social Semiotics and in their earlier Language as Ideology (1979; 1993). The paper will conclude with observations on my one-year pilot of a second-semester freshman composition course configured as “Discourse and Society,” which included literary texts, student writing, essays, film, and scholarly articles.

- by Thomas Lawrence Long
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- Composition and Rhetoric, Social Semiotics

"Una sceneggiatura sociale: analisi semiotica dell'aperitivo".
Il presente lavoro è incentrato sul fenomeno dell'aperitivo letto come uno dei temi della semiotica del gusto e del cibo. Il momento dell'aperitivo non è dettato prettamente dal bisogno di nutrimento e non possiede la natura di carburante corporeo, rappresenta piuttosto uno spazio altro in cui vivere un'esperienza conviviale e tornare ad esercitare le forme del vivere sociale fondate sull'incontro, sulla conversazione e sulla corporeità.

- by Roberta Cortellucci
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- Semiotics, Conversation, Social Semiotics, Greimas

The amount of new semantic content circulated in a society is limited by implicit norms and explicit rules. Belonging to a community means knowing, mastering, and even interiorizing such restrictions. Some of them are imposed by economy, as in the case of copyright, some by moral, as with pornography, and some for political reasons. In times of international tension such restrictions are tightened, giving rise to state ideologies and rhetorics of taciturnity. The essay explores those that came about in Italy, German, and Japan during World War II but also those that were circulated in their democratic opposers, USA and UK. The study seeks to show the relevance of a semiotic analysis of this corpus of propaganda materials not only for the sake of historical knowledge but also so as to cast new light on urgent present-day issues concerning both private and public conversation.

- by Massimo Leone
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- Semiotics, Cultural History, Cultural Studies, Visual Studies

The book presents a semiotic approach to the study of power relations in the symbolic space of medieval culture.
A critical analysis of medieval texts was carried out in accordance with the methodology of European structuralist and poststructuralist tradition (Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Umberto Eco, Jean Baudrillard), as well as Russian semiotic tradition (Mikhail Bakhtin, Juri Stepanov, Juri Lotman, Boris Uspensky, Viktor Toporov, Sergei Proskurin).
The author analyzes the early medieval historical works of Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede the Venerable, Paul the Deacon, Snorri Sturluson and other authors. The book raises questions of the realiation of the plot of teratomachia (Greek “fight against monsters”) in political culture. The murder of a monster becomes a kind of initiation of an archetypal Hero (for example, such as Theseus, Perseus, Sigurd, Beowulf, etc.), who manifests his individuality and strengthens his authority as a military leader or potential ruler through the victory over the monster. Formation of the comitatus culture and rising power of military leaders is associated with the development of ideas about the kinship of military aristocracy with the world of monsters, which is reflected in the representation of royal power.
The semiotics of power in archaic Germanic culture is identified as being of a physiological nature - the signs of power are represented by various aspects of the ruler’s body, both innate and acquired as a result of certain ritual practices, such as long hair or characteristic features of the body of representatives of the ruling Merovingian family. Such phenomena are explained through the prism of the “quasi-bodily” code of archaic culture. The psychological aspects of the perception of the physiological aspects of power are analyzed through the prism of the methodology of S. Freud, A. Adler and E. Berne.
The formation of medieval culture is considered from the point of view of the transformation of the perception of symbolic structures and the development of the practice of symbolic representation in the space of political communication. The author analyzes semiotic aspects of overcoming physiological limitations and weakening the biological relevance of power, which took place in the form of ideas about the transfer of charisma through the things of the ruler, transmitted within the framework of symbolic redistribution and the medieval gift economy.
In accordance with the methodology of K. Jung, J. Campbell and E. Meletinsky, the archetypes underlying the perception of power in medieval literature (Hero, Wise old man, Father, Shadow, Seeker, Child, etc.) are analyzed.
The author examines the methods of forming political myths in the works of intellectuals of the late antiquity - Flavius Cassiodorus, Severinus Boethius, Isidore of Seville, in particular, myths concerning the categories of equality and freedom. The medieval perception of the “barbarian” world is considered in accordance with the methodology of the Moscow-Tartu semiotic school from the point of view of the dynamics of the processes of semiosphere - the interaction of the cultural core, periphery and border space of the era of late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

