From sacrum to profanum: reinterpretation of communist places of power in Baltic cities

Places always represent the social and cultural dimensions of societies, seen through relationships between ideas, beliefs, and hopes. Places and their social practices are interwoven into the urban fabric and have become vital components of urban and ideological identities. Ideological systems create unique arrangements and classifications of those special places, which can be called “hallowed” or “profaned.” This project focuses on the recent transformation of the communist system of “sacral” spaces and their recent “profanation.” The transformation of meaning, together with the use and attitude toward landscape, has become visible due to spatial and functional manifestations of post-socialist cities.     

The “Double-Battle”: women combatants and their embodied experiences in war zones

Our study contributes to the ongoing debate about women in combat by exploring women combatants’ experiences of war through interviews with women soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces who served as combatants or in combat-support roles in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. We proffer that the bodily experiences of women combatants disturb conventional international relations and hegemonic masculine war metanarratives that either abstract or glorify combat. These otherwise silenced narratives reveal juxtapositions of feelings of competence and vulnerability and shed light on the women’s struggle for gender integration in the military. We conclude the article with a reflection on the challenges facing researchers investigating war and terrorism.     

mStories: exploring semiotics and praxis of user-generated mobile stories

Innovations in information and communication technologies have allowed people to actively author multimodal content and engage in new meaning-making practices. New Literacies research has gone some way to understanding new meaning-making behaviours. However, this research often derives its understandings from studies undertaken with students enrolled in formal educational settings. Mobile technologies are increasingly situated outside such domains; the informal use of these devices by adults remains on the periphery of scholarly focus. mStories is a creative participatory digital mobile storytelling project. Taking a multidimensional perspective, this article presents the in-depth case analysis of one participant and their mStory. A semiotic analysis found that the user-generated content demonstrated complex and sophisticated multimodal sense relations. However, control over the textual or compositional meta-function of the text was determined largely by the computer interface, with users habituated to relinquishing authorial control over this element. Within this study, mobile literacy praxis was characteristically ad hoc and contextually embedded, and though mobile technology invites such practices, users were neither determined nor limited by this, and happily turned to other devices where necessary.     

Race as Category Crisis: Whiteness and the Topical Assignation of Race

In this essay, I examine whiteness along two different axes. First, I discuss, in the context of Richard Dyer's White , the manner in which discussions of whiteness tend to be decontextualised and dehistoricised. Fundamentally, in White , whiteness is represented in terms of a homogeneous and self-identical category. In the second part of my essay, I focus on how racialised bodies, once they are situated within a specific historico-cultural context, complicate and problematise unitary and homogenised concepts of whiteness. I argue that the power and endurace of whiteness emerges out of its historical dispersions and geo-political mobility.     

The meta-discourse of contemporary brands and the indexing of consumption: a way to build bonds of meaning

There is an important volume of reflections on the theoretical and methodological proximity of semiotics and brand. I emphasize the texts of Lencastre and Corte-Real on brand myopia, Perez on brand expression and the proposition of a brand analysis model based on TGS de Peirce, and Mick with his studies of branding, marketing, and advertising, among others. However, the constitutive tension of the sign-brand, in its complexity as a media phenomenon determined by the sign object, pulsates in harmony with the emotional, associative, and cognitive relations it is able to generate in the interpreting minds. Brand as a complex sign, detached from the shackles of marketing management, grows toward the performing hybridism of digital technologies and arts, finding its interpreters – open-minded, active, and desirous of constant negotiations of meaning – in countless semioses. The purpose of the present article is to show that the sign strength of contemporary brands lies in their ability to index consumption based on advertising metadiscourse that reveals its audiences' social values and the objectual power by which it is determined. To this end, the study integrated knowledge of the semiotic analysis of the expressions of twenty international brands in the fashion, food, and technology industries, and the systematization and analysis of their value offers.     

