Semiotic creativities in and with space: binaries and boundaries, beware!

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the way of commentary, I offer a brief, summative reflection on the complex, multifarious nature of people’s semiotic engagements in and with space. Against the backdrop of three snapshot case studies, I suggest there are actually few neat boundaries to be drawn between the linguistic and non-linguistic, between the semiotic and the spatial, and between the creative and non-creative. These kinds of binarized ways of understanding linguistic-semiotic landscapes are neither helpful nor accurate. In a world of ‘context collapse’, we also need to attend to the ways creativity is often leveraged for its commercial indexicalities and possibilities, blurring the boundaries between play and work, and between communication and commerce. Similarly, we ought not to romanticise ‘grassroots’ and ‘vernacular’ actions as necessarily creative, reflexive or benign. It certainly behoves us to stay mindful of the political economies and class ideologies which shape semiotic landscapes and, indeed, our scholarly approaches to them.