*CFP* "POST-CONFLICT CULTURES IN ASIA", MAJOR VOLUME, THE STUDIES IN POST-CONFLICT CULTURES SERIES

Critical, Cultural and Communications Press (London) announces the publication in early 2023 of a major volume focusing on post-conflict cultures in Asia.

The Studies in Post-Conflict Cultures series, which was inaugurated in 2006, has to this date published ten anthologies and three monographs exploring the cultural consequences of conflict across the globe. This is an ongoing series, originating in an Anglo-Italian Leverhulme-funded project, examining the specifically cultural aftermath of periods of national or international conflict, understood as war, civil war, dictatorship, terrorism, revolution, colonialism or persecution. 

No chronological or disciplinary boundaries are applied. Studies may be historical or contemporary, and may fall within any subject field. The ten volumes so far published have brought together international experts from disciplines as diverse as Political Science, History, Law, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, Semiotics, Geography, Film Studies, Anthropology and Literature Studies. CCC Press intends to publish a major volume of papers on post-conflict cultures in Asia in the first half of 2023. 

*CFP* "SOCIOSEMIOTIC CRITIQUE. A LOTMANIAN PERSPECTIVE", ISSUE 5 (2022), SOCIAL SEMIOTIC JOURNAL

In 2022 – the centenary of the birth of Juri Lotman – we invite you to focus on the potentiality of his semiotic theory (including ideas of as personality, translation, creolization, autocommunication, self-description, semiosphere) to critique power structures and ideological processes in semiosic phenomena.

We invite contributors to prepare an analytical essay focusing on a specific case study of a semiotic artefact or type of artefact, demonstrating how Lotmanian theory can fuel a critique of the limitations on, and variations in, the ways in which the semiotic resources/practices in question may perpetuate biases, imbalance or legitimize and maintain kinds of power interests.

At this stage, we solicit not papers but a proposal of between 1000 and 1500 words length, with bibliographic references included. On this basis, we will select 8 proposals, to be developed in an essay of 7/8000 words (bibliography included).

Proposals should be sent to: (annamaria.lorusso@unibo.it) and (franciscu.sedda@gmail.com).

Deadline CfP: 30 October 2021

*CFP* CALL FOR PROPOSALS FOR TOPICAL ISSUES, OPEN CULTURAL STUDIES

Open Cultural Studies invites groups of researchers, conference organizers and individual scholars to submit their proposals of edited volumes to be considered for publication as topical issues of the journal. 

 

About the journal: 

Open Cultural Studies is a peer-reviewed, scholarly journal that explores the fields of Humanities, Social Sciences and Arts. It interprets culture in an inclusive sense, in different theoretical, geographical and historical contexts. The journal would like to promote new research perspectives in cultural studies, but it also seeks to map out social and political scholarship that places questions of inequalities and imbalances of power at the heart of academic debate. 

 

Published special/Topical issues: 

*CFP* "TRANSITIONS IN TENSION. CONTROVERSIES AND TENSIONS AROUND ECOLOGICAL TRANSITIONS", COMMUNICATION, ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE AND SOCIETY CONFERENCE

Transitions in tension. Controversies and tensions around ecological transitions

Communication, Environment, Science and Society Research Group

16 & 17 December, 2021

 

 

The conference will take place in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, and will also be held remotely on a digital platform, on 16 and 17 December 2021 - Conference website

This colloquium aims to question the discourses and communicational phenomena related to ecological and energy transitions - we explicitly use the plural to indicate the complexity of the object in question. The polemical dimension of the communication surrounding the transitions - controversies, polemics, discussions, debates - which mobilises verbal language and all other types of semiotic devices (notably still and moving images), is at the centre of attention. 

*CFP* "REPRESENTATIONS OF VIOLENCE IN LITERATURE, CULTURE AND ARTS", VIRTUAL CONFERENCE

In his foreword to World Report on Violence and Health, published by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2002, Nelson Mandela states that “the twentieth century will be remembered as a century marked by violence” (Krug et.al., 2002, “Foreword”).  Now we are nearly at the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, but violence still permeates in our lives at various levels. Various forms of violence occurring at levels of interpersonal, self-directed, collective, state, warfare, child and youth violence, intimate partner violence, environmental violence, and animal violence lay bare the complexity and pervasiveness of the phenomenon, yet it also brings along the necessity to discuss violence from multiple perspectives.

It is difficult to present a comprehensive definition of violence since not only the concept of violence is broad as stated above but also it runs the risk of degrading the concept through fixed meanings. Keeping in mind that the concept of violence has always attracted philosophers, writers, and artists across disciplines throughout centuries, the evolving nature of the concept has made it essential to address it from different perspectives. Concordantly, Dahlberg and Krug’s definition of ‘violence’ is an applicable one which characterizes violence on different aspects as follows: “the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation” (Krug et.al., 2002, 5). 

*CFP* CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS, NEXT ISSUES, ETHNOMUSICOLOGY REVIEW

Deeply interdisciplinary, the field of ecomusicology is a branch of study exploring the various and complex nexus between people, nature and sounds. Ecomusicologists can come from the fields of composition, acoustic ecology, bio-acoustics, ethnomusicology, historical musicology, biology as well as ecocriticism, biosemiotics, ecosemiotics, phenomenology.

Ethnomusicology Review would like to invite you to share perspectives from your research for our online platform "Sounding Board." Texts on any of the following subjects are welcome:

• Music and Climate Change 
• Music in the Age of Anthropocene 
• Post humanities and sounds /music / acoustic patterns 
• DNA / Metabolic / Transgenetic poetics and sounds 
• Music in or about Landscapes 
• Natural Sounds, acoustic ecology, bio-acoustics 
• Music and/in Environment 
• Music and/ in Place or Space 

*CFP* "RE-INTRODUCTIONS TO CULTURAL SCIENCE", SPECIAL ISSUE, CULTURAL SCIENCE JOURNAL

Cultural Science Journal is an Open Access (free for authors to publish) journal that was started by Professor John Hartley and colleagues in 2008 at the Queensland University of Technology. Most recently it has been published by Ubiquity Press and Curtin University’s Centre for Culture and Technology. After 13 years of activity the editorship of the journal is handed over this year to professors Indrek Ibrus and Maximilian Schich, both of Tallinn University. The journal will be published by Tallinn University's Cultural Data Analytics Open Lab and it is currently being transferred to Sciendo platform.

Cultural Science Journal continues to be a multidisciplinary journal publishing original work on change and dynamics in culture, media and communications. It investigates structures, interactions, and processes of cultural systems at all levels of analysis and scales of application.

The Journal takes advantage of advances in cultural analytics, cultural data science, and cultural semiotics. It encourages active dialogue with evolutionary and institutional economics, biosemiotics, complexity science, network analysis, research in and cultural history and cultural evolution, specifying the ‘uses of culture’ from personal meanings to planetary platforms and systems of meaning.

*CFP* "THE SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND IDEOLOGICAL SEMIOTICS OF COMICS AND CARTOONS", VOLUME 7, ISSUE 2, PUNCTUM-INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SEMIOTICS

We are pleased to announce the publication of the Volume 6, Issue 2 (2020) of Punctum-International Journal of Semiotics, the online, open-access journal of the Hellenic Semiotic Society. This issue is devoted to "Semiotics of Political Communication", edited by Gregory Paschalidis. The articles, as well as the whole of the issue, can be accessed/downloaded at the journal’s website. We also bring you the new the new call for papers for the Volume 7, Issue 2 of Punctum-International Journal of Semiotics, devoted to ''The Social, Political and Ideological Semiotics of Comics and Cartoons'', edited by Stephan Packard and Lukas R.A. Wilde.

What more can semiotics do for comics? As early as the 1960s and through to the first decades of the 21st century, comics studies have attracted a large and perhaps disproportionate amount of attention from analytical semiotic approaches that foreground description and theory building: Their combination of pictures and text offering a challenge to any attempt towards a systematic theory of signs, and their experimental treatment of their semiotic inventory as well as the genres, imageries, and conventions of other media and art forms inviting descriptive scrutiny as well as playful engagement. Scott McCloud’s famous Understanding Comics (1993), both praised and criticized for its essentially semiotic approach, provided the foundation for the rise of sequential comics studies. Even the relatively more practice-based earlier work of Will Eisner (Comics & Sequential Art, 1985), on which McCloud built his own, focuses on a description of formal semiotic and semantic relationships. 

*CFP* "BORDERLINE SONORITIES", II CONFERENCIA INTERNACIONAL DE INVESTIGACIÓN EN SONORIDADES

II Conferencia Internacional de Investigación en Sonoridades – (CIPS)

Borderline Sonorities

9-11 de junio 2021 (online)

Grupo de Estudos em Imagens, Sonoridades e Tecnologias (GEIST)

 

Invitamos a investigadores de todas las áreas a someter ponencias a la II Conferencia Internacional de Investigación en Sonoridades – (CIPS, en portugués) que se realizará en línea entre el 9 y el 11 de junio de 2021. Como en su primera edición, la II CIPS busca promover la integración entre diferentes campos del conocimiento relacionados con el sonido y con las prácticas sonoras.

