Projects
Workshops, Conferences, and Events
The faculty and staff of CSCS are involved in a number of University of Chicago workshop initiatives: Semiotics Workshop, The Linguistic Anthropology Lab, The Chicago Tamil Forum, Language Variation and Change Workshop, and the Michicagoan Graduate Student Conference and Faculty Seminar. See the Events page for more information.
Some Recent Publications of CSCS Faculty
- Barker, Meghanne and Nakassis, Constantine, eds. 2020–202. Images, a special issue of Semiotic Review.
- Bate, Bernard. 2021. Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern. Edited by E. Annamalai, F. Cody, M. Jayanth, C. Nakassis. Stanford University Press.
- Carr, E. Summerson. 2023. Working the Difference: Science, Spirit, and the Spread of Motivational Interviewing. University of Chicago Press.
- Carr, E. Summerson and Michael Lempert, eds. 2016. Scale: Discourse and Dimension in Social Life. University of California Press.
- Gal, Susan and Judith Irvine. 2019. Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life. Cambridge University Press. (Winner of the 2021 Edward Sapir Prize of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, awarded biennially to a book that makes the most significant contribution to our understanding of language in society)
- Nakassis, Constantine V. 2023. Onscreen/Offscreen. University of Toronto Press. Series: Studies in the Anthropology of Language, Sign and Social Life. Open-access .pdf here.
- Nakassis, Constantine V. 2016. Doing Style: Youth and Mass Mediation in South India. University of Chicago Press. (2022 Italian translation, Fare Stile: Culture giovanili e mass media nell’India del Sud, Raffaello Cortina Editorie.)
- Silverstein, Michael. 2022. Language in Culture: Lectures in the Social Semiotics of Language. Cambridge University Press.
- Wedeen, Lisa. 2019. Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria. University of Chicago Press. (Winner of the Best Book Award of the APSA Middle East and North Africa Politics Section; Winner of the Charles Taylor Book Award of the APSA Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Section
Other projects
- Semiotic Review. Edited by Constantine V. Nakassis (Anthropology, University of Chicago) and Meghanne Barker (Faculty of Education and Society, University College London), Semiotic Review (ISSN: 3066-8107) takes the notion of semiotics in its most polyphonic sense. The journal’s scope encompasses a wide range of research – from the study of signaling behavior in evolutionary biology through the analysis of the discursive formation of ideologies in human societies; from critical investigations of literary and linguistic theories all the way to the vagaries of fashion, consumer culture, and the production of political and entertainment spectacles. It welcomes diverse approaches to semiotics – Peircean and pragmat(ic)ist, Saussurean, (post)Greimassean, and Lotmanian, humanist and post-humanist, as developed in anthropology, linguistics, cultural studies, biology and ecology, and beyond. It endeavors to contribute to the advancement of knowledge by facilitating the communication of the most recent research across disciplinary boundaries. Semiotic Review publishes original scholarly essays and other interventions on topics that develop critical perspectives exploring semiotic themes, organized either in thematic issues or in its Varia section. Both are ongoing, open issues that accept new papers and publishes them on a rolling basis.