Making Signs, Translanguaging Ethnographies
Exploring Urban, Rural and Educational Spaces
Edited by Ari Sherris, Elisabetta Adami
Publication date:
29 October 2018Publisher
Multilingual MattersDimensions:
210x148mm6x8"
ISBN-13: 9781788921916
This book is the beginning of a conversation across Social Semiotics, Translanguaging, Complexity Theory and Radical Sociolinguistics. In its explorations of meaning, multimodality, communication and emerging language practices, the book includes theoretical and empirical chapters that move toward an understanding of communication in its dynamic complexity, and its social semiotic and situated character. It relocates current debates in linguistics and in multimodality, as well as conceptions of centers/margins, by re-conceptualizing communicative practice through investigation of indigenous/oral communities, street art performances, migration contexts, recycling artefacts and signage repurposing. The book takes an innovative approach to both the form and content of its scholarly writing, and will be of interest to all those involved in interdisciplinary thinking, researching and writing.
After beginning as an orientation to communicative practices that transcend labeled languages, Translanguaging now analyzes practices that transcend language itself, to include diverse semiotic resources in expansive time/space materialities. Scholars are breaking free from the limiting forms of linguistic exceptionalism, methodological individualism, and cognitive representationalism to study meanings as embodied, embedded, and extended. This book provides significant methodological and theoretical pathways to undertake this form of inquiry.