RSSJournal: Signs and Society
Feb 01
Call Deadline: 15-May-2014
Signs and Society is a multidisciplinary open-access journal focusing on the study of sign process (or semiosis) in the realms of social action, cognition, and cultural form. Taking as its broad mission the study of “signs and society,” the journal publishes articles that analyze sign processes and/or sign activities empirically in some specifiable or generalizable social circumstance, historical period, or textual artifact.
The journal solicits contributions from scholars in traditionally defined fields as well as emerging interdisciplinary fields of inquiry:
Anthropology, Archaeology, Art History, Classics, Cognitive Psychology, History, Linguistics, Literary Studies, Religious Studies, Sociology, Semiotics, Digital Humanities, Cognitive Science, Global Studies
We are interested in becoming a dialogic forum for scholars such as classicists and archaeologists working on “past worlds” and scholars studying contemporary cognitive and social phenomena. We welcome studies that cross types of communicational media, from face-to-face verbal interaction to technologically mediated mass communication (both analog and digital), and types of semiotic codes, including linguistic, material, behavioral, and pictorial. Research in several fields dealing with the relationships between languages and textualized cultural complexes (e.g., narratives, performances, literatures, films) fits the intent of the journal especially well. While frequently understood as a real-time phenomenon, semiosis, in our view, includes modalities for diachronically and historically recording events in fixed forms, such as memorializations, museums, and archives, and for extending the range of communication from interpersonal, contextualized messages to the global “flow”!
of transmitted or commodified cultural forms.
Mission
We take semiosis to be the most general label for the activity of sign production, communication, and interpretation. In using this word, made famous as a technical term by Charles Sanders Peirce, we do not suggest that Signs and Society is another semiotics journal, nor do we intend that every contribution need advance the often arcane quasi-discipline of semiotics.
Rather, we intend semiosis to refer to a set of interrelated dimensions, —representation, codification, communication, entextualization, interpretation, regimentation, etc.— and to argue that research from many disciplines is required to understand their dynamic interrelationship. While the journal insists on this “big picture” approach, we do not expect that each contribution will treat all of these dimensions of semiosis. Rather, we seek to publish articles that, taken as a group, will illuminate this larger view.
We believe that our approach will provide flexible scaffolding for investigation and not be a constraining grid for explanation. Focusing directly on semiosis in its multiple dimensions, we believe, will promote collaborative translation across analytical categories and technical vocabularies already established in distinct disciplinary traditions and lead to uncovering unanticipated parallels in the ways semiosis is manifest in diverse empirical domains.
We encourage scholars from various disciplines in the social sciences and humanities to contact the Editor-in-Chief (Richard J. Parmentier, rparmentier at brandeis.edu) to discuss a possible contribution. For general questions, please feel free to contact the Managing Editor (sas at hufs.ac.kr).
Signs and Society publishes regular issues in May and Nov (and a Supplementary Issue in Feb). Submissions are ongoing, but for consideration for publication in Nov 2014 issue, please submit your papers–at least–by May 15.
Website: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/journals/journal/sas.html
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/SignsAndSociety
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