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This volume analyses the interpretation of the built environment by connecting analytical frames developed in the fields of semiotics and geography. It focuses on specific components of the built environment: monuments and memorials, as it is easily recognisable that they are erected to promote specific meanings in the public space. The volume concentrates on monuments and memorials in post-Soviet countries in Eastern Europe, with a focus on Estonia. Elites in post-Soviet countries have often used monuments to shape meanings reflecting the needs of post-Soviet culture and society. However, individuals can interpret monuments in ways that are different from those envisioned by their designers. In Estonia, the relocation and removal of Soviet monuments and the erection of new ones has often created political divisions and resulted in civil disorder. This book examines the potential gap between the designers' expectations and the users' interpretations of monuments and memorials. The main argument is that connecting semiotics and geography can provide an innovative framework to understand how monuments convey meanings and how these are variously interpreted at societal levels.
This original and interdisciplinary volume explores the contemporary semiotic dimensions of the face from both scientific and sociocultural perspectives, putting forward several traditions, aspects, and signs of the human utopia of creating a hybrid face. The book semiotically delves into the multifaceted realm of the digital face, exploring its biological and social functions, the concept of masks, the impact of COVID-19, AI systems, digital portraiture, symbolic faces in films, viral communication, alien depictions, personhood in video games, online intimacy, and digital memorials. The human face is increasingly living a life that is not only that of the biological body but also that of it...
This book comprises eight essays that consider the politics and polemics of monuments in Africa in the wake of the #RhodesMustFall movement in 2015. The removal of the Rhodes statue from UCT main campus is the pivot on which the discussion of monuments as heritage in South Africa turns. It raised a number of questions about the implementation of heritage policy and the unequal deployment of memorials in the South African and other postcolonial landscapes. The essays in this volume are written by authors coming from different backgrounds and different disciplines. They address different aspects of this event and its aftermath, offering some intensive critique of existing monuments, analysing the successes of new initiatives, meditating on the visual resonances of all monuments and attempting to map ways of moving forward.
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This multidisciplinary companion offers a comprehensive overview of the global arena of public art. It is organised around four distinct topics: activation, social justice, memory and identity, and ecology, with a final chapter mapping significant works of public and social practice art around the world between 2008 and 2018. The thematic approach brings into view similarities and differences in the recent globalisation of public art practices, while the multidisciplinary emphasis allows for a consideration of the complex outcomes and consequences of such practices, as they engage different disciplines and communities and affect a diversity of audiences beyond the existing 'art world'. The book will highlight an international selection of artist projects that illustrate the themes. This book will be of interest to scholars in contemporary art, art history, urban studies, and museum studies.
This volume analyses the interpretation of the built environment by connecting analytical frames developed in the fields of semiotics and geography. It focuses on specific components of the built environment: monuments and memorials, as it is easily recognisable that they are erected to promote specific meanings in the public space. The volume concentrates on monuments and memorials in post-Soviet countries in Eastern Europe, with a focus on Estonia. Elites in post-Soviet countries have often used monuments to shape meanings reflecting the needs of post-Soviet culture and society. However, individuals can interpret monuments in ways that are different from those envisioned by their designers. In Estonia, the relocation and removal of Soviet monuments and the erection of new ones has often created political divisions and resulted in civil disorder. This book examines the potential gap between the designers’ expectations and the users’ interpretations of monuments and memorials. The main argument is that connecting semiotics and geography can provide an innovative framework to understand how monuments convey meanings and how these are variously interpreted at societal levels.
Andrew Selth has been watching Myanmar for 50 years. During this time, he has published 10 books and more than 400 other works about the country. In 2020, he released a collection of almost 100 articles that had been posted on the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter website. This second anthology brings together another 72 articles, written for a range of outlets between 2007 and 2023. This period saw the installation of a “disciplined democracy” under Aung San Suu Kyi, the 2021 military coup, and the country’s descent into a bitter civil war. Many of the articles in the book deal with international relations and security issues, but there are also works on Myanmar’s history, politics and culture, as well as some personal reminiscences. Together, they make a unique contribution from an Old Myanmar Hand with wide ranging interests and insights.
On August 9, 1965, 53 men died in the impoverished hills of rural Arkansas. Their final breaths came in a government facility deep underground while their loved ones were at home expecting their return. The incident at Launch Complex 373-4 remains the deadliest accident to occur in a U.S. nuclear facility. The 53: Rituals, Grief, and a Titan II Missile Disaster analyzes the event. It looks at causes but more importantly at how the mishap has affected daughters and sons for nearly six decades. It gives new sociological insight on technological disasters and the sorrow following them. The book also details how surviving family members managed themselves and each other while benefiting from the support of friends and strangers. It describes how institutions blame the powerless, and how powerful organizations generate distrust and secondary trauma. With an analysis of the event and post-disaster life, their children share stories on what went wrong and how they keep moving forward.
A Sephardi Sea tells the story of Jews from the southern shore of the Mediterranean who, between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s, migrated from their country of birth for Europe, Israel, and beyond. It is a story that explores their contrasting memories of and feelings for a Sephardi Jewish world in North Africa and Egypt that is lost forever but whose echoes many still hear. Surely, some of these Jewish migrants were already familiar with their new countries of residence because of colonial ties or of Zionism, and often spoke the language. Why, then, was the act of leaving so painful and why, more than fifty years afterward, is its memory still so tangible? Dario Miccoli examines how the m...
Given that signs and meanings pervade the world in its different aspects, semiotics is naturally open to interactions with other fields, from the humanities and social sciences to the natural and pure sciences. Open Semiotics aims to explore and expand these interactions, and to facilitate new avenues for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, providing insights into a redeployment of disciplinary fields. Such an endeavor, which is intended to benefit the entire scientific community, has drawn upon extensive cooperation. This has resulted in 141 chapters authored by 178 scholars from 58 countries spanning all continents, which represent a broad array of trends and approaches as well as numerous and diverse disciplinary crossings. Open Semiotics comprises four volumes: (1) Epistemological and Conceptual Foundations, (2) Culture and Society, (3) Texts, Images, Arts, (4) Life and its Extensions. This book is the first volume of the project.