Making Signs, Translanguaging Ethnographies : Exploring Urban, Rural and Educational Spaces

This book is the beginning of a conversation across Social Semiotics, Translanguaging, Complexity Theory and Radical Sociolinguistics. In its explorations of meaning, multimodality, communication and emerging language practices, the book includes theoretical and empirical chapters that move toward an understanding of communication in its dynamic complexity, and its social semiotic and situated character. It relocates current debates in linguistics and in multimodality, as well as conceptions of centers/margins, by re-conceptualizing communicative practice through investigation of indigenous/oral communities, street art performances, migration contexts, recycling artefacts and signage repurposing. The book takes an innovative approach to both the form and content of its scholarly writing, and will be of interest to all those involved in interdisciplinary thinking, researching and writing.

Ari Sherris is a Professor of Bilingual Education at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. His research interests explore communication, meaning making and complex social semiotics in multilingual contexts. Ari also documents and supports indigenous languages and teacher activists reclaiming and revitalizing their languages as they bring those languages into schooling for the Safaliba in Ghana and Salish speakers on the Flathead Reservation in the USA. He has edited four books on indigenous languages, literacies, pedagogies of revitalization and ethnography. His research appears in Writing & Pedagogy, Journal of Multilingual & Multicultural Development, The Canadian Modern Language Review, Language Awareness, and edited volumes. 

Elisabetta Adami, PhD, is Associate Professor in Multimodal Communication at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research in social semiotic multimodal analysis has a current focus on culture, interculturality and translation. She has published on sign-making practices in place, on urban visual landscapes and superdiversity; in digital environments, on intercultural digital literacies, aesthetics, interactivity and social media practices; and in face-to-face interaction, in intercultural contexts and deaf-hearing interactions. Her latest volume is Multimodal Communication in Intercultural Interaction (2023, Routledge), co-edited with Ulrike Schroeder and Jennifer Dailey-O’Cain. She is a founding editor of the journal Multimodality & Society (SAGE), former editor and in the editorial board of Visual Communication (SAGE) and Multimodal Communication and leads Multimodality@Leeds.