Lawnscape: semiotics of space,spectacle, and ownership

While seemingly straightforward, the boundaries of ownership can be confusing. Take the front lawn, for instance. Some local ordinances prohibit such things as parking on one's front lawn or displaying celebratory storks, “For Sale” signs, or political displays out of concern for the neighbours. However, what happens when the front lawn is taken over by an unstoppable lava flow? On the Big Island of Hawai'i, countless front lawns are now vast expanses of hardened black lava. These lawns exist now under changed jurisdiction as legal spaces. No longer are these lava-ed lawns now simply purely private property as state authorities now control the area. On front lawns with or without lava, the notion of ownership is confused by two competing rights: the rights of those who inhabit the property versus the rights of those who view the property. Here, the context of rights expands traditional claims and lines of ownership according to the activity of spectaclizing. This paper will examine the tension of ownership and pursuant competing rights that challenge the construction of traditional boundaries and their enforcement within the framework of the semiotics of space. In this paper, the semiotics of space found in front lawns challenges the standard faculties of law to remedy conflicting rights.     

(Anti) Queer: Introduction

Thumbnail images depicting the face of a social actor were the most common type of image used in hard-news stories on the home page of the Sydney Morning Herald online (smh online), a high-circulation Australian daily broadsheet, between 2002 and 2006. While not all online newspapers use such images to the same extent as the smh online, close-up thumbnails of faces are commonplace on online newspaper home pages in general. This paper examines the use of these “thumbnail faces” on the smh online home page. Over four years (and across four page-design periods), these images were used more frequently, despite the fact that they function in a very different way to traditional hard-news images. Thumbnail faces cannot “tell stories”, nor “provide evidence”, but they play an important interpersonal role in individual news stories, collectively on the home page, and over time in the discursive relationship between the smh online and its readership.     

Sensibility in the era of global communication: a semioethic perspective1

This article proposes a phenomenological and semiotic analysis of sensibility in the era of globalization, which is the era of global communication. How are time, space, self, others, life, death, health, illness, work, employment, unemployment, free-time, development, underdevelopment, and so forth, perceived in today's world? As vast as this excursion may seem, these different issues concerning sensibility all bear on the problem of the relation between identity and alterity. The hypothesis guiding my analysis is that the common denominator in science and sensibility today is the ideology, or ideo-logic, of identity. However, taking Europe as our societal paradigm the ideo-logic of identity reveals itself as a menace to the difficult process of forming the European Union. In Europe – indeed, in world history at large – the logic of identity and of alterity can be traced in all the important phases that have determined peoples’ historical destiny. In the current phase of development in the social reproduction system of advanced capitalism, the contrast between identity and alterity is at an extreme, at the point of exasperation. In this article I intend to explore the possibility of opening sensibility to alterity not only in Europe, but in the anthroposociosemiosic sphere at large.     

An interpretation of Argentine economic growth since 1930. Part II∗

This article focuses on the measurement of embodied technological change. It develops the core-machinery approach to capital measurement, which is based on an engineering perspective on technological change. Using technical characteristics of different types of machinery, technical progress in the capital stock can be decomposed into incremental innovation in existing machinery and radical shifts to new technologies. The usefulness of this approach is illustrated by an analysis of embodied technological change in the Indonesian spinning and weaving industries. The core-machinery measure is compared with more traditional measures of the capital stock which are based on price information. Strengths, weaknesses and relevance of the new measure are discussed.     

Subversive semiotics and ironic anchorage on Vrye Weekblad covers: A visual analysis

Abstract

The apartheid-era Afrikaans press's compliance with apartheid politics and ideology is commonly recognised. This article investigates the newspaper Vrye Weekblad as an exception in this regard. A reading is made of four selected Vrye Weekblad front covers, through a qualitative visual semiotic analysis based on a Barthesian model, in order to describe the covers’ subversive and anti-apartheid tendencies. This analysis reveals that the subversive tendencies at work on the covers represent an open assault on the ruling National Party's (NP) norms and values, especially in terms of the bastions of apartheid Afrikaner nationalism, such as traditional reformed Christian beliefs, symbols of Afrikaner patriotism, concepts of racial purity and white ethnic superiority. The myths present on these covers, while functioning to undermine dominant ideologies, also naturalise an ideology of Vrye Weekblad's own, by creating alternative myths of a critical disposition towards the NP government. The subversive encoding of these covers stems from an ironic tension in anchorage between the conventional connotations associated with the cover images and their accompanying text, which undermine the dominant meanings of the images. This article seeks to contribute a theorisation of this ironic anchorage as a mode of encodification within the broader context of mythical representational practices. The author proposes that as these Vrye Weekblad covers were published under much the same uncertain circumstances as are experienced today with the African National Congress's (ANC) looming Protection of Information Bill and Media Appeals Tribunal, one might see the same occurrence of subversion through ironic anchorage in the contemporary South African media.