Read more
This book addresses disciplinary gaps between work in semiotics and multimodality (fields that have typically centered on the nature of signs/modes or on semiotic artifacts) and situated observational research (traditions that have focused on particular semiotic resources such as talk, gesture, and inscription). Situated, Historical, Embodied Semiosis (SHES) rearticulates these lines of work around understanding semiosis as action, communication, and becoming across temporal-spatial scales. With particular attention to laminated indexical fields, the book offers a multidisciplinary synthesis of Peircean biosemiotics, flat materialist ontologies, dialogic and cultural-historical theory, empirical traditions studying talk, nonverbal communication, and inscriptional practices. It illustrates the SHES framework with examples from the literature and the authors' studies of disciplinary literate activity and communicative diversity (e.g., individuals with aphasia). This unified account of semiotic activity tackles a knotty set of conceptual, methodological, disciplinary, and ideological roadblocks. These roadblocks have impeded a fuller understanding and exploration of semiosis as situated, embodied becoming in material practices in the world.
About the author
Paul A. Prior
and
Julie A. Hengst
, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA;
Andrea R. Olinger
, University of Louisville, USA.
Summary
Situated, Historical, Embodied Semiosis
offers a new synthesis of Peircean biosemiotics, empirical research on situated activity (including talk, gesture, and inscriptions), and intra-active frameworks for becoming-with. Examining and integrating a wide range of theory and research, the authors combine close analysis of situated semiotic activity (artifacts and practices) across production, reception, and use to account for semiosis as a matter of flat, dialogic histories. The book proposes an expansive, transdisciplinary agenda where semiotic theory is grounded in the details of situated research and situated research is framed by basic theories of dialogic semiotics.
