Introduction: Exploring Semiotic Remediation

Renegotiating cultural practices as a result of HIV in the eastern region of Malawi

“…Our interest is in the modification and remodelling of those cultural practices that require sexual acts to be consummated. This entails an examination of cultural (meaning) change due to the re-ordering and shifting of social semiotics, or mobilising certain semiotics to do new things (Prior and Hengst 2010). This is where the notion of semiotic remediation comes in (Bolter and Grusin 1999).…”

“…The issue here relates to mediation and repurposing of cultural norms and practices to mitigate the spread of HIV. Therefore, the centrality of remediation stems from ways that activity is repurposed through taking up materials at hand, putting them to present use and thus producing transformed circumstances for prospective accomplishment (Prior and Hengst 2010). This notion will be useful in understanding, for example, transformation of the verbalised kutaya mafuta, 'throwing away the lotion', into the semiotics of sexual acts in the rites of passage for girls into womanhood.…”

Writing(s) at the Crossroads

“…(1) demonstrate an enhanced awareness of the affordances they employ in service of those goals; (2) successfully engineer ways of contextualizing, structuring and realizing the production, distribution, delivery and reception of their work; and (3) become better equipped to negotiate the range of communicative contexts they find themselves encountering both in and outside of school. (Shipka 2011, 103-4) Grounded in sociocultural research on writing, literate activity, and semiotic remediation rather than in traditional cultural views of writing processes and products, Shipka's pedagogy is one that emphasizes the development of the semiotic agility (Prior 2010) that is, in fact, the hallmark of our literate and semiotic practices in the world. In order to do this, I aim to explore the notion of "writing act" developed by Béatrice Fraenkel.…”

“…The drawing and discussion of this emerging template was being coordinated with references to a PHP data entry screen on a laptop on the table, with another drawing on the whiteboard (representing a database architecture), and with many gestures in the air and over the diagram. As my fuller analysis (Prior 2010) details, Nan and Tony's interactions over this box diagram involved a lot of miscommunication as Nan wanted Tony to be thinking about how the database related to the design of future IO screens whereas Tony was focused on another issue, how users could contribute images to IO to achieve what Joseph imagined as an intelligent art object that would learn. Inscription at the whiteboard emerged through sequential, co-present interaction, inscription as embodied and social activity rather than as artifact (although inscriptions became artifacts-ininteraction and could have a longer duration, as a version of the diagram did in this case).…”

Mainstream Media in Contemporary Fluid News Environments: Brandcasting the News in the TV Genre of News Tickers

“…In this way, news tickers must at the same time catch viewers' attention and give viewers a point of view on the news story. These different but, at the same time, ancillary purposes coexist in news tickers thanks to specific linguistic choices, giving rise to a mixed genre developed from the transmediation of the traditional genres (Prior & Hengst, 2010).…”