Conference Announcement "Signs of the World: Interculturality and Globalisation" 8th AIS/IASS Congress International Association of Semiotics (AIS/IASS) Lyon (France) 7.-12.7.2004
Signs are conceived and circulate in a world whose recent evolution implies a change in the nature of geopolitical and intercultural relations. The evolution in the means of exchange, in the representations of the world and the strategies devised by political and institutional actors lead semioticians to appraise and update their concepts and analysis tools. The 8th AIS congress will have interculturality and globalisation as themes. It will allow for clarification of the specific contributions of semiotics to world comprehension and to political, economic, cultural, aesthetic and anthropological debate. Through their involvement in critical reflection on globalisation, semioticians contribute to the process of clarifying issues arising from this reflection and have a role to play in this contemporary debate: how world cultures can be made more intelligible to each other within the framework of their own differences. Below is the list of congress sessions. Contributions will take place in one of these sessions. 1. Theoretical semiotics and epistemology The theoretical origins of semiotics will be subject to contemporary debate on the sign and communication. Do New Information and Communication Technologies (N.I.C.T.) require semiotics to invent special methods or procedures for analysis and interpretation ? In this framework great theoretical questions about the objects and the boundaries of semiotics will also be tackled. 2. Differences and identities Semiotics concerns the forms of sociability, rituals, symbolic experience, political systems and religions that give cultures identity. We will tackle here the semiotic modalities of self-presentation (politeness systems and civility) and symbolic strategies regulating relations between subjects and cultures. We will try to analyse and understand conflicts and wars of identity. The Congress will pay careful critical attention to the analysis of racist and discriminatory themes and discourse. 3. Semiotics of communication : exchanges and relations Due to globalisation, different signs and forms systems are confronted. Through symbolic processing of information, and taking into account new production, distribution and reception practices, the media devise global intelligibility systems of the world and of its significations. 4. Semiotics of cultural practices Does globalisation modify the status and the signification of cultural practices (Cuisine, clothing, housingÂ…) and does it favour the emergence of transitory cultures ? How does semiotics account for these practices and their evolutions. 5. Semiotics and aesthetic practices Does globalisation leave its mark on contemporary evolution of literature, music or dramatic arts ? Could it foster an original approach of intersemioticity ? Is interculturality, from now on heralded by the arts, an exchange or a factor of standardisation ? 6. Semiotics of space and time globalisation Could semiotics help us have a better understanding of our relation to space, in our collective practices as well as in our individual experiences ? Does globalisation induce a new particular approach to temporality, in day-to-day life or in history (polychronic or monochronic cultures ; cyclic or linear time) ? Does it require new organisational forms and new space practices (town and country organisation) ? Can semiotics describe new representations of world space, of travelling and movement ? 7. Political semiotics of globalisation In a globalisation problematic, has semiotics to deliver a particular discourse about law and politics ? It is valuable to analyse the sign's place and use within the dynamics of general exchange and globalised communication. It is a matter of describing the forms of a political economy of sign . The semiotics of globalisation could interpret the practice of money as a sign in our political and cultural experiences. The Congress will move to formulate a semiotic critique of the dominating logics of liberal globalisation. Conference Website: http://sites.univ-lyon2.fr/semio2004/sommaire.php3 _________________________________ InterPhil List Administration: http://interphil.polylog.org/ Intercultural Philosophy Calendar: http://agd.polylog.org/cal/
