Semiotic Landscapes of Southeastern Europe

CONFERENCE PROGRAM

This rich program brings together researchers from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds working on the visual and semiotic aspects of everyday culture in Southeastern Europe.

As the presentations will show, studying the diversity of human meaning-making on public display allows for expedient insights into the fundamentals and frictions underlying visual manifestations of social patterns and political implications.

Having moved beyond its initial focus on writing and images in public space, the concept of semiotic landscapes neatly embraces the implications and intertextualities of human activities involved in the creation and shaping of space and place. 

Verbal as well as nonverbal modes of engagement with the outer world create the realities and resignifications connected to and produced by a given semiotic landscape.

Any semiotic act affecting the landscape is in itself both a consequence of and a potential cause for political, cultural, economic and other challenges and changes.

The diverse geographical and social premises of Southeastern Europe, where hegemonic as well as heretical discourses have been active in the politics of memory and meaning-making in (recent) history, provide a copious amount of perspectives and topics for researching the interconnection of the sign and public space.

ABSTRACT BOOK