Announcements
Call for Papers: Signs of the Margin: Semiotics, Symbols and the Making of the Periphery
Rationale
Margins are not found on maps but are made in signs. A territory is perceived to be "remote", people and communities "peripheral" and a language "minor" through flags, toponyms, photographs, borders, dress, accents and archives that repeatedly assign value to distance. This issue asks how symbols and semiotic meaning-making produce, naturalise and contest perceptions of marginality or periphery. Distance is never only geographic; it is an interpretive dimension, a positionality, drawn from a centre that presents its own codes as universal. Yet peripheries are also sites of counter-semiosis, where signs are resignified, inverted and are made to speak back. We seek critical, theoretically ambitious work that treats centre and periphery as co-constituted by sign systems, and that asks who holds the power to signify, to translate and to command epistemic authority.
Themes
Article contributions may address the following topics:
- Cartographies of otherness: maps, toponyms, flags, islands and borders as sign systems that construct places as "far", "frontier" or "backward".
- Rhetoric of distance: travel writing, tourism, ethnography and media tropes that make peripheries legible through prevailing stereotypes.
- Belonging and exclusion: emblems, dress, rituals and heritage symbols that include, stigmatise or erase communities.
- Language and the semiotics of the minor: dialect, accent, and linguistic landscapes as markers both of prestige and periphery.
- Colonial residues, decolonial counter-signs: inherited names, monuments and archives; practices of renaming and re-signification.
- Visual signs: photography, film, imagery and data visualisation that frame who looks/gazes, who is seen, how, and why.
- Digital peripheries: platforms, algorithms, memes, characters and emoji that redistribute or reinscribe semiotic centrality.
- Indigenous sign systems: non-Western cosmologies and material cultures that challenge or unsettle Eurocentric theories.
- Translation and epistemic distance: mistranslation, untranslatability and silence in cross-cultural meaning-making.
- Bodies, emotions and intersectional margins: the body and affect as sites where periphery is inscribed and resisted.
- Memory, ruin and landscape: memorials, sacred sites and contested heritage as anchors of peripheral memory.
- Theorising from the margins: reassessing post-structuralist semiotics for their centre-bound blind spots.
Submission
Send an abstract of 300 words, five keywords and an 80-word biography to editor@simbolismo.org or nimrod.delante@ntu.edu.sg by 30 January 2027. Full articles (8,000-10,000 words, double-blind peer review) are due on 30 April 2027. Submissions are in English. Contributions from scholars that contest the construction of the margin or periphery from different lenses or disciplines (semiotics, anthropology, geography, linguistics, history, media, art and cultural studies) are highly encouraged.
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We are pleased and honoured to inform the scholarly public that a few inspiring scholars of semiotics and qualitative inquiry have joined our Editorial Board.
We welcome Dr Rey, Dr Jesus Rafael, Dr Trina, Dr Christine Faith, Ms. Roseville, Dr Frederick, Mr Nelson, Dr Raymund, and Dr Jeffrey to the team!
Dr. Reynaldo Gacho Segumpan, City University Malaysia, Malaysia
Dr. Jesus Rafael B. Jarata, Don Mariano Marcos Memorial State University, Philippines
Dr. Trina Leah T. Mendoza, University of the Philippines Los Banos, Philippines
Dr. Christine Faith Avila, Ateneo de Davao University, Philippines
Dr. Ali Pinzon, Department of Education, Philippines
Ms. Roseville N. Nidea, Poet, Cultural Worker, and Public Intellectual, Philippines
Dr. Frederick Talaue, De La Salle University, Philippines
Mr. Nelson M. Buso, Jr., University of the Philippines Diliman, Philippines
Dr. Raymund Vitorio, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Dr. Jeffrey R. Ancheta, Polytechnic University of the Philippines
Editor-in-Chief
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Past Announcements
We are happy to have launched the second issue of our journal with the theme "Myth, Perception and Time" Link here: Vol. 1 No. 2 (2025): Myth, Perception and Time | Simbolismo: Signs, Identities, Meanings
If you are into semiotic studies or its related fields (symbolism/symbology, biosemiotics, social semiotics, semiotics of law, computational/AI semiotics, semiotics of teaching, medical semiotics, semiotics of religion), we encourage you to submit your research article to us.