El tema de esta edición será “Sonoridades Fronterizas”, lo que enfatiza las diferentes relaciones entre prácticas sonoras/musicales asimiladas y sedimentadas en los distintos contextos sociales, políticos e históricos, así como aquellas que, por razones distintas, son excluidas o consideradas secundarias en el actual modelo globalizado de producción y circulación mediática.

*CFP* "RESEARCHING CLIMATE CHANGE COMMUNICATION: METHODOLOGICAL CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN THE DIGITAL ERA", 1ST INTERNATIONAL AND INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE ON SPATIAL METHODS

Researching Climate Change Communication: Methodological Challenges and 

Opportunities in the Digital Era

23rd, September- 26th September, 2021

Online

Over the years, communication scholars have used multiple methods to research and analyse climate change discourses. In the advent of new media technologies, climate change communication and discourses have spanned from the traditional modes of communication such as the radio, print and television to emerging platforms including the social media.

 

This has transformed the ways audiences encode and interpret issues revolving around climate change. In addition, the emergence of social media technologies allows researchers to analyse data on the dynamics of climate change debates with unprecedented breadth and scale. These platforms have expanded the research areas for studying changing patterns in interpersonal and institutional communication on climate change. At the same time this development has brought new methodological challenges and opportunities for studying content, context and climate change representations. This session is aimed at stimulating innovative investigations into the conceptual and methodological challenges and or opportunities of climate change communication research in the emergent new media digital technologies and directions for future researchers from an African perspective.

*CFP* "SEMIÓTICA DE LA CULTURA: MÉTODO Y CONCEPTOS", PRÓXIMO NÚMERO, REVISTA CUADERNOS DE INFORMACIÓN Y COMUNICACIÓN

La semiótica de la cultura, que tiene su origen en la teoría de la información, concibe la cultura como un sistema semiótico formado por el conjunto de sus textos. Además, cada cultura es entendida como la memoria no hereditaria de una colectividad. Este espacio es lo que se denomina semiosfera, fuera de la cual no hay semiosis.

Esta perspectiva considera, por un lado, los textos como dispositivos que producen sentido y, por el otro, la cultura como mecanismo de producción, conservación y transmisión de información.

Los textos se entienden como espacios de comunicación, que implican siempre un mecanismo de traducción, sea entre textos, o entre textos y destinatarios o entre cualesquiera participantes de la comunicación. En otras palabras, toda comunicación es vista como traducción entre sistemas semióticos.

El presente número de Cuadernos de Información y Comunicación pretende dar cuenta de este método de análisis de la comunicación y de la información, a través de sus conceptos.

*CFP* "IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD; THE WORD AS A TECHNICAL OBJECT", SPECIAL ISSUE, THE JOURNAL OF TECHNOLOGY AND LANGUAGE

The theme of the special issue of the Journal is related to the Word as a starting point in interdisciplinary studies of the relationship between technology and language. We propose to publish research by specialists in philosophy, philology, linguistics, history, art, computer science, logic and others. Special issue In the Beginning was the Word - The Word as a Technical Object offers but not limited to the following topics:

• The redeeming word“ known from fairy-tales, art, and romantic and spell magical thinking. Finding the right word might open doors, set us free, break a spell, effect a transformation
• Word as a key, password, trigger codes. Coding mechanisms (a secular version of the redeeming word)
• Naming as a technological activity. New words for new technologies. Eponymous technical terms. Сross-lingual term analysis.
• Word: from image to meaning (signs, signage, experiments with words in art (zaum, calligrams, etc.))
• Developing formal ontologies. Named entity recognition.
• Historical precedents of the transformation function of a word
• Inceptions and conclusions: In the beginning was the word and the final word that seals a deal

*CFP* "THE VIRUS IN SIGHT: VISUAL CULTURE IN THE FACE OF PANDEMICS IN THE 20TH CENTURY", VOL. 8, Nº 1, VISUALREVIEW: INTERNATIONAL VISUAL CULTURE REVIEW

The great metaphor of epidemics and pandemics is one that summarizes them as “the invisible enemy.” However, the one that we have had to live through, the COVID-19, like others, beyond our fears and concerns, we see them through visual stories. Therefore, it is not so invisible to the human eye. 

Every day throughout history, the stalking of pandemics has been felt by means of the symptoms that we see in infected people. In recent years, by the way, the imagery generated by television, the internet, cinema, photography, social networks, and other more popular media, such as graffiti and meme, has widened our pupils.

