Scaling silence, visualising void: Critical and creative approaches to Covid's semiotic landscapes
Jackie Lou will reflect on the enduring impact of Covid-19 by attending to the absent-present.
Scaling silence, visualising void: Critical and creative approaches to Covid's semiotic landscapes
09 May 2025, 16:00 – 17:30
Nothing like a global pandemic heightened awareness of the role of semiotic landscape in communicating crisis, organising public space, and regulating behaviours and relationships.
Jackie will examine the typology of silences in the linguistic landscape of London’s Chinatown during the pandemic by situating them on multiple scales.
The second part of the seminar will reflect on an interactive installation presented at the fourteenth Linguistic Landscape Workshop in Madrid, exploring the relationship between memory and trauma in urban China by visualising ‘voids’ in the semiotic landscape.
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Image
Gustavo Fring via Pexels.
Jackie Lou
Senior Lecturer in the School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
Birkbeck University
Her research has so far focussed on language and the city, particularly through the lens of linguistic landscape, and she has published widely on the topic.
More recently, she has become interested in historical urban sociolinguistics, and received a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for the project ‘Language change and urban transformation in Treaty Port Shanghai, c.1842-1943’.
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