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Anthropocenic landscapes: Space and semiosis in planetary crisis
Smith,Sean P.
Smith,Sean P.
Abstract
The Anthropocene concept has been widely embraced, with scholars and practitioners demonstrating its potential to challenge the most tenacious frameworks of modernity even as the Holocene remains the officially designated geological epoch. This special issue takes up the Anthropocene’s conceptual provocations as a heuristic for the study of space and semiosis, laying groundwork for new theoretical and methodological frameworks through which sociolinguistics can address planetary crisis. After locating the sociolinguistic study of space within the field of linguistic and semiotic landscapes, this introduction critically reviews the colonial origins of the Anthropocene. Three directions for the study of space and semiosis are then proposed: (i) entangled and expanded space, (ii) attunement as method and praxis, and (iii) political economy as planetary actor. Six contributing articles are summarized, followed by a discussion that charts a path forward for sociolinguistics in planetary crisis. (Linguistic/semiotic landscape, environment, nature, posthumanism, climate change, space, attunement, political economy, coloniality)
Description
Date
2025-11
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Keywords
Language, Linguistic landscape
Citation
Smith, S P 2025, 'Anthropocenic landscapes : Space and semiosis in planetary crisis', Language in Society, vol. 54, no. 5, pp. 934-945. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404525101814
License
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess