The landscape of contemporary semiotics is expanding through a new international editorial initiative: Contemporary Semiotics: Research in Five Languages, promoted by the International Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS-AIS)in collaboration with the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana of Bogotá and the Instituto Departamental de Bellas Artes in Cali.
The first volume of the series, published in 2025 under the title Remodelling Narrative Spaces: Semiotic Insights, marks the beginning of a project that places the new generation of semioticians at the centre of research and theory.
The Early Career Researchers Network
The publication arises from the Early Career Researchers (ECR) programme, a global network of young scholars in semiotics coordinated by Jorge Eduardo Urueña López (Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Colombia) and Damien Tomaselli (South Africa).
The initiative was launched under the leadership of Paul Cobley and Kristian Bankov, former president and secretary general of IASS-AIS, with the aim of fostering interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration among emerging researchers in the field.
Over the past few years, the ECR network has organised congresses, mobility programmes and academic training events in Buenos Aires, Thessaloniki, and Warsaw, shaping a vibrant international community devoted to developing semiotics as both a scientific and cultural practice — one that embraces innovation, technology and social transformation.
Five Books in Five Languages
At the heart of the ECR project is a series of five volumes, each devoted to a specific field of semiotic research and published in a different language: Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Italian and English.
As Jacques Fontanille (University of Limoges, IASS president) and Tiziana Migliore (University of Urbino Carlo Bo, IASS secretary general) explain in their Prologue, the choice of linguistic diversity aims to “question the production of knowledge in traditionally hegemonic languages”, restoring semiotics to its multilingual and intercultural vocation.
Supported by the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, the five volumes present a rich cross-section of current semiotic research:
- Pluriversos en la semiótica latinoamericana (Spanish): identities and social resistances in Latin America;
- Semiótica da Comunicação: novas perspectivas sobre mídia e linguagens (Portuguese): new perspectives on media and communicative forms;
- 艺术产业符号学 (Chinese): semiotics of the industrial arts and creative processes;
- Semiotica, vita, ecologia e sostenibilità. Critici biosemiotici (Italian): biosemiotic approaches to life and ecology;
- Remodelling Narrative Spaces. Semiotic Insights (English): reconfiguring spaces of narration and representation in contemporary culture.
Semiotic Pluralism and the Challenge of Multilingualism
Fontanille and Migliore emphasise that the series embodies a dual challenge — theoretical and linguistic. Its semiotic pluralism—multidisciplinary, multicultural, and multi-theoretical—invites hybrid yet coherent models capable of making sense of contemporary phenomena without simplifying their complexity.
Multilingualism, a key theme in semiotic thought, is here reframed as a dynamic and generative principle: not a limitation, but a condition for new meaning-making. Quoting Lotman and Fabbri, the authors suggest that the “myth of Babel” can be turned into an epistemological advantage.
Towards the Second Phase of the Project
Following this first editorial series, the ECR network is now preparing a second phase aimed at fostering a more inclusive and active multilingualism, and at broadening collaboration beyond semiotics to include scholars and professionals from other disciplines.
As Urueña López writes, the ultimate goal is “to strengthen the scientific vocation of young researchers and to stimulate the linking of new generations for the growth and expansion of semiotics as a theoretical perspective and methodological approach in contemporary science.”
Reference: Remodelling Narrative Spaces: Semiotic Insights, edited by Jorge Eduardo Urueña López and Damien Tomaselli, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana – International Association for Semiotic Studies – Instituto Departamental de Bellas Artes, Bogotá, 2025.