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Language, Culture, and Media

New Semiotic Approaches for the Study of Communication

Summer School

Erasmus+ / Blended Intensive Programme

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A Multilateral Agreement between 

the University of Cagliari (Franciscu Sedda), the University College of Cork (Tatsuma Padoan), Potsdam Universität (Eva Kimminich, Marie Schröer), Université de Liege (Maria Giulia Dondero)

With the support of the following extra-UE partners: 

Constantine Nakassis (The University of Chicago), Francesco Casetti (Yale University), 

Nicholas Harkness (Harvard University), Paolo Demuru (Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie)

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Organized by Franciscu Sedda

University of Cagliari

Department of Literature, Languages and Cultural Heritage

With the support of ISMOKA and Sardinia Film Commission

 

Cagliari, October 16th-20th

Sa Manifattura – Viale Regina Margherita, 33 – Locale 004

Online Sessions – October 25th-26th 

 

PROGRAMME

Monday 16th

15.00

Institutional Greetings

Prof. Francesco Mola (Chancellor of the University of Cagliari)

Prof. Ignazio Putzu (Dean of the Department of Literature, Languages, Cultural Heritage)

Nevina Satta (Director of Sardinia Film Commission)

15.15

Franciscu Sedda

Introduction: The Subject of Cultural Semiotics

15.35

Eva Kimminich
Hacking of sign and communication systems. A new field of action of socio-cultural change

16.45

Tatsuma Padoan

Actants, Rhizomes, Textuality: Between Anthropology and Semiotics

18.15

Marie Schröer
Sense and Sensuality. Semiotics of Food (on Social Media)

Tuesday 17th

15.00

Franciscu Sedda

Cultural Semiotics: Semiosphere

15.20

Tatsuma Padoan

Metasymbols: Explorations in the Ethnosemiotics of Pilgrimage

16.45

Eva Kimminich

Semiotic approaches to Protest as questioning and recoding of dominant cultural programs

18.15

Helene Bongers
Semiotic Approaches to Comics

Wednesday 18th

15.00

Franciscu Sedda

Cultural Semiotics: Formations

15.20

Constantine Nakassis

Event, indexicality, metapragmatics, entextualization

16.45

Anna Viola Sborgi

Film and Semiotics: An Introduction

18.15

Marie Schröer  and Helene Bongers

Multimodal referencialization: Analyzing museum comics (Workshop)

Thursday 19th

15.00

Francesco Casetti (online)

Mediascapes

16.15

Constantine Nakassis

Semiotics of Performative Speech

17.45

Franciscu Sedda

Cultural Semiotics: Translations

18.15

Marie Schröer  and Helene Bongers

Multimodal referencialization: Analyzing museum comics (Workshop 2)

 

Friday 20th

9.30

Franciscu Sedda

Cultural Semiotics: Poetics

10.00

Constantine Nakassis

Semiotics of Performative Images

11.30

Tatsuma Padoan

The Visual Discourse of Tokyo Metro

13.00

Anna Viola Sborgi

The Media Home (Workshop)

 

October 25th

Online Session

Paolo Demuru

The lies of the "I": Semiotics of First Person Misinformative Discourse

 

October 26th

Online Session

Maria Giulia Dondero

The Analysis and the Generation of Images via Algorithmic Processes

 

SCHOLARS’ BIO-NOTES

HELENE L. BONGERS

Helene L. Bongers is a research assistant and master program coordinator for applied cultural studies and cultural semiotics at Universität Potsdam as well as a doctoral candidate of art history at Freie Universität Berlin. Her dissertation addresses representations of art and museums in comics. She studied art history, literary studies and English philology in Berlin and Paris. Since 2022, she is a member of the coordinating team for the Working Group Comics Research (AG Comicforschung) of the German Society for Media Studies (Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft, GfM).

 

FRANCESCO CASETTI

Francesco Casetti is Sterling Professor of Humanities and Film and Media Studies at Yale University. He currently teaches courses on Semiotics, on Film and Media Theories, on Post-Cinema and Technical Images, and on Media and Space. He is the author of six books, translated into (among other languages) French, Spanish, Czech, and Korean; he is also co-author of two books, editor of more than ten books and special issues of journals, and author of more than sixty essays.

