This book examines how people around the world have articulated and shaped their experiences of COVID-19 through a sociolinguistic phenomenon known as magical thinking. Using case studies from throughout the world–China, Egypt, Europe, Jordan, Thailand, East Jerusalem, the UK, and the US–this volume looks at how people managed ambiguity and uncertainty, risk, and social isolation by viewing their experiences of the pandemic as other than, or alongside, those presented by voices and images representing scientifically derived knowledge. Each chapter in the volume introduces the reader to a core semiotic concept and shows how it can be used to analyze and unpack a specific signifying practice. In the conclusion, the several concepts from the chapters–ideological positioning, entextualization and recontextualization, double-voicing, discursive grafting, imaging, and contagion–are revisited and synthesized, in order to demonstrate that semiotics is useful not only in ethnographic studies of various “others” and of various "crises," but also in explaining the quotidian experiences of everyday life. Ultimately, this book reveals that COVID-related magical thinking practices are often as “contagious” as the virus they reimagine, spreading through social media and resulting in such social phenomena as viral videos promoting and rejecting public health practices, the first-lockdown stockpiling of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, resistance to public health recommendations, anti-vax rhetoric, and competing interpretations of emerging public health data. This book not only represents cutting-edge research in the field, but it also provides students of anthropology, linguistics, media, and communication with the vocabulary and conceptual framework to understand the human experience of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Focusing on the discursive dimension of the COVID-19 pandemic from a semiotic perspective, this book uses semiotic theory and methods to analyse the meaning-making mechanisms and dynamics that occurred during, and revolved around, the pandemic. Demonstrating the utility of semiotic theory, concepts and analytical methods to make sense of discursive phenomena like those triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, the book explores in detail: · the blame-attribution discourses that emerged at the beginning of the pandemic; · how the coronavirus was brought to life in plastic and visual manifestations as a monster that poses a threat to humans; · how the collective actor 'the healthcare workers' was constructed in discourse and axiologised in positive terms; · the semiotics of the body during the pandemic, with a focus on the face, facemasks, social distancing and the uses of the body in online environments; · the idea of a 'new' normality following the pandemic. The book examines different dimensions of the COVID-19 pandemic, including examples from Europe, Latin America and the United States and a wide range of images, texts, practices and objects, in order to highlight the importance of its discursive and semiotic nature.

Bloomsbury Semiotics offers a state-of-the-art overview of the entire field of semiotics by revealing its influence on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. With four volumes spanning theory, method and practice across the disciplines, this definitive reference work emphasizes and strengthens common bonds shared across intellectual cultures, and facilitates the discovery and recovery of meaning across fields. It comprises: Volume 1: History and Semiosis Volume 2: Semiotics in the Natural and Technical Sciences Volume 3: Semiotics in the Arts and Social Sciences Volume 4: Semiotic Movements Written by leading international experts, the chapters provide comprehensive overviews of the history and status of semiotic inquiry across a diverse range of traditions and disciplines. Together, they highlight key contemporary developments and debates along with ongoing research priorities. Providing the most comprehensive and united overview of the field, Bloomsbury Semiotics enables anyone, from students to seasoned practitioners, to better understand and benefit from semiotic insight and how it relates to their own area of study or research. Volume 1: History and Semiosis provides a general and historical orientation to semiotic traditions and their methodologies, followed by an in-depth overview of critical issues in the study of sign systems and semiosis. It ends with an exploration of issues of sign classification and practical application, setting the scene for the remaining volumes.

