Semiotics provides key analytical tools to understand the creation and reproduction of meaning in social life. Although some fields have productively incorporated semiotic models, sociology still needs to engage with semiotic mediation.
Written by a diverse group of authors in interpretive sociology, this ambitious volume asks what the relationship between meaning systems and action is, how we can describe culture and which roles we assign to language, social processes and cognition in a sociological context. Contributors offer empirical research that not only outlines the conceptual issues at stake, but also demonstrates how to do things with semiotics through case studies.
Synthesizing a diverse and fragmented landscape, this is a key reference work for scholars interested in the connection between semiotics and sociology.
Introduction: Interpretive Sociology and the Semiotic Imagination - Andrea Cossu and Jorge Fontdevila1.Marked and Unmarked: A Semiotic Distinction for Concept-Driven Interpretive Sociology - Wayne H. Brekhus2.Blumer, Weber, Peirce and the Big Tent of Semiotic Sociology: Notes on Interactionism, Interpretivism, and Semiotics - J. I. (Hans) Bakker3.Collective Agency: A Semiotic View - Rein Raud4.Theorizing Side-Directed Behavior - Paul McLean and Eunkyung Song5.Cultural Syntax and the Rules of Meaning Making: A New Paradigm for the Interpretation of Culture - Todd Madigan6.Memory, Cultural Systems, and Anticipation - Andrea Cossu7.Stigma Embedded Semiotics: Indexical Dilemmas of HIV across Local and Migrant Networks - Jorge Fontdevila8.Supremacy or Symbiosis? The Effect of Gendered Ideologies of the Trans- versus Posthuman on Wearable Technology and Biodesign - Elizabeth Wissinger
Andrea Cossu is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Trento.
Jorge Fontdevila is Professor of Sociology at California State University.
