Linguistic landscape (LL) scholarship has traditionally rested on a central premise: that language visibility, such as on street signs and store fronts, correlates positively with language vitality. Rani Rubdy and Selim Ben Said's edited collection Conflict, exclusion, and dissent in the linguistic landscape attempts to broaden that premise, exploring the LL as a critical space of representation and identity construction. As Rubdy writes in the opening chapter, the primary aim is to ‘conceptualize the [LL] as a site for the propagation of particular ideologies through textual/linguistic/semiotic artifacts… whereby languages are marginalized and concealed, but also sometimes used as a vehicle for social contestation, thus impacting in a number of ways the local readership, community, as well as ethnolinguistic vitality of sociolinguistic groups' (p. 1).

To that end, the collection consists of two parts, Conflict and Exclusion (chapters 2 to 9) and Dissent and Protest (chapters 10 to 14). Conflict and Exclusion arranges a series of case studies that emphasizes the relations between languages and their speakers. For instance, Robert A. Troyer, Carmen Cáceda, and Patricia Giménez Eguíbar in chapter 3 report a mixed methods LL survey in Independence, Oregon; these authors found that, despite the significant Hispanic population, Spanish was for the most part excluded from public signage. Melissa L. Curtin in chapter 5 analyzes an ‘orthographic tug of war’ (p. 107) between hanyu and tongyong Romanization styles, as well as the possible implications of traditional Chinese characters and minority languages displayed in public. Ruanni Tupas in chapter 8 interviews a Singaporean university student, exposing ideologies of competition between academic English and Singlish.

Dissent and Protest, the second part, focuses on sociopolitical contestation, and especially in mass protests. For example, David I. Hanauer in chapter 10 investigates the Occupy Baltimore movement (an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street), addressing the ‘multimodal representational genres’ (p. 211) the protestors deployed, the political functions of those genres, and the broader discursive positions those genres reflect. Similarly, Sonia Shiri in chapter 12 parses the LL of the Tunisian revolution, showing how protest signs served to subvert and counter power; and Hayat Messekher in chapter 13 explores the uses of handheld signs, posts, banners, and flags in Algeria's demonstrations.

An unpleasant truth is that ‘We live in a most remarkable age of turmoil and turbulence’ (p. 19). Thus, although LL scholarship must continue to expand its methods and conceptual frameworks, Rubdy and Ben Said's edited collection Conflict, exclusion, and dissent in the linguistic landscape provides a timely contribution on language in society writ large.