Social Science as Social Semiotics: Bridging Theories,
Methods and Practices
International Conference
25-27 September 2018
Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University, Kaliningrad, Russia
25-27 September 2018
Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University, Kaliningrad, Russia
Kaliningrad conference of September 2018 is a tribute to Michael Halliday who passed away earlier this year on April 15 – right after he turned 93. Three decades ago as well as in our time scholars of various vocations studied different languages as well as the language phenomenon. Linguists explored language system and speech. Sociologists surveyed language as a social institution. Their enterprises were worlds apart. Michael Halliday was daring enough to claim that languages are semiotic makeups as well as social institutions. Those two hypostases pertain to a single phenomenon. Its panoramic and multidimensional vision as well as adequate research can be provided by coupling linguistic and social science outlooks. To this effect he coined the very term social semiotics in 1978. Our conference is also a contribution to a momentous project of social semiotics. Its interpretation as a grand multidisciplinary domain of studies was advanced by Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress about a generation ago in 1988. They extended social semiotic phenomenon beyond the scope of language and communication. They magnified it up to comprehensive human interaction and actual existence of our kind. It had been a major challenge and still remains the one. Three decades that passed by were marked by significant achievements and major breakthroughs. But we are still in the nascent phase of social semiotics – not even half-way to its coming of age. The topic of our conference “Social Science as Social Semiotics: Bridging Theories, Methods, and Practices” give us a chance to review both accomplishments and impediments, solid scaffolding of social semiotics and its nebulous allures. We can and should instigate a new commencement to the projects launched by Halliday, his disciples and followers. Time is ripe for new responses to incessant challenges of social semiotics. Mikhail Ilyin, Programme Chairman, Professor of Higher School of Economics. |
PLENARY SPEAKERS AND LECTURERS
Plenary papers (PDF)
Plenary papers (PDF)
Gunther Kress,
professor at University College London, Institute of Education, author of Language as Ideology (1979), Social Semiotics (1988), Multimodality, Learning and Communication (2015), Literacy in the New Media Age (2003), Multimodality (2010) and many other works on semiotics, multimodal discourse analysis, communication and identity studies.
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.
Mikhail Ilyin,
tenured professor at the Higher School of Economics, head of the Centre for Advanced Methods in Social Sciences and Humanities at INION RAN, author of Words and Meanings: Describing Key Political Concepts (1997), What can semiotics contribute to political science? (2016), Semiotics of Political Discourse (2018) and other publications on political semiotics, discourse analysis and multimodal performative analysis.
Jeff Bezemer,
professor at University College London, Institute of Education, author of Multimodality, Learning and Communication (2015), Introducing Multimodality (2016) and a number of works on video analysis and multimodal analysis of communication in healthcare.
Maxim Krongauz,
professor of the Higher School of Economics, head of the Laboratory of Linguistic Conflict Resolution Studies and Contemporary Communicative Practices, author of Semiotics, or the ABC of Communication (1997), The Russian Language on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (2008), Dictionary of the Russian Internet Language (2016) and a number of other works on sociolinguistics.
Vladimir Plungyan,
member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, professor, deputy director of V.V. Vinogradov Russian Language Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow), author of works on grammatical typology, Russian grammar and lexicon, corpus linguistics and poetics, including General Morphology (2000; 5th ed. 2016), Introduction to grammatical semantics (2011), popular science book for schoolchildren Why are the languages so different? (1996, 4th ed. 2012) and many more.
Suren Zolyan,
professor at the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University, author of On the Structure of Behavior Description Language (1977), Yuri Lotman and Social Semiotics (2017), Semiotics of Political Discourse (2018), as well as a number of other publications on modal semantics, political discourse analysis and (bio)semiotics.