 

MARIA GIULIA DONDERO

Maria Giulia Dondero, PhD, is a Research Director of the National Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS), and Professor of Visual Semiotics at the University of Liège. She is the author of four books: Les langages de l’image. De la peinture aux Big Visual Data, Paris, Éditions Hermann, 2020 (English augmented and revised version: The Language of Images. The Forms and the Forces, Springer, 2020); Des images à problèmes. Le sens du visuel à l’épreuve de l’image scientifique, with J. Fontanille, Limoges, Pulim, 2012 (Eng. trans. The Semiotic Challenge of Scientific Images. A Test Case for Visual Meaning, Ottawa, Legas, 2014); Sémiotique de la photographie, with P. Basso (Limoges, Pulim, 2011); Le sacré dans l’image photographique (Paris, Hermès, 2009). She has published around 80 peer-reviewed articles in French, Italian, English, some of which have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Polish. She has directed 20 collective works and special issues on photography, scientific and artistic images and on the semiotic theory of visual language. Dondero is Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed Journal Signata Annales des Sémiotiques / Annals of Semiotics (https://journals.openedition.org/signata/) and Co-director of the collection ‘Sigilla’ at Presses universitaires de Liège. She is a member of the editorial board of several scientific journals, General Secretary of the International Association for Visual Semiotics (IAVS/AISV) since 2015, and Vice-President of the French Association for Semiotics (AFS) since 2013. She has been Visiting Professor at the University of Manouba, Tunisia (2012 and 2013); at UNESP-Araraquara University, Brazil (2014, 2016 and 2019), at the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), Mexico, at Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas, France (2019-2020) and at the University of Turin (2020-2021). Academia.edu: https://frs-fnrs.academia.edu/MariaGiuliaDondero

 

PAOLO DEMURU

Paolo Demuru, Ph.D, is Professor at the Mackenzie University of Soo Paulo, where he teaches Semiotics and Linguistics. He is the Vice President of the Brazilian Association of Semiotic Studies (2023-2025). His main areas of expertise include semiotics, cultural studies and political communication. He has published around 50 peer-reviewed articles in Italian, English, Portuguese and Spanish. Currently, he is working on digital populism and disinformation alongside European and Latin American colleagues. Some of his recent publications include "Gastropopulism: a sociosemiotic analysis of politicians posing as the everyday man via food posts on social media" (in Social Semiotics, v. 31(3), 2021), and "Conspiracy Theories, Messianic Populism, and Everyday Social Media Use in Contemporary Brazil: a Glocal Semiotic Perspective" (in Glocalism: Journal of culture, politics, and innovation, n. 3, 2020).

 

EVA KIMMINICH

Eva Kimminich was Professor of Semiotics of Culture and Roman Literature at the Institute of Roman Languages in the University of Potsdam. She established the first German master program of Applied Cultural Studies and Cultural Semiotics. Her primary research fields are semiotics of sub-, popular- and protest cultures, conspiracy theories and metaphors as cognitive concepts.

 

CONSTANTIN V. NAKASSIS

Constantine V. Nakassis is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. A linguistic anthropologist with regional focus on Tamil Nadu, India, he is the author of Onscreen/Offscreen (2023, University of Toronto Press) and Doing Style: Youth and Mass Mediation (2016, University of Chicago Press; Fare stile: Culture giovanili e mass-media nell’India del Sud, 2022, Raffaello Cortina Editore), as well as numerous articles on the ethnographic semiotics of discourse, cinema, youth culture, and brands and counterfeiting.

 

TATSUMA PADOAN

Dr Tatsuma Padoan is Lecturer in East Asian Religions (Assistant Professor) at University College Cork, and a Research Associate at SOAS, University of London. He is co-director of Sensa Lab (Laboratory of Semiotics, Ethnosemiotics, Nonfictional Studies and Audiovisuality) at UCC, the first platform for research on semiotics in Ireland, with a strong focus on anthropology and media. As an anthropologist and a semiotician, he has worked on ritual in Japan – including pilgrimage, asceticism, ritual apprenticeship, religious materiality and spirit possession – as well as on the study of design practices and the politics of urban space. His monograph Towards a Semiotics of Pilgrimage: Ritual Space, Memory and Narration in Japan and Elsewhere is forthcoming for DeGruyter.

 

ANNA VIOLA SBORGI

Anna Viola Sborgi is currently a Marie Sk?odowska-Curie Research Fellow and lecturer at the Department of Film and Screen Media, University College Cork Ireland, where she is working on her EU Horizon-funded project, Mediahomes. She was previously Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Genoa, Italy, where she worked on post-2000 interdisciplinary representations of high-rise and tower-block living in London and where she lectured on English literature, visual culture and linguistics. She holds a PhD in Film Studies (King’s College London) and a PhD in Comparative Literature (University of Genoa).  She has published on housing, film and media, film and architecture, and literature and visual culture.

 

MARIE SCHRÖER

Marie Schröer is assistant professor for cultural semiotics and cultures of Romance countries at the University of Potsdam. Her research interests include Food Studies, Auto/biography Studies and Comic Studies. She is responsible for the Comics and Graphic Literature section within the German Society for Semiotics.

 

FRANCISCU SEDDA

Franciscu Sedda is Associate Professor at the University of Cagliari, Department of Literature, Languages and Cultural Heritage. Here he teaches “Semiotics of Language and Languages”, “Semiotics of Contemporary Communication” and “Cultural Semiotics”. He has been visiting professor at Harvard University and Pontificia Universidade de São Paulo and held conferences in 15 countries.