Bob Hodge
This presentation addresses the conference theme directly as a theoretical and practical problem. It uses semiotics in the first place as meta-theory. With this conceptual toolkit it tackles two related problems. Why do social science and social semiotics seem so closely related in name and theory, yet intractably divided as academic disciplines and departments? Why are social sciences and social semiotics so difficult to apply to a range of large, complex, urgent problems of modern society in Russia and the world? And can the problems in practice be resolved by better theories and analytic tools from Social Semiotics? This presentation develops an appliablesocial semiotics on a stronger, broader conceptual basis.
To build a long perspective on the process I start from Immanuel Kant, after whom this University was named, who published Critique of Practical Reason in 1788, 190 years before Halliday’s Language as Social Semiotic, 200 years before Hodge and Kress’s Social Semiotics. From KantI take his undervalued contribution to biosemiotics and social semiotic metatheory, his use of epigenetics as the basis of a theory of the evolution of categories. Only in the last 40 years has biology caught up with Kant’s ideas on epigenesis. Recent scientific breakthroughs allow us to develop an epigenetic theory of transformations that crosses biological, cognitive, social and semiotic domains and provides new insights into them all.
I develop this new model with reference to Halliday (1978), who is not usually seen as having a major place for transformations, and to Social Semiotics (Hodge and Kress 1988) as developed in Kress (2010) and Hodge (2017). Out of the modelI develop an interdisciplinary method of analysis which is as powerful in the social sciences as in social semiotics, well-designed for dealing with urgent problems that otherwise fall between the cracks of social science methods and narrow social semiotics. I illustrate the analytic method with texts around economic crises that impinged on Russia and the world between 1998 and today.
To build a long perspective on the process I start from Immanuel Kant, after whom this University was named, who published Critique of Practical Reason in 1788, 190 years before Halliday’s Language as Social Semiotic, 200 years before Hodge and Kress’s Social Semiotics. From KantI take his undervalued contribution to biosemiotics and social semiotic metatheory, his use of epigenetics as the basis of a theory of the evolution of categories. Only in the last 40 years has biology caught up with Kant’s ideas on epigenesis. Recent scientific breakthroughs allow us to develop an epigenetic theory of transformations that crosses biological, cognitive, social and semiotic domains and provides new insights into them all.
I develop this new model with reference to Halliday (1978), who is not usually seen as having a major place for transformations, and to Social Semiotics (Hodge and Kress 1988) as developed in Kress (2010) and Hodge (2017). Out of the modelI develop an interdisciplinary method of analysis which is as powerful in the social sciences as in social semiotics, well-designed for dealing with urgent problems that otherwise fall between the cracks of social science methods and narrow social semiotics. I illustrate the analytic method with texts around economic crises that impinged on Russia and the world between 1998 and today.
Bob Hodge,
Emeritus Professor at the University of Western Sydney, author of Language as Ideology (1979), Social Semiotics (1988), Social Semiotics for a Complex World (2016) and a number of other works on the methodology of social and cultural research, critical linguistics and transdisciplinarity.
Emeritus Professor at the University of Western Sydney, author of Language as Ideology (1979), Social Semiotics (1988), Social Semiotics for a Complex World (2016) and a number of other works on the methodology of social and cultural research, critical linguistics and transdisciplinarity.
Мероприятие проводится при финансовой поддержке Российского фонда фундаментальных исследований, Проект № 18-012-20072.