Aims and scope
Signs and Society is an open access, multidisciplinary journal in the humanities and social sciences focusing on research that examines the role of sign processes (or semiosis) in social interaction, cognition, and cultural formations. The journal seeks manuscripts that empirically explores the dynamic relationship between “signs and society” and contributes to uncovering unanticipated parallels in the ways semiosis is manifest in diverse cultural domains.
Signs and Society is the journal of the Semiosis Research Center at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.
The journal solicits contributions from scholars in traditionally defined fields such as:
- Anthropology
- Archaeology
- Art history
- Classics
- Cognitive psychology
- Cultural studies
- History
- Linguistics
- Literary studies
- Media studies
- Religious studies
- Science and technology studies
- Sociology
Signs and Society also encourages contributions that represent cutting-edge scholarship in emerging interdisciplinary fields of inquiry such as cognitive science, comparative semiotics, digital humanities, environmental studies, global studies, posthumanistic studies, and translation studies.
Our broad mission of studying the relationship between “signs and society” implies that each contribution to the journal will analyze some kind of sign process or “cultural production” (Bourdieu) in some specifiable or generalizable social circumstance, historical period, or textual artifact. For example:
- We are interested in becoming a dialogic forum for scholars such as classicists and archaeologists working on “past worlds” and scholars studying contemporary cognitive and social phenomena.
- We welcome studies that cross types of communicational media, from face-to-face verbal interaction to technologically mediated mass communication (both analog and digital), and types of semiotic codes, including linguistic, material, behavioral, and pictorial.
- Research in several fields dealing with the relationships between “primary modeling systems” (Lotman) such as languages and textualized cultural complexes such as narratives, performances, literatures, and films fits the intent of the journal especially well.
- We welcome studies that offer comparison of different theoretical perspectives on specific semiotic processes and thereby encourage collaborative translation of analytical categories and technical vocabularies already established in traditional fields.
Author instructions
More information about preparing your materials for submission, submitting your materials and the publication process itself can be found in the relevant tabs under 'Author Instructions' (in the navigation panel on the left-hand side of this page).
Article types accepted
- Article*
* All or part of the publication costs for these article types may be covered by one of the agreements Cambridge University Press has made to support open access. For authors not covered by an agreement, and without APC funding, please see this journal's open access options for instructions on how to request an APC waiver.