Call for Papers for the Section “Signs and the City” – CCKS: Cities, Cultures, Knowledge Societies

Invitation email

Dear Colleagues,

CALL FOR PAPERS:

Institute for Socio-Semiotic Studies ISSS
CCKS: Städte, Kulturen, Wissensgesellschaften
CCKS: Cities, Cultures, Knowledge Societies
Virtual INST World Conference – 25-28 November, 2010

Section:
Signs and the City.
In honor of Jeff Bernard

The processes involving creating signs, exchanging signs and using/reading signs are the main focus of semiotics in general.

In the case of “City Semiotics” or Urban Semiotics, the complex semioses comprise three different signs systems: “the actual built environment, the patterns of social interactions, and the means of communication”, as Larsen (1998) observed in his entry on “Urban Semiotics” in the Encyclopedia of Semiotics.

Accordingly, a wide range of topics can be studied under the label of city semiotics, and papers on any of these aspects or related ones are welcome:

–     urban semiotics in a closer sense, or semiotics of urban space and urban planning;

–     semiotics of architecture, semiotics of built envirionments;

–     city traffic & public transport: co-presence of material and semiosic/semiotic systems (and their representation);

–     center of the city and/vs. its peripheries;

–     different social and age groups and their use and appropriation of city space;

–     a gendered view of the city: wo/man moving & living in the city;

–     mapping the city: from “old-fashioned” two-dimensional printed maps to electronic and/or three dimensional representations;

–     filming the city: cities on the screen (from Pudovkin’s creative geography to CGI (re)presentations of real/imaginary cities);

–     tales of the city: cities in literary texts of yesterday and today;

–     depictions of the city in fine arts, visual communication (advertisements) and comics;

–     etc. etc.
Both theoretical and methodological studies as well as applied analyses in this area have a long tradition, and the contributions from all over the world in the proceedings of all Congresses of the International Association for Semiotic Studies IASS-AIS, starting from the very first in Milan in 1974, are strong evidence of this history and of the interest. Moreover, there exists also the International Association for the Semiotics of Space which organizes its own conferences and special sections inside the IASS congresses.

The section Signs and the City is open to everybody who considers her/his submitted paper to fit into the framework of city semiotics as outlined above. However, both the abstract and the final text should be clear about the theoretical semiotic background and approach the study is based on.

The CCKS Conference will be held as a Virtual Conference which should enable more people to contribute. During the conference the accepted papers (either as full text, or, at least, extended exposés) will be available online in a Virtual Forum. Every participant has the possibility to comment both on the paper itself and on the previous postings by others (almost) in real time. For more information and details concerning the actual procedure, please check the CCKS website (http://www.inst.at/ccks/index.htm).

To commemorate the unexpected and premature passing of Jeff Bernard on February 24, 2010, this section will be held in his honor. Jeff Bernard, who initially studied architecture and environmental design, was the President of the Austrian Association of Semiotics, Director of the Institute of Socio-Semiotic Studies ISSS and long-term member of the Board of the IASS-AIS.

You are kindly invited to send the title of your contribution together with an abstract in English (appr. 300 words, in the body of the email!) at your earliest convenience, but no later than August 31, to

Gloria Withalm <gloria.withalm@uni-ak.ac.at> and

Institute for Socio-Semiotic Studies ISSS <ISSS-Info@gmx.net>
Gloria Withalm (Chairwoman ISSS)