Although the COVID-19 outbreak is the basis for this special issue of VISUALreview. International Visual Culture Review / Revista Internacional de Cultura Visual, referring to Volume 8, Number 1, and which is expected to launch in the spring of 2021, we intend to address, in a broader sense the role of epidemics and pandemics during the 20th century, from the following approaches:

*CFP* "COMUNICACIÓN Y CULTURA DIGITAL", Nº 146 (2020), REVISTA MEXICANA DE COMUNICACIÓN

Podría decirse que la era actual se enfrenta a aquello que podemos nombrar como la presencia del acontecimiento visual (Mirzoeff, 2003) o como una constante pulsión icónica (Mandoki, 2004) en los medios de comunicación, en los espacios públicos y en los ámbitos privados. Dar forma visual a aquello que no estaba destinado a conformar imágenes constituye una actividad creciente de la época contemporánea. Más allá de la prevalencia de las brechas tecnológicas, producir o atestiguar materiales gráficos se ha convertido en una posibilidad completamente cotidiana. Personas, grupos, instituciones o medios producen representaciones visuales del mundo motivados por múltiples intencionalidades.

La dinámica del acontecer visual está caracterizada por millones de imágenes que circulan en medios, plataformas informáticas, feeds de redes sociodigitales, pantallas y espacios materiales o digitales. Además, tiene una conexión permanente con los procesos de la comunicación humana. Esta relación profunda y compleja ofrece una apertura permanente para los estudiosos de ambos fenómenos toda vez que la cultura visual y la comunicación pueden comprenderse como dos campos cuya articulación da lugar a un sinnúmero de temas de análisis.

*CFP* "HERITAGE AND THE CITY. SEMIOTICS AND POLITICS OF CULTURAL MEMORY IN URBAN SPACES", 39TH - 40TH ISSUES, LEXIA: JOURNAL OF SEMIOTICS

This Special Issue of Lexia aims at bringing together articles that critically reflect, from a semiotic angle, on the relation between cultural memory and the city, exploring the semiotic and political role that cultural heritage plays today within urban spaces, with a specific, although not exclusive, focus on difficult, uncomfortable and dissonant heritage (Macdonald; Tunbridge & Ashworth). Contributions from all disciplines dealing with cultural heritage are welcomed, since the issue intends to propose an interdisciplinary dialogue about the semiotic dimension of heritage in urban environments, that is, its meaning, but also its processes of construction, transformation, interpretation and translation.

The main issue at stake is the city-heritage connection. On the one hand, cities are places of collective memories par excellence: public spaces of mise-en-scène of historical, political, social identities and knotted fabrics of places of memory (“loci of collective memory”, according to the popular definition by the architect Aldo Rossi). On the other hand, cities are also dynamic spaces in constant transformation and redefinition, in which identities and memories are always renegotiated through everyday practices and re-written by the manifold subjectivities and communities that inhabit them. If the city is (a texture of) place(s) of memory, this memory has to be deemed as processual, dynamic and in constant evolution – a palimpsest in which traces and signs of both history and memory sediment, accumulate and stratify, generating complex and diversified effects of meaning.

*CFP* "20 YEARS LATER: LOOKING BACK AT 9/11", INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

20 Years Later: Looking Back at 9/11, International Conference

October, 7-8, 2021

University of Toulouse, Jean Jaurès, Francia 

Twenty years after the 9/11 attacks, the Universities of Toulouse and Montpellier in the South of France are joining forces to organize an international interdisciplinary conference on these events. Its aim is to analyze, not only the events and their short-term consequences with a two-decade hindsight, but also the many ways in which those events have been perceived, represented, commented upon, co-opted or rewritten along the years. It also invites reflections upon the way in which some of these responses, representations or co-optations have been in their turn received, commented upon and used in this 20-year period. The scope of the conference is interdisciplinary, as it welcomes contributions from scholars specializing in history (contemporary, political, institutional, military), geopolitics, international relations, sociology, psychology, law, economics, media and communication studies, literature, film studies, art, architecture, and popular culture. The conference is meant as a place for fruitful cross reflections on images, discourses, facts that have been seen, heard, told thousands of times, with varied intentions and perspectives. Joint paper proposals by two or three specialists from different fields are particularly welcome. Two interdisciplinary round tables will also be organized. 

*CFP* "ON INMERSIVITY", SPECIAL ISSUE, CARTE SEMIOTICHE: INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC JOURNAL ON SEMIOTICS AND THE THEORY OF IMAGES

With the advent of digital technologies, the term immersivity is gradually spreading. This lemma, which finds its root in the Latin mergĕre, to plunge, refers to the experience of a body completely enveloped by an environment, thus accounting for the shift from a purely spectatorial dimension to an immersive relationship to images  (Eugeni 2018).

