Space has more than three dimensions. Our sense of space is generated by movement, that is, by time. But space is foremost a multimodal experience: visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory, and gustative. There is also an inner dimension when we feel parts of our body aching or enjoying pleasure. This inner space, however, is not the [...]
For geographer John-David Dewsbury (2011), affective geography— which builds out of the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza and, later, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (see Deleuze and Guattari 1986) — is about forming linkages or assemblages of (and between) ideas that connect different knowledge systems so as to form new connections and possibilities for meaning. Using [...]
Visual and kinesthetic stimuli led Dr. Judith Lynne Hanna (Columbia University, PhD 1976) to begin an almost five decade interdisciplinary study on the semiotics of nonverbal communication. At social dances in Los Angeles, she noticed that African university students had a distinctive “aura” as they danced, an energy that was different from their American classmates [...]
Cognitive Semiotics (hence, CS) can be defined as an interdisciplinary matrix of disciplines and methods, focused on the multifaceted phenomenon of meaning or as an emerging field with the ambition of “…integrating methods and theories developed in the disciplines of cognitive science with methods and theories developed in semiotics and the humanities, with the ultimate [...]
25? There are different ways of calculating a person’s age: from birth, or from the moment of conception. The same goes for institutions, organizations, associations, though for the latter ‘conception’ is harder to pin down, as it takes place in the more abstract world of ideas. A very brief history The International Pragmatics Association (http://ipra.ua.ac.be), [...]
I have always been interested in semiotics, if we are to take ‘an interest in semiotics’ to mean an ‘interest in how things mean’. That’s perhaps a difficult and rather tortuous phrase to begin with, but sentences like that have always interested me, and those books that refuse easy definition, but hint at great things [...]
Learning about the social lives of other species, such as wolves (Canis lupus), is complicated by the difficulty of observing them in the wild. Over the past few decades, increased opportunities to observe pack life have led to a huge shift in our understanding of wolf social behavior. The early focus on pack politics and [...]
Before sight there were touch and smell, both in our evolutionary and developmental past. Scant attention has been paid, though, to tactile, gustatory, and olfactory information in the semiotic literature. By contrast, visual and acoustic communication has attracted much research, and the meanings which images and sounds convey have been extensively discussed. This situation reflects [...]