The 50th Conference of the Semiotic Society of America: Semiotic Communities and Collective Inquiry

CALL FOR PAPERS

The 50th Conference of the Semiotic Society of America

Pittsburgh, 14–18 October 2026

Semiotic Communities and Collective Inquiry

This Year’s Theme: Semiotic Communities and Collective Inquiry

Relationally conceived, the Collective is a form of continuity of semiosic relations that makes reasoning and reasonableness open to experimentation, critique, and correction. Collective reasoning emerges when interpretations are rendered accountable to others, where claims can be challenged, redescribed, and tested, while keeping the process open through a readiness for translation across boundaries, for correction, and for the expansion of shared semioses. As an ever-expanding field of knowledge and research that ranges across virtually all phenomena, semiotics is deeply interwoven with the idea of community itself. Semiotics and sign theories of all stripes presuppose perceivers, interpreters, interactors, sign producers, meaning makers, and inquirers.

It is in this very sense of semiotics and communities of inquiry that the 50th Conference of the Semiotic Society of America invites scholars and researchers to examine semiotic processes in their communal and collective aspects. As signs are increasingly produced, circulated, and interpreted throughout nature, humanity, and technology, semiotics is challenged to reframe agency, mediation, interpretation, and meaning-making in relational terms, the manner in which communities are formed, strained, and transformed through semiosis. Any consideration of semiosis as the action of a sign in being interpreted into another more developed sign already bears a collaborative component: shared, traded, and challenged codes, traditions of interpretations and innovative disruptions, differentiations of significations, and, simultaneously, integrations of produced signs and meanings into larger, more global contexts.

Click here to download the full Call for Papers.

SSA-2026-Call-for-Papers