The immersive effect calls into question the genealogical dimension of the media and the aesthetic experience elaborated within the history of the arts and images. The relationship between devices such as Smart Glasses and VR and the pre-cinematographic optical instruments, cannot be reduced to an evolutionary principle. Both the stereoscope (Crary 1990) and the panorama (Grau 2003), for instance, are examples of immersive strategies in the 19th century; and they share with the most recent technologies the problem of a «channeled aesthetic perception» (Montani 2014). Likewise, trompe-l’oeil painting and 3D cinema, baroque chapels and contemporary durational performances, raise questions related to the simulacrum of continuity between the space of the spectator and the space of representation. New technologies conceive an aesthetic experience in which every distance between subject and object seems to collapse.

*CFP* “MORAL COMMUNICATION. OBSERVED WITH SOCIAL SYSTEMS THEORY”, 2020 CONFERENCE

Moral Communication. Observed with Social Systems Theory

15-18 de Septiembre de 2020

Inter-University Centre, Dubrovnik, Croatia

The conference committee invites contributions on the significance of moral communication in Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory. As readers familiar with his work will recognise, Luhmann’s approach to morality is characterised by a profound moral scepticism and a certain neglect of moral communication not only as an occasional topic, but also as a distinct form of communication. As contemporary society is continuously producing moral communication, however, social systems theory is bound to adequately deal with this phenomenon if its claim to a universal theory is to be maintained. We therefore welcome contributions from scholars with an interest in moral communication at all levels of society.

The conference series has always been characterised by fruitful interactions of scholars with diverse paradigmatic and empirical backgrounds in disciplinary fields as different as political science, aesthetics, sociology, theology, history, economics, health, psychology, ecology, education, and organization studies.

*CFP* "TEATRO, NARRATIVA Y DEPORTES EN LOS INICIOS DEL SIGLO XXI", XXIX SEMINARIO INTERNACIONAL DEL SELITEN

XXIX Seminario Internacional del SELITEN: 

Teatro, narrativa y deportes en los inicios del siglo XXI

Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED)

Edificio de Humanidades, UNED. Paseo Senda del Rey, 7. 28040- Madrid (España)

Viernes, 15 mayo, 2020

El Centro de Investigación de Semiótica Literaria, Teatral y Nuevas Tecnologías (SELITEN@T), de la Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), celebra este seminario del 24 al 26 de junio de 2020 en Madrid (España). 

El objetivo de estudiar lo publicado/representado en el ámbito teatral desde el año 2000 al 2020, tanto en España (en sus diferentes lenguas) como en Iberoamérica y otros ámbitos internacionales, en relación con dos líneas básicas desarrolladas en el SELITEN@T, en los siguientes apartados:

*CFP* "SENTIDO Y SIMULACIÓN EN LA COMUNICACIÓN MEDIÁTICA", NÚMERO 25, CIC: CUADERNOS DE INFORMACIÓN Y COMUNICACIÓN

El pasado 21 de octubre de 2018 fallecía en Madrid a los 70 años de edad Wenceslao Castañares, profesor de la Facultad de Ciencias de la Información de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid y miembro del Consejo Editorial de esta revista. Desde su tesis doctoral —la primera en España centrada en la obra de Charles S. Peirce y titulada El signo: problemas semióticos y filosóficos (1985)—, toda la vida académica del profesor Castañares estuvo atravesada por el pensamiento semiótico, hasta el punto de que su fallecimiento se produjo durante la redacción de un proyecto titánico que decidió emprender él solo y que, por desgracia, quedará inconcluso: una historia de la semiótica desde la antigüedad grecolatina hasta nuestros días. Él mismo justificaba la necesidad de esta historia de la semiótica en la introducción al primero de los tres volúmenes que planeó: “[…] en la ciencia, como en cualquier otro proceso biológico o cultural, nada ocurre sin que haya precedentes. El interés por los signos y por lo que estos son capaces de hacer es, probablemente, tan antiguo como el hombre mismo”. Y, aunque la muerte lo sorprendió mientras trabajaba en el tercer volumen, los dos que nos ha dejado —Historia del pensamiento semiótico 1. La antigüedad grecolatina (2014) e Historia del pensamiento semiótico 2. La edad media (2018)—uno de los esfuerzos más serios y rigurosos por rastrear ese interés a lo largo de los siglos, dos volúmenes que son ya lectura obligada para cualquier interesado en el mundo de los signos y en la actividad de construir e interpretar sentido.