Routledge Critical Global Semiotics: Understanding Sustainable Transformational Citizenship

Critical Global Semiotics: Understanding Sustainable Transformational Citizenship incorporates powerful unifying frameworks which make explicit a developing global consciousness. It explores transdisciplinary ‘common wealth’ through focus on multimodality, media, and metaphor, testing two universally applicable humanitarian frameworks: critical realism (CR) and systemic functional semiotics (SFS). Every day, global citizens encounter an overwhelming host of genres and sub-genres, emergent semantic triangles, evolving semiotic trinity. Embodying philosophy, incorporating active engagement, this book addresses the political economy and cultural politics of diverse domains. Challenging daily drama and performative dharma, 24 analysts from 13 countries present current issues in Anthropology, Architecture, Dance, Feminism, Film, Health, Law, Management, Medicine, Music, Politics, Pharmaceuticals, Sociology, Sustainability Education, and Urban Development. The book’s integrative, unifying foundations will be of interest to researchers, academics, and post-graduate students in the fields of linguistics, semiotics, and critical realist philosophy, as well as to policy makers, curriculum developers, and civil society. Review "The deep and rigorously academic contributions to this collection of essays present some of the issues both from the point of theory and practice. The value of the book to linguists and teachers is that the essays expand the application of language and semiotics as applied to language and symbols and extend it into the arts and social and political organisation. It is a book of essays in which we can follow our interests, be they primarily political, social or linguistic, or all three. The underlying message, however, is clear: we live in a world that is under threat and only by understanding our different societal symbols, interpreting them and recognising the commonalities lying beneath can we move forward to a sustainable future." From Cassidy, M. (2019). Critical global semiotics: Understanding sustainable transformational citizenship (a review). Training, Language and Culture, 3(4), 68-70. doi: 10.29366/2019tlc.3.4.8 "Maureen Ellis’s volume, Critical Global Semiotics: Understanding Sustainable Transformational Citizenship is unique and greatly needed, bringing together semiotic theory and scientific methodology, all in such a way as to improve both theory and methodology while outlining pathways for improving our world. The book does several things very well: right from the beginning, Maureen Ellis, in her “Introduction” and “Conclusion” to the volume, as well as in her editorship of the volume’s sixteen contributions, serves to operationalize Thomas A. Sebeok’s global semiotics. In so doing, Ellis and her contributors employ the fields of Critical Realism (CR) and Systemic Functional Semiotics (SFS) as frameworks for “understanding sustainable transformational citizenship”; thus Critical Global Semiotics is born." W. John Coletta & Ryan T. Polacek in The American Journal of Semiotics 37.1–2 (2021), pp. 141–155. About the Author Maureen Ellis is a senior research associate at University College London and associate lecturer at The Open University, UK.