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Signs of Europe: discourses, mythologies, politics of representation. Selected Proceedings from the 12th International Conference of the Hellenic Semiotics Society
Τ he theme of the 12th International Conference on Semiotics (Thessaloniki, 1-3/11/2019, organized by the Hellenic Semiotic Society, the School of French Language and Literature and the Laboratory of Semiotics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) was dictated by a flood of changes in the 21st century that, among other things, radically redefined what one might understand as “signs of Europe”. Sadly, the current situation (2023), political, social and economic, only reaffirms the radical fragility of signs, as well as the importance of tracking and tracing the shifting values within the European semiosphere. Since Antiquity, Europe has been both a political geography, as well as a series of cultural mythologies. Imagined in several forms by scholars, artists and travellers, regulated with various strategic intentions by rulers and businessmen, home to the most radical forms of both particularism and universalism, exceptionalism and cosmopolitanism, (Mark 1998; Swedberg 1994), Europe has been consistently challenged by fragmentation, hegemonic expansionism, antagonism, and contestation, as well as by the recurring question of its identity as a ruthless colonizer or an exporter of humanist education and high culture (Wolf 1984; Davies 2011).
This edited volume includes selected studies presented at the 12th International Conference on Semiotics: Signs of Europe and complements volume 6, issue 2 of Punctum-International Journal of Semiotics, edited by Gregory Paschalidis (2020), which was dedicated to the Semiotics of Political Communication, and in which are including important articles presented to the conference too. The volume is divided into six chapters: media discourses, values and techniques of connectivity, grander narratives, representations and allegories, visual arts and their politics and social practices and their mythologies.