Please submit them through our Submission portal. Please read our Submission Guidelines, Submission Process, Instructions for Authors, and Submission Checklist for your guidance.
Editor-in-Chief
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We just launched our maiden issue on 04 May 2025. Our articles are now available at Vol. 1 No. 1 (2025): Lusong ug Alho | Simbolismo: Signs, Identities, Meanings
We invite anyone with an interest and passion for qualitative and semiotic studies to publish with us. We publish research articles, commentaries, literature reviews, essays, or meta-analyses framed within semiotics as a theoretical and methodological lens, literary pieces (a poem or a short story), and visual arts (e.g., painting, drawing, or sketch). Please submit them through our Submission portal. Please read our Submission Guidelines, Submission Process, Instructions for Authors, and Submission Checklist for your guidance.
Editor-in-Chief
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We completed the installation of our bi-annual journal in late January 2025 after four years of ideation, discussion, reflection, and other unforeseen circumstances.
We will launch the maiden issue of Simbolismo between May 2025 and June 2025. The subsequent issue will be out between November 2025 and December 2025.
Meanwhile, if you have research articles, commentaries, literature reviews, essays, or meta-analyses framed within semiotics as a theoretical and a methodological lens, literary pieces (a poem or a short story), and visual arts (e.g., painting, drawing, or sketch), please submit them through our Submission portal. Please read our Submission Guidelines, Submission Process, Instructions for Authors, and Submission Checklist for your guidance.
We also encourage you to register for Simbolismo for future announcements such as upcoming issues, special issues, ideation workshops, or potential mini-conferences on semiotics or semiotic studies.
Editor-in-Chief
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Updates and Events
(1) We delivered a webinar titled "Semiotics as a Research Methodology" with the faculty and graduate students of the City University Malaysia on 25 March 2025, 3PM, via Zoom. Collaborator: Dr Reynaldo Gacho Segumpan
(2) We delivered the same webinar to the graduate students of Biliran Province State University on 29 March 2025, 11AM, via Google Meet. Collaborator: Dr. Roland Niez
(3) On 01 March 2025, 11AM, a related webinar titled "Thinking Qualitatively in Research" was also conducted with the faculty and undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate students of Pangasinan State University, via Zoom and Facebook Live. Collaborator: Dr. Presley De Vera
(4) On 26 July 2025, 8AM to 5PM, we conducted a seminar-workshop titled "Thinking Qualitatively in Research: Revisiting Qualitative Research Methods" with Biliran Province State University (BIPSU). This was attended to by the faculty and graduate school students of BIPSU. Collaborator: Dr. Roland Niez
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Bulletin
We offer seminars or webinars to those who are interested to know more about semiotics as a theory and a qualitative method. You may send your request or inquiry to editor@simbolismo.org or the Editor-in-Chief Dr. Nimrod L. Delante
Suggested Readings on Semiotics
(1) de Saussure, F. (1959). Course in general linguistics. Philosophical Library.
(2) Lagopoulos, A., & Boklund-Lagopoulou, K. (2022). Theory and methodology of semiotics: The tradition of Ferdinand de Saussure. De Gruyter Mouton.
(3) Peirce, C. S. (2022). Peirce's theory of signs. In A. Atkin (Ed.), Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Stanford University.
(4) Peirce, C. S. (1991). Peirce on signs: Writings on semiotic (J. Hoopes, Ed.). University of North Carolina Press.
(5) Peirce, C. S. (1955). Philosophical writings of Peirce. Dover Publications.
(6) Eco, U. (1976). A theory of semiotics. Indiana University Press.
(7) Eco, U. (1984). Semiotics and the philosophy of language. Indiana University Press.
(8) Innis, R. E. (1985). Semiotics: An introductory anthology. Indiana University Press.
(9) Lotman, J. (1990). Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd.
(10) Sanders, C. (2004). The Cambridge companion to de Saussure. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL052180051X
