Proceedings Publication: Semiotics in the Lifeworld. Proceedings of the 15th World Congress of IASS/AIS

G. Paschalidis (ed), Semiotics in the Lifeworld. Proceedings of the 15th World Congress of IASS/AIS. Thessaloniki: IASS Publications & Hellenic Semiotics Society, 2026 [https://doi:10.24308/IASS-2022]https://DOI:10.24308/IASS-2022.

The 15th World Congress was likely the most improbable and challenging in the more than fifty-year history of the IASS-AIS World Congresses of Semiotics. It was planned and approved by the IASS-AIS General Assembly in summer 2019, when global society was still recovering from the hardships of a decade- long recession, the worst since the interwar years. Furthermore, it seemed almost impossible when the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 pandemic on March 11, 2020, and worldwide lockdowns, travel bans, and public health measures suspended normal social interaction and activities. Therefore, it took a leap of faith to launch the Congress website and the Call for Abstracts in May 2021, just as mass vaccinations began to lessen the pandemic’s deadly impact and foster hope for its transition to an endemic. In the following months, this leap of faith was shared by nearly 100 colleagues, who submitted an extraordinary number of panel proposals that attracted hundreds of paper abstracts from around the world. What’s more, all of this occurred at a time overshadowed not only by the emergence of new COVID variants but also by the war in Ukraine and the resulting energy and food price crisis.

Despite institutional cuts and pandemic- and war -related restrictions that prevented many colleagues from attending the Congress, the program featured 63 thematic panels and more than 600 papers and keynote addresses from participants in 63 countries. Against all odds, the Congress proved to be a truly global gathering of the international semiotic community. Many attended for the first time the most important scientific event of the international semiotic community, demonstrating the worldwide growth of semiotic thinking and research. Most importantly, they showed our colleagues’ desire for an in-person event that would restore the intimacy, connection, and empathy of our scientific gatherings, especially the sense of transnational relatedness, dialogue, and community traditionally associated with the World Semiotics Congresses. Τhis atmosphere of relief and conviviality was keenly felt during the Congress. For over two years, our lifeworld has been deeply disrupted by the pandemic. Affected societies worldwide expended enormous semiotic labor in response to these disruptions, effectively reconfiguring our lifeworld. In fact, the Congress theme was inspired by the circumstances and challenges we faced at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the same is true for the many participants who chose to present relevant papers.

Specifically, the Congress theme, Semiotics in the Lifeworld, aimed to highlight semiotics’ ongoing engagement with everyday life, shared experiences, imaginations, meanings, and practices. It emphasizes semiotics as a socially engaged and critical examination of sign- and meaning-making processes at the core of human world-building. Semiotic research is grounded in the historical lifeworld – concrete timescapes and semioscapes – in the vibrant and evolving fabric of semiotic practices that shape human experience and communication by continually (re)articulating the perceptual and the conceptual, the discursive and the performative, the ethical and the aesthetic, the ideological and the figurative, the material and the immaterial, the human and the non-human, the natural and the man-made.

The preparation of these Proceedings also proved challenging, hindered by repeated deadline extensions, shortages and changes in editorial staff, and rapidly rising costs. The volume comprises just over 100 papers, significantly less than those presented in person but in line with a trend evident for quite some time now: fewer and fewer colleagues choose to publish their papers in Proceedings, preferring other, more versatile, and thematically focused publication venues. In view of this, the thematic sections adopted in this volume do not always reflect those found in the Congress program. Finally, in line with standard practice, the keynote speakers’ papers are due to be published in a separate volume in the Semiotics and its Masters series. I want to express my deepest appreciation to all Congress participants for their insightful contributions, which made this a meaningful, inspiring, and memorable scientific event. Despite the modest number of papers submitted to the Proceedings, this volume remains a powerful and eloquent testament to that.