Elana Shohamy &amp; Durk Gorter (eds.), Linguistic landscape: Expanding the scenery. New York: Routledge, 2009. Pp. viii, 352. Pb. $47.95.

Large-scale protests have recently transformed urban common spaces into sites of resistance. Squares and urban places, monumentally designed as political and economic centres, have been reclaimed as places for discussion and decision-making, for increasing participation and intervention in the governance of the community. Through banners and signs, open assemblies, and other communicative practices in the encampments and interconnecting physical and virtual spaces, participants permanently reconfigure the spatial context discursively. The attempt to account for on-going social phenomena from the moment they first happen, and with an international perspective, undoubtedly represents a theoretical and methodological challenge. This volume focuses on this complex interplay between social, spatial, and communicative practices, drawing on complementary and alternative methods.

Occupy

Rojo

2016

Mobilities of a linguistic landscape at Los Angeles City Hall Park

Chun

2016

In this chapter, I expand a category of linguistic landscapes, the signs by individuals in public spaces, to include another form of linguistic landscape even more transgressive in nature and intent: the panoply of protest signs produced and mobilized by the Occupy Movement during the Fall of 2011 at Los Angeles City Hall Park. My data are drawn from the photographs I took of these signs at the Park and the near vicinity, a YouTube video of a protest sign, a blog commenting on this sign, and a political cartoon using the same image featured on two other signs. I explore how social actors drew upon and mediated specific discourses in their protest signs that became transportable across time and space, the role of these signs in transforming public space, and this linguistic landscape’s ensuing mobilities in its mediated relocations to online social media sites and blogs.

Identity as space

Goutsos

Polymeneas

2016

The chapter studies the textual, discursive and social practices of the Greek “aganaktismeni” (indignados) movements, which mainly took place in the public gathering of tens of thousands of Greeks in Syntagma Square, outside the Greek parliament from May to August 2011. Data come from multiple sources, including the General Assembly proceedings and resolutions, while a linguistically-informed approach is followed, which combines Critical Discourse Analysis concepts with corpus linguistic methods. It is argued that the Syntagma protests generated a new context in Greek politics, by introducing new genres and the innovative articulation of already existing discourses. It was also found that social/political identities and social/public space were co-articulated, since the identity of the movement was crucially constructed in terms of space.