This volume is an important contribution to our understanding of global pandemics in general and Covid-19 in particular. It brings together the reflections of leading social and political scientists who are interested in the implications and significance of the current crisis for politics and society. The chapters provide both analysis of the social and political dimensions of the Coronavirus pandemic and historical contextualization as well as perspectives beyond the crisis. The volume seeks to focus on Covid-19 not simply as the terrain of epidemiology or public health, but as raising fundamental questions about the nature of social, economic and political processes. The problems of contemporary societies have become intensified as a result of the pandemic. Understanding the pandemic is as much a sociological question as it is a biological one, since viral infections are transmitted through social interaction. In many ways, the pandemic poses fundamental existential as well as political questions about social life as well as exposing many of the inequalities in contemporary societies. As the chapters in this volume show, epidemiological issues and sociological problems are elucidated in many ways around the themes of power, politics, security, suffering, equality and justice. This is a cutting edge and accessible volume on the Covid-19 pandemic with chapters on topics such as the nature and limits of expertise, democratization, emergency government, digitalization, social justice, globalization, capitalist crisis, and the ecological crisis. Contents Notes on Contributors Preface Gerard Delanty 1. Introduction: The Pandemic in Historical and Global Context Part 1 Politics, Experts and the State Claus Offe 2. Corona Pandemic Policy: Exploratory Notes on its ‘Epistemic Regime’ Stephen Turner 3. The Naked State: What the Breakdown of Normality Reveals Jan Zielonka 4. Who Should be in Charge of Pandemics? Scientists or Politicians? Jonathan White 5. Emergency Europe after Covid-19 Daniel Innerarity 6. Political Decision-Making in a Pandemic Part 2 Globalization, History and the Future Helga Nowotny 7. In AI We Trust: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Pushes us Deeper into Digitalization Eva Horn 8. Tipping Points: The Anthropocene and COVID-19 Bryan S. Turner 9. The Political Theology of Covid-19: a Comparative History of Human Responses to Catastrophes Daniel Chernilo 10. Another Globalisation: Covid-19 and the Cosmopolitan Imagination Frédéric Vandenberghe & Jean-Francois Véran 11. The Pandemic as a Global Total Social Fact Part 3 The Social and Alternatives Sylvia Walby 12. Social Theory and COVID: Including Social Democracy Donatella della Porta 13. Progressive Social Movements, Democracy and the Pandemic Sonja Avlijaš 14. Security for Whom? Inequality and Human Dignity in Times of the Pandemic Albena Azmanova 15. Battlegrounds of Justice: The Pandemic and What Really Grieves the 99% Index

This book is the result of selective research papers that were presented at the First International Conference on Semiotics and Visual Communication at the Cyprus University of Technology in November 2011. The conference was structured around the theme from theory to practice, and brought together researchers and practitioners who study and evaluate the ways that semiotic theories can be analysed, perceived and applied in the context of various forms in visual communication. Within a semiotic framework, the book explores research questions under five main thematic areas: Architectural, Spatial Design-Design for Three-Dimensional Products; Design for Print Applications; Design for Screen-Based Media; Pedagogy of Visual Communication; and Visual Arts. This volume will be an asset for people who have an interest in semiotics, not only from a theoretical and historical perspective, but also from an applied point of view, looking at how semiotic theory can be implemented into educational research, design and visual communication practice. The book provides 25 essential contributions that demonstrate how the concepts and theories of semiotics can be creatively adapted within the interdisciplinary nature of visual communication.

The chapters in this book consist of selected papers that were presented at the 3rd International Conference and Poster Exhibition on Semiotics and Visual Communication at the Cyprus University of Technology in November 2017. They investigate the theme of the third conference, “The Semiotics of Branding”, and look at branding and brand design as endorsing a reputation and inhabiting a status of almost mythical proportion that has triumphed over the past few decades. Emerging from its forerunner (corporate identity) to incorporate advertising, consumer lifestyles and attitudes, image-rights, market-research, customisation, global expansion, sound and semiotics, and “the consumer-as-the-brand”, the word “branding” currently appears to be bigger than its own umbrella definition. From tribal markers, such as totems, scarifications and tattoos, to emblems of power, language, fashion, architectural space, insignias of communal groups, heraldic devices, religious and political symbols, national flags and the like, a form of branding is at work that responds to the need to determine the presence and interaction of specific groups, persons or institutions through shared codes of meaning.

