[Linganth] Call For Papers: Special Issue on Semiotics of Role-Play [Semiotic Review]

[Grigory Gorbun]

Dear colleagues,

Please find attached a Call for Papers for the special issue of *Semiotic
Review *on Semiotics of Role-Play*.* We plan to review the initial set of
papers beginning *March 18, 2024. *

If you are interested in contributing or have any questions please contact
me at ggorbun at uchicago.edu or one of my co-editors Katie Gibson (
gkate at uchicago.edu) and Lily Ye (lilyye at uchicago.edu).

Call for Papers

Issue 11: The Semiotics of Role-Play

This special issue examines the social and semiotic work that goes into and
is performed through role-playing. As “fictional” spaces in which norms and
roles are both made explicit and (often) suspended, role-plays can be
potent sites of institutional and cultural maintenance, critique, and
transformation. As interactional events, role-plays are distinctive in
offering heightened reflexivity about the shared fiction/reality being
co-produced by participants. Role- plays establish frames which delineate
roles, rules, and responsibilities for participants, as well as a bounded
"play" text that is distinguished from the context of "reality." Yet, this
meta-discursive frame holding the role-play apart from reality is never
fixed, being both citable and contestable. We thus conceptualize role-play
as being asymptotically bounded on one side by actual role relations and on
the other by virtual play scenarios.

Theatrical performances and games have often been taken as metaphors and
sites that allow researchers to describe and analyze how worlds are
socially constructed and contested. Taking inspiration from anthropological
and sociological studies of social roles, games, and play, we consider
role-plays to be key sites for the study of roles, norms, and the creation
(or foreclosure) of spaces in which to question them. In this issue, we
call for empirical analyses of role-plays as embodied discursive
interactions, illuminating the contingency of both role-play's constitution
and consequences. We contend that questions about the consequentiality of
role-play can only be answered through empirical investigation of
role-plays as unfolding interactions.

As such, we wish to elucidate not only the effects of role-plays, but also the
ideological and institutional conditions and interactional mechanisms that
make role-plays consequential activities. How are roles, norms, and
identities taught, learned, questioned, and re-worked through role-plays?
How are role-plays evaluated as texts (critiques of role-play) and how do
role-plays and participants in them call into question the contexts within
which they take place (role-play as critique)? These questions call for
investigations of (a) ideologies regarding the relationship between
performativity, play, and practice that people bring to role-plays (e.g.,
ideas about the (in)appropriateness or (in)effectiveness of role-plays as
pedagogical, therapeutic, or recreational activities), and (b) how such
ideologies are upheld or challenged through the socio-semiotic,
interactional co-production of role-plays. How do role-play participants
set up, maintain, adjust, and evaluate the role-play frame before, during,
and after the role-play? And what happens when role-players straddle the
inside and outside of the role-play frame, step out of character, "break
the fourth wall," or otherwise breach the boundary between “real” and
“fictional” worlds?

We seek interactional analyses of role-plays which take place in
institutional (e.g., therapy, professional training) or recreational
settings (e.g., Live Action Role-Playing [LARP], children's games),
recognizing that role-play often blurs the boundary between the two (e.g.,
therapeutic LARPing, professional training via children's games). The
editors of Semiotic Review, and the guest editors Katie Gibson, Grigory
Gorbun, and Lily Ye, invite essays, articles, and book reviews from
contributors representing a wide range of disciplines.

We plan to review the initial set of papers beginning March 18, 2024, but
the issue will remain open to essays and interventions, as we will continue
publishing new contributions in an ongoing dialog.

Submissions should be sent to semioticreview at gmail.com. Information on
submission is available here:
https://www.semioticreview.com/ojs/index.php/sr/submission.


Semiotic Review is a multidisciplinary open-access online peer-reviewed
journal publishing review articles as well as original essays. It endeavors
to monitor those domains in the Humanities, the Social and the Natural
Sciences which bear upon symbolic and communicative behavior, cognitive
systems and processes, cultural transmission and innovations, and the study
of information, meaning and signification in all forms. It specializes in
open issues, thematically linked issues that accept publications on a
rolling ongoing basis.


-- 
Grigory Gorbun
Department of Anthropology
University of Chicago
https://anthropology.uchicago.edu/directory/grigory-gorbun
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