Linguistic Landscape - Volume 8, Issue 2-3, 2022

This paper uses the notions of dispositive and scale to explore the emergence and transformation of pandemic signage, focusing on a subset of regulative signs, i.e. requests to wear a mask. Based on a crowdsourced dataset of pandemic signs collected in Hamburg, analysis examines the multimodal resources sign-makers mobilize to create mask-requirement signs and the change of these signs in the transition from the first to the second pandemic wave during 2020. The findings show that regulative measures within the pandemic dispositive are scaled, i.e. given a particular spatiotemporal validity that is shaped by shifting power relations between sign producers and their audiences. This scaling is dynamically iterated as mask-wearing regulation changes its scope across pandemic waves. The rescaling of directive acts such as face-mask requests is reflected in the multimodal makeup of regulative signs, whose linguistic, pictorial, and composition choices shift as mask-wearing regulations are extended to outdoor space.

Orienting to theoretical descriptions of ‘affective-discursive practices’ (Wetherell, 2012) and linguistic/semiotic landscapes as ‘affective regimes’ (Wee, 2016), this paper accounts for (some of) the complex ways in which the experience of pandemic and lockdown was articulated and felt across the landscape of Melbourne. I employ a novel combination of autoethnographic and citizen sociolinguistic approaches as self-reflexive research techniques. Working more-or-less chronologically, from the lowest ebbs to feelings of (relative) joy, importantly, this paper does not focus solely on negative articulations such as sadness or anxiety. Rather, it examines the affective resonance of expressions of love, kindness, and resilience in the landscape, and these affects’ intersection with chronotopes during and since isolation; from being locked down, to keeping spirits up, from top-down to bottom-up. This paper concludes with an orientation to hope: to Melburnians’ rejoicing in what they’ve achieved, and the belief that there can be an end to crisis.

This paper offers an analysis of a British government publicity campaign during the third national lockdown, which began in England in January 2021. When it came to enforcing lockdown rules, the government’s messaging in the Linguistic Landscape (LL) and elsewhere focused on individualising responsibility for the pandemic. This framing favoured the political interests of the government by apportioning blame for the highest death toll in Europe to the British public’s reckless behaviour, which conveniently elides the government’s own role in the crisis. Drawing on data from social media and the LL, I analyse the publicity campaign according to a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis approach, taking into account the multiple semiotic systems employed to communicate the campaign’s underlying neoliberal ideology.

The proliferation of handmade signage, physical installations, and other neighborhood scale visual communication in the months following the outbreak of Covid-19 presented a unique opportunity to consider how new norms of social conduct and community solidarity are established and negotiated in public space. This study examines the cultural and spatial implications of this informal visual communication through street-level photographic analysis conducted over 18 months in communities around the United States, producing a typology of observed phenomena and highlighting differences across time, place, politics, and intentions. In particular, the author illustrates how the signs not only work to negotiate new norms for public conduct during a time of fear, misinformation, and inconsistent guidelines, but in doing so effectively demonstrate what a grassroots community response looks like to this unusual kind of extreme event.

This article is about adaptations to the regimentation of public and private living through the reorganisation of domestic space and time routines a year into changeable Covid-related restrictions. The discussion is based on narratives and audio-visual artefacts generated by participants from 20 UK households through the methodology of photovoice and that articulate domestic-related boundary-making processes and forms of space hybridisation in the ongoing changes caused by the pandemic. In the article, Covid-19 signage is represented by language and other semiotic markings that engender an inside spatial and social semiotics and that stands in a dialogic relationship with the outside spatial and social semiotics as dictated by the pandemic, and where domestic landscapes articulate forms of transmedia code-mixing that invest written words, sounds, and screens.

This article examines how Linguistic Landscapes in the Covid-19 pandemic construct the borders of place and people. We build on ‘semiotic ideology’ (Keane, 2018) and ‘semiotopology’ (Peck, Stroud & Williams, 2018) to analyze the bordering practices in citizen Linguistic Landscapes during the pandemic in Nepal. Our analysis shows that citizens combine multiple semiotic resources, both linguistic and non-linguistic, to create physical boundaries to restrict the mobility of people during the pandemic. However, the findings show that such practices are ideological; they promote the othering of the tenants, returnees from abroad/outside the valley, and non-locals. We argue that keeping place and people at the centre of analysis provides a critical framework to widen the scope of Linguistic Landscapes as a broad visual and semiotic space that embodies the bordering practices and categorization of people and their impacts on emotions, identities, and sense of belonging.

In March 2019, South Korea instituted a mask mandate as the main protective measure against the spread of Covid-19. The mask and the government-issued posters detailing guidance and regulations regarding masking have since become a prominent part of Korea’s semiotic landscape. This study focuses on the capital city of Seoul to explore how these changes in the semiotic landscape have resulted in a (re)negotiation of control over space between the government and the citizens, through the lens of the mask as a static and dynamic semiotic device. The data is drawn from photographs, observations, and notes made during 3 months of commuting in central Seoul. The findings are interpreted in the light of local sociocultural ideologies, and in reference to the greater global discourse of both governmental intrusion into and regulation of spaces and behaviors through the act of mask-wearing.

At the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak in China, the state quickly declared a nationwide anti-Covid campaign. This article looks at how the rural space was transformed during this early anti-Covid campaign. Unlike the official state discourses, rural officials resorted to direct, down-to-earth, and ‘cold-hearted’ messages to persuade the villagers to comply with the rules. Based on a study of widely circulated banners and videos online, drawing on Linguistic Landscape studies and discourse analysis, I investigate the discursive strategies employed in rural LL. Moreover, I discuss how the intended/imagined audiences of these multimodal signing practices are disconnected from the changed rural population. These discrepancies will be further examined in light of the online subcultural practices of ‘tuwei culture’. I will argue that much-needed discussion of the actual difficulties that rural officials face is displaced in the online consumption of rural LL.

Prior to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in Hong Kong, there had been an extended period of civic unrest which began as opposition to an extradition bill but which later grew into a larger socio-political movement. We consider the relationship between ongoing political sentiments and the Covid-19 pandemic as evident through public signs; particularly, how commercial signage aligns and disaligns with government discourse on solidarity evident through recontextualization of the official tagline “Together, we fight the virus!” We suggest three analytical categories: (1) signs which demonstrate an alignment stance with the institutional sense of solidarity; (2) alignment with the pro-democracy movement, and thus disalignment from the institutional sense; and (3) politically ambiguous stances appealing to a broad understanding of solidarity for commercial gain. The pandemic occurring at a politically sensitive time has caused and made evident fractures in the way solidarity is construed, resulting in (dis)alignment and differing stances arising from the various social actors who have emplaced signs.

We use a geographically informed notion of landscape and Williams’ (1977) framework structure of feeling to examine ‘closed’, masking, and social distancing signs on businesses in the Washington, DC central-city neighborhood of Adams Morgan. We argue that the semantic content and discursive structure of the Covid signs, together with the in-the-moment feeling of walking down empty streets while a little-understood virus had just started raging, promoted a reconceptualization of labor relations tied to solidarity, public health, and communal responsibility, and making visible the working conditions of low-wage workers. This new structure of feeling opens up a space – however narrow – of political possibility.