Semiotics of Lecture Series Announcements

UMB's Center for Innovative Teaching just announced a Decolonizing Forum Series, aimed at teaching and scholarship.

Semiotics is a science of signs. By looking at the image below, you already know that McDonalds got a WiFi connection, even though what you actually see are just specially arranged French fries, with no explicit reference to either IEEE-802.11 network protocol or to unhealthy burgers.

An ad for the UMB's Center for Innovative Teaching a Decolonizing Forum Series (top of this page) can be assigned as a homework in SOCIOL 606, Social Semiotics and Cultural Analysis… the hidden message behind the new UMB logo in the upper-right corner notwithstanding.

Let’s decode the ad indeed, signified first, followed by its signifier.

• Down with the White Supremacy, down with consistency: Forums 3 and 4 list the day of the week, but Forums 1, 2, and 6 don’t. Forum 5 doesn’t have a fixed date yet, but be prepared for it to be listed using a pre-Gregorian calendar.

• We mash up the semantic and phonetic parallels in one and the same list to smash up the White Colonialism: “Transnational” and “transdisciplinary” can, in the world-to-come, coexists with “transdisciplinary” and “translating”.

• Rigor is bad: The scare quotation marks around “rigor” are a sign of an outmost disapproval. Rigorously speaking, if something is as wrong as a “ghost hunting” or “flat earth studies”, it needs to be abolished, not decolonized. This White stuff is so confusing!

Something is wrong with this poster. Solution: decolonize semiotics! In case you were wondering, semiotics is fully disposable, since its workhorse never happened to declare his allegiance to either the colonizer or decolonizer camp.