Bloomsbury Semiotics offers a state-of-the-art overview of the entire field of semiotics by revealing its influence on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. With four volumes spanning theory, method and practice across the disciplines, this definitive reference work emphasizes and strengthens common bonds shared across intellectual cultures, and facilitates the discovery and recovery of meaning across fields. It comprises: Volume 1: History and Semiosis Volume 2: Semiotics in the Natural and Technical Sciences Volume 3: Semiotics in the Arts and Social Sciences Volume 4: Semiotic Movements Written by leading international experts, the chapters provide comprehensive overviews of the history and status of semiotic inquiry across a diverse range of traditions and disciplines. Together, they highlight key contemporary developments and debates along with ongoing research priorities. Providing the most comprehensive and united overview of the field, Bloomsbury Semiotics enables anyone, from students to seasoned practitioners, to better understand and benefit from semiotic insight and how it relates to their own area of study or research. Volume 3: Semiotics in the Arts and Social Sciences presents the state-of-the art in semiotic approaches to disciplines ranging from philosophy and anthropology to history and archaeology, from sociology and religious studies to music, dance, rhetoric, literature, and structural linguistics. Each chapter goes casts a vision for future research priorities, unanswered questions, and fresh openings for semiotic participation in these and related fields.

This is a book about how to read visual images: from fine art to photography, film, television and new media. It explores how meaning is communicated by the wide variety of texts that inhabit our increasingly visual world. But, rather than simply providing set meanings to individual images, Visual Culture teaches readers how to interpret visual texts with their own eyes. While the first part of the book takes readers through differing theoretical approaches to visual analysis, the second part shifts to a medium-based analysis, connected by an underlying theme about the complex relationship between visual culture and reality. Howells and Negreiros draw together seemingly diverse methodologies, while ultimately arguing for a polysemic approach to visual analysis. The third edition of this popular book contains over fifty illustrations, for the first time in colour. Included in the revised text is a new section on images of power, fear and seduction, a new segment on video games, as well as fresh material on taste and judgement. This timely edition also offers a glossary and suggestions for further reading. Written in a clear, lively and engaging style, Visual Culture continues to be an ideal introduction for students taking courses in visual culture and communications in a range of disciplines, including media and cultural studies, sociology, and art and design.

Here is a radically interdisciplinary account of how Charles S. Peirce's theory of signs can be made to interact meaningfully with translation theory. In the separate chapters of this book on semiotranslation, the author shows that the various phenomena we commonly refer to as translation are different forms of genuine and degenerate semiosis. Also drawing on insights from Ludwig Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin (and drawing analogies between their work and Peirce's) it is argued that through the kaleidoscopic, evolutionary process of unlimited translation, signs deploy their meaning-potentialities. This enables the author to throw novel light upon Roman Jakobson's three kinds of translation - intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic translation. Gorlée's pioneering study will entice translation specialists, semioticians, and (language) philosophers into expanding their views upon translation and, hopefully, into cooperative research projects.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a host of critical reflections about discourse practises dealing with public health issues. Situating crisis communication at the centre of societal and political debates about responses to the pandemic, this volume analyses the discursive strategies used in a variety of settings. Exploring how crisis discourse has become a part of managing the public health crisis itself, this book focuses on the communicative tasks and challenges for both speakers and their public audiences in seven areas: - establishment of discursive and political authority - official governmental and expert communication to the public - public understanding of government communication - legitimation of public health management as a 'war' - judging and blaming a collective other - cross-national comparison and rivalry - empathy and encouragement Covering global discourses from Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North and South America, and New Zealand, chapters use corpus-based data to cast light on these issues from a variety of languages. With crisis discourse already the object of fierce national and international debates about the appropriateness of specific communicative styles, information management and 'verbal hygiene', Pandemic and Crisis Discourse offers an authoritative intervention from language experts.