Bloomsbury Making Sense of People, Place and Linguistic Landscapes (Advances in Sociolinguistics)

Linguistic landscape research has emerged as the core component of a wider geohumanities. It focusses on the sense that people make of place and how concepts of place help to make sense of the notion of 'people'. This volume offers comprehensive analyses of how we live continuously in a multiplicity and simultaneity of 'places' and how this is semiotically mediated through materialities of affect and sensuality. The volume explores a gamut of linguistic landscapes (LLs) across the world from South Africa to Guadeloupe in the material semiotics of desire, learning, innovation and aspiration. It looks at signage structured around body/transgressions, slum towns and migration troubles. The authors explore how LLs contribute to the (re)imagining of different selves in (a) the living past (living the past in the present), (b) alternative presents (manufactured alternative selves) and (c) imagined futures. It focuses particularly on how the LL in all of these mediations is read through emotionality and affect, creating senses of belonging, precarity and hope across a simultaneous multiplicity of worlds. The volume offers an emerging framework with which to explore how emotions, place and bodies mediate the 'self' in LL studies, building upon the rich body of LL research. It covers various methodological and epistemological issues, such as the need for extended temporal engagement with landscapes, a mobile approach to landscapes and how bodies engage with texts (corporeality).