Place, Space, and Landscape
The Semiotics: Culture in Context Workshop is now accepting submissions for the 2022–23 academic year. As usual, this workshop serves as a forum for scholars attuned to the emergent production of cultural and linguistic phenomena via diverse semiotic processes. Our theme for the year is Place, Space, and Landscape.
For linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists, research is often tied intimately to place—where speakers are located, how speech communities create location, where the outer (spatial) limits of a community of practice are located, how speakers create channels of communication in space, and how space and place are ideologically imagined and represented in discourse. We invite paper presenters to consider the following questions: What is the role of space and place in constructing language? What is the role of language in creating place and space? How are place-making processes informed by other semiotic processes? What assumptions about space and place do we as linguistic anthropologists bring to our research, and how might our research itself be a place-making process?
We seek papers from students from any discipline that consider any of the many dimensions of place and place-making as they relate to language and other semiotic modalities. These may include chronotope (Bakhtin 1981), spatial deixis, spatial-semiotic landscape (Eckert 2019), linguistic landscape, toponomastics, signing space, phaticity, as well as papers that explore concepts of locality (Appadurai 1992), place identity (Reed 2018), memory and migration, and language policy.
The deadline for submissions is two weeks before the beginning of each quarter. If you would like to workshop a paper with us sometime next year, please send an email to Anna-Marie Sprenger (sprengeram@uchicago.edu) and Bob Offer-Westort (bobow@uchicago.edu) with the following information:
- Paper title
- Type of paper (e.g., dissertation chapter, MA paper, a potential manuscript submission for a journal)
- An abstract of no more than 250 words
- The quarter(s) in which you are able to present (if more than one, please list your preferences in ranked order): Fall 2022, Winter 2023, or Spring 2023
References
Arjun Appadurai. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.
Mikhail Bakhtin. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.
Penelope Eckert. “The individual in the semiotic landscape.” Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 4, no. 1 (2019): 1–15.
Paul E. Reed. “Place and language: Links between speech, region, and connection to place.” WIREs: Cognitive Science 11, no. 3 (2018).