What does training look like such that one’s improvisation can be experienced as spontaneous? In this paper, I explore how the aesthetics of “freestyle” in street dance are constituted by empirically achieved bodily capacities contingent upon recognitions. Through examining the pedagogy of freestyle, I show how semiotic labor registers the apparent solipsism of freestyle in street dance into reflexive accounts of sensory-affective capacities selected for cultivation, scaffolded through the deployment of terms like “feeling” and “relation” within participation frameworks. I suggest that ethnographic approaches to the relationship between discursive and non-discursive dimensions of aesthetic-social practices, such as street dance, need to remain both affectively attuned to and semiotically informed, attending to how sensory-affective experiences are rendered discernible and enactable within intersubjective spaces. In addition to exploring these semiotic processes, I also gesture toward the evaluative dimensions of street dance through my fieldwork in a local community in the US and my participation in its transnational scene.

The papers in this volume point to an analysis of synaesthesia which is not merely grounded in firstness, the free unconstrained play of fancy, cross-modal iconism, and metaphoric slippage of adjectives randomly from one body to another, but to the way synaesthesia is transitive, grounded in affective encounters between bodies (secondness), leaping from one body to another related body, involving indexicality, metonyms, hence “synaesthetic encounters.”

This is the first multimodal analysis of a real—not mock or hypothetical—jury deliberation and consists of two parts. The first part investigates the interactive contours of laughter and how it integrates with co-speech gesture to provide an authoritative stance to the juror’s narrative. The second part examines the multimodal interplay among poetics, gesture, and stance in pursuit of justice during deliberation. Rather than consider justice as an abstract or theoretical concept I demonstrate how it circulates in and through embodied conduct.

This roundtable discussion convenes contributors to this special issue for reflections on the diversity of their research questions, approaches, and findings, as well as avenues for further inquiry. The discussion touches on several shared concerns, including the role of lexicalization in improvised forms becoming intelligible, enregistered, and reusable; how improvisational action might implicate action below the threshold of awareness; and more generally the relation between sign-processes and embodied action. In doing so, this roundtable discussion considers the importance of social semiotic analysis for understanding improvisation.

This article examines the semiotics of epistemic politics surrounding climate change denial on Tangier Island, Virginia, a shrinking inhabited island in the Chesapeake Bay, USA. Using long-term ethnographic field research, the paper analyzes how islanders’ professed disbelief in climate change functions not as ignorance but as political and poetic positioning. Denial is treated as a symbolic act, not reducible to misinformation or scientific illiteracy, but shaped by classed and embodied relations with state knowledge regimes, media discourses, and environmental governance. Drawing on Peirce’s pragmatism and Jakobson’s poetics, the article frames climate denial as both an imposed stereotype from without and an identification strategy from within, connected to multiply indexed relationships. To that end, the article advances a semiotic approach to climate politics that centers affect, professed belief (creed) and epistemic stratification.

This paper analyzes the practice of writing inscriptions on munitions, termed “bomb mail,” with a focus on inscriptions on artillery shells used in the Ukraine–Russia conflict and in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. To better understand bomb mail’s enigmatic appeal, I examine its uncanny and quasi-magical affordances. First, through the medium of writing, bomb mail offers the inscriber a form of distributed personhood that extends into the weapon. Second, in bomb mail, violence becomes a vehicle for augmenting verbal meaning, while the words’ meanings are inseparable from the violence itself. This intertwining may contribute to the impression that bomb mail possesses a kind of spell-casting power. Third, bomb mail gives rise to an uncanny enemy other, a target shaped by an uneasy simultaneity of humanizing and dehumanizing stances. Working in tandem, these three qualities make bomb mail compelling and encourage cosmopolitan militarism among civilians, while embodying a form of political communication that shuts dialogue down altogether.

We argue that surveillance technologies, increasingly powered by artificial intelligence, translate print capitalism into data capitalism. We observe this transition as championed in Japan, a country favorable to its development given a strong techno-nationalism, by adopting Aurora Donzelli’s criticism of capitalism as a translation machine. Unlike traditional CCTV that simply records passersby in real-time, retail surveillance systems in Japan sense repeat customers and known offenders. These technologies are justified through Japanese techno-nationalism, recursively translating sociotechnical imaginaries of nationhood into databases. We observe that an epistemology of big data responsible for this transition paves the way for new technological infrastructures while maintaining old imaginaries of print capitalism. The goal of automating interpretation turns society into a closed system that interprets itself. Through this study, we also explore how semiotics can contribute to research on emergent technology, by eschewing the traditional analysis of discourse by differentiating “form” from “content.”