Higher seminar: Between Fixity and Fluidity in Semiotic/Linguistic Landscape Research

Speaker: Prof. Christopher Stroud.

Seminar

Date:

Tuesday 21 January 2025

Time:

13.00 – 15.00

Location:

X308 Seminar room, Geovetenskapens hus

Navigating the shoals (borderlands): Between fixity and fluidity in semiotic/linguistic landscape research

The ‘scape’ in linguistic landscape studies has been the terra firma of the discipline since its inception. With dogged determination, these grounds have been mapped and measured with Euclidean precision, with one scape populated after the other. But, as we move across scapes, mapping, classifying and counting, other topographies with other, non-euclidean topological characteristics have literally began to surface. These are semiotic topographies that shift shape over time in/as (unexpected) places and shapes (Peck and Stroud, 2015), at times violently washed away beyond recognition (turbulence), the full extent of earlier presence only imaginable from traces (Karlander, 2019) and deposits of sediment left behind (Volvach, 2024). This is a shifting terrain beyond the fixity of ‘scape’ but not yet full immersive fluidity. In geographical parlance, such topologies/topographies are ‘shoals’, “areas in which the sea or water becomes shallow” and points where “the movement of the ocean [flows] from greater to shallower depths” (King, 2019).  Shoals can erode, drift and accumulate elsewhere, they are mobile, shape-shifting and in flux, their unpredictability comprising ‘a demonic ground’ (McKittrick, 2006) beyond cartographic certainty that requires new (conceptual) tools to navigate (King, 2023).

In this talk, I explore the productivity of ‘shoal’ as a conceptual metaphor for contact and encounter and emerging spaces of becoming in S/LL research, departing from my own work and that of colleagues who, intentionally or not, find themselves navigating the shoals and shallows of the ‘bed’ of S/LL research, Following King’s original research on ‘The Black Shoal’ as an “analytical and a methodological location”, I speculate what implications this might carry for the field.

References

Karlander, D.   2019 A semiotics of non-existence: Erasure and erased writing under anti-graffiti regimes. Linguistic Landscape 5(2):198-216

King, Tiffany Lethoba. 2019. The Black Shoals: Offshore formations of Black and Native Studies. Duke University Press

McKittrick, K. 2006. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. University of Minnesota Press

Peck, A. and C. Stroud. 2015. Skinscapes. In Linguistic Landscape, 1(1): 133-151

Volvach, N. 2024. “Our nation is just trying to rebirth right now”: constructing Crimean Tatar spaces of otherwise through Linguistic Citizenship. International Journal of the Sociology of Language , 2024(287):45–74

Christopher Stroud is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of the Western Cape (where he directed the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research, CMDR) and Emertitus Professor of Transnational Bilingualism at Stockholm University.