- by Sergey Sannikov
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- Semiotics, Medieval History, Medieval Studies, Cultural Semiotics

Las fronteras tienen caras. No se trata solamente de atributos metafóricos, en el sentido de partes del espacio que una comunidad organizada dirige y muestra hacia lo exterior, sino de caras físicas, humanas, que contribuyen al funcionamiento semiótico de las fronteras como dispositivos creadores de comunicación espacial, geográfica, y política. Por un lado, las fronteras están habitadas por las caras de los hombres y de las mujeres que protagonizan estos entornos espaciales, o sea porque los presidian, o sea porque quieren cruzarlos, o incluso desafiarlos y destruirlos. Por otro lado, las caras se vuelven de sujetos objetos, a la vez en la iconografía de las fronteras (pinturas, fotografías, videos, películas, imágenes digitales) y en el control más y más automático de sus entornos. ¿Qué hacen las máquinas con las caras en las fronteras? ¿Quién está detrás de estos dispositivos de control bio-político, y qué forma de poder expresa? ¿De qué manera la pandemia de COVID-19 ha cambiado la presencia de las caras en las fronteras y el control que las máquinas ejercen sobre ellas? ¿En qué medida se desarrolla el proyecto bio-político de un control de las emociones que las caras expresan en el espacio físico, geográfico, y político de la frontera? ¿Nos espera un futuro en el que los dispositivos de control de las fronteras leerán en nuestros rostros no solamente nuestras identidades civiles, sino también nuestras emociones?

- by Massimo Leone
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- Semiotics, Border Studies, Visual Semiotics, Cognitive Semiotics

This study focuses on the hair bow as a key element of identification and gender performance for child celebrity Jojo Siwa and her fans. Siwa is now most famous for her oversized hair bows; however, she sprung to fame with her mother in 2014 on the American reality TV show Dance Moms. This research engages with a social semiotic discourse analysis approach (Van Leeuwen, 2009) to observe how the hair bow acts as a central element of both Siwa and her fans identification. Siwa's Social media accounts include representations of both children (0-11 years old) and 'mother-fans' from America, UK, New Zealand and Australia. Jojo Siwa's Face book, You tube and Instagram official accounts, media representations and advertisements were observed closely over a 3 month period for visual and written conversations amongst fans. Keeping with social semiotic considerations of context, the hair bow also located in a history of popular culture. Close observations of the Jojo Bow suggest a celebration of exaggerated ideals of feminine performance limited to the female body. The bow also provided a means through which an idealized and exclusive mother-daughter bond was practiced and affirmed.

- by Fiona Andreallo
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- Gender Studies, Children and Families, Identity (Culture), Celebrity Culture
- by Nikos Bubaris
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- Semiotics, Cultural Geography, New Media, Mobile Media

Livro que reúne vários capítulos sobre multimodalidade, textos e tecnologias

- by Fábio Bezerra
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- Visual Narrative, Multimodality, Social Semiotics, Intermodality

This article concerns the relationship between general literacy skills
and engagement with subject-specific content in classroom practice.
The aim is to contribute knowledge about how enactment of
reading strategies impacts classroom discussions about science
texts. For 10 weeks, the researcher conducted observations and
audio recordings of strategy-focused text discussions in Grade 4
physics and biology. The strategies employed were as follows: text
knowledge, looking at text features and using prior knowledge. The
analysis of the transcribed recordings and relevant parts of the
textbook material was informed by Bernstein’s sociology of education
and a social semiotic view of disciplinary literacy practices. The
result shows that reading strategies were foregrounded in discussions
about texts in ways which created and upheld boundaries to
related content, activities and texts. Notably, the teacher and the
students discussed single pages of science textbook material without
considering how meaning conveyed by images and writing
relates to other pages by, for example, bringing technical knowledge
closer to everyday experience or by condensing meanings in
a technical way. The study shows the potential of adhering to the
information flow between given and new on textbook spreads to
understand shifts between concrete and technical meaning.

- by Antoine Constantin Caille
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- Marketing, Empathy (Psychology), Cultural Semiotics, Visual Semiotics

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