Autumn 2019 Series title: Semiotics of Conflict
Session 1 speakers:
Elo-Hanna Seljamaa “Communities of Conflict on May 9 and beyond”
Alin Olteanu “Killing in the name of… culture”
Discussions about conflicts often revolve around two main questions: how to solve them and how to avoid them? Despite our often fearful and negative attitude towards them, conflicts play an important role as a dynamic force in the world around us and thus deserve a more multifaceted approach. The semiotic viewpoint offers an interesting insight and allows us to observe conflict as a universal mechanism of meaning generation. In turn, conflict presents one of the most fruitful research objects for semiotic inquiry. It is in the moment of conflict where everyday life routines lose their automaticity revealing different meaning structures and making the semiotic nature of our reality apparent. The autumn Semiosalong 2019 aims to bring these two perspectives into dialogue with a series of lectures addressing various contexts – cultural, social and environmental with the aim of gaining a deeper insight on the nature and function of conflicts.