ΧΙIΙ INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SEMIOTICS: Semiotics Across and In-Between
Athens, Panteion University, 28-30 September 2023

Organized by the Hellenic Semiotic Society
and the Department of Communication, Media, and Culture
of Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences

Semiotics was first established in the fields of the Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts but its subsequent intersections with the Life Sciences as well as the ‘hard’ and applied sciences are now considered as part of its core. Studying signs and sign systems in all areas of human behavior, thought and creativity, semiotics acts as a key transversal field in which various kinds of scientific inquiry, communication and artistic practice can critically reflect on their world-making and meaning-making and, moreover, interact and collaborate in interdisciplinary and meta-disciplinary directions. The recent emergence of new epistemologies, hybrid ontologies and methodologies, based on relational thinking and synergistic practices, drastically reconfigures the classical taxonomies, borders and models of knowledge, experience and meaning. In this context, the issue of what is the use of semiotics to the other disciplines, and what use are the other disciplines to semiotics, raised repeatedly in the past decades, has acquired a new significance and dimension.

In the tradition of devoting the International Conferences of the Hellenic Semiotic Society to topics directly relevant to the concerns and challenges of the day, the 2023 conference invites original research which utilizes the transversality of semiotics to advance sign-analytical work across or in-between the various disciplines and/or arts. The Conference invites proposals for individual papers (15-20 minutes long) or panels (incl. 3-4 individual papers)* that relate to the following main themes:

• Semiotics as Inter-science: Inter/trans-disciplinarity has been an integral characteristic of semiotics since its beginnings, fostering integrated approaches to semiosis and sense-making. How does this tradition of inter/trans-disciplinarity is currently reinvigorated through innovative new directions for semiotic research and applications in the human and social sciences?
• Signs in/of the Sciences: How do scientists in the so-called ‘hard’ and applied sciences understand sign-deciphering and incorporate it into their practices? How do they use semiotics to re-conceptualize and/or interrogate their understandings and model-building, to evaluate ‘scientificity’ and ‘truth-making’ and, more generally, develop their critical reflexivity?
• Media and Arts Semiotics: What is the role and contribution of semiotics at a time when inter/transmediality in the media, arts, museums, and curatorial practices is making their world-making and meaning-making more hybrid, interactive, immersive, performative, and synesthetic?
• Semiotic pedagogies: Semiotics in educational environments open to different literacies (visual, media, transmedial, multimodal, intercultural). How is the literacy discourse incorporated in semiotics, how are we to teach literacies from a semiotic point of view, and what form of literacy is semiotics in itself?

Proposals for panels should include all the names/titles and abstracts of the participants, since they will be considered as a whole.

Information: https://semiotics2023.gr/