37.1251, Calls: Punctum - International Journal of Semiotics - "Special Isuue: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Medical Semiotics" (Jrnl)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-1251. Mon Mar 30 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.1251, Calls: Punctum - International Journal of Semiotics - "Special Isuue: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Medical Semiotics" (Jrnl)

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Date: 27-Mar-2026
From: Evangelos Kourdis [ekourdis at frl.auth.gr]
Subject: Punctum - International Journal of Semiotics - "Special Isuue: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Medical Semiotics" (Jrnl)


Journal: Punctum - International Journal of Semiotics
Issue: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Medical Semiotics
Call Deadline: 15-Sep-2026

Medicine has long been described as an “art of signs”: bodily
sensations, gestures, postures, voices, test results, and images are
read as clues to invisible processes, prognoses, and therapeutic
possibilities. For two thousand years, the term “semiotics”
(sēmeiōtikē or σημειωτική) meant “prognostics” or “diagnostics” in the
medical sciences (Deely 2003). From the emergence of the “clinical
gaze” in the modern hospital (Foucault 1975; Ristić et al. 2021) to
contemporary algorithmic diagnostics and teleconsultations, medical
practice is saturated with semiotic operations that connect what can
be observed, measured, narrated, sensed, or visualized across
different media and modalities to socially and institutionally
validated knowledge.
Classical reflections on the “normal” and the “pathological” have
shown that medical reasoning always involves value-laden distinctions
and normativity, not just neutral observation (Canguilhem 1966/1991).
Semiotic analyses of symptoms have further demonstrated that even the
most seemingly “objective” clinical sign is a complex interpretive
achievement and a challenge for semiotic research (Honkasalo 1991).
Wor on diagnosis has highlighted how naming and classifying disease
organizes experiences, practices, and identities, rather than merely
reflecting pre-given entities (Jutel 2011).
Medical anthropology and related fields have likewise demonstrated how
illness is experienced and represented through culturally embedded
narratives that mediate suffering, healing, and moral life (Good 1994;
Kleinman 1988). Narrative medicine and narrative-based approaches in
health care have, in turn, foregrounded the interpretive work
performed by patients and clinicians as they coconstruct stories of
illness, care, and recovery in consultation rooms, medical records,
and a wide range of media and genres (Charon 2006; Frank 1995).
Semiotic theories, from structural and post-structural analyses to
Peircean, biosemiotic, and Umwelt-oriented approaches, provide rich
vocabularies for understanding signs, bodies, and environments, as
well as the material-discursive practices through which they are
linked (Eco 1976; Hoffmeyer 2008; von Uexküll 1982). Recent work has
argued for (re)introducing semiotics into medical education and for
revisiting Thure von Uexküll’s contributions to psychosomatic medicine
and the patient’s lifeworld (Tredinnick-Rowe 2016). Digitalization,
datafication, and platformization of health care (e.g., telemedicine,
electronic health records, apps, and wearable sensors) add further
layers of semiotic mediation, reconfiguring how symptoms, risks, and
responsibilities are encoded, visualized, and acted upon (Greenhalgh
et al. 2017; Lupton 2013). Telemedicine and hybrid care settings
demand new forms of “telesemiotics,” in which audio, video, text, and
streams of sensor data must be coordinated to compensate for the
altered affordances of physical copresence (Bavngaard et al. 2023;
Brizio et al. 2022; Klammer & Pöchhacker 2021). Public health
communication during epidemics and pandemics likewise mobilizes
powerful semiotic repertoires – graphs, slogans, dashboards, emojis,
memes, and hashtags – that frame threats, shape affect, and regulate
forms of “health citizenship” (Briggs & Nichter 2009; Christiansen et
al. 2025; Xu & Löffelholz 2024).
This special issue invites contributions that explore medical
semiotics in a broad, explicitly interdisciplinary sense: not only as
the analysis of clinical signs and symptoms (in the original
historical sense), and not only as the study of sign processes or
semiotic infrastructures (in the modern and contemporary semiotics
sense, see Mesinioti 2025; Fatigante et al. 2021; Snaith et al. 2021).
We welcome interdisciplinary, theoretically grounded, empirically
rich, and methodologically innovative papers that combine medical and
health humanities, medical anthropology, sociology, philosophy,
communication, media studies, biosemiotics, biotechnology studies,
disability studies, bioethics, discourse analysis, and clinical
disciplines. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
 - Biosemiotics, ecology, and more-than-human/posthuman health
 - Bodies, symptoms, and multimodal indexicality
 - Disability, chronicity, and the politics of recognition
 - Histories and genealogies of medical semiotics
 - Illness narratives, narrative medicine, and storytelling across
media
 - Multimodal technologies of seeing, listening, measuring, and
predicting
 - Public-health communication and media: critical discourse analysis
 - Telemedicine, telesemiotics, and platformized care
Prospective authors should submit an abstract of 250-300 words to the
guest editors, Georgios Damaskinidis (damaskinidis at hotmail.com) and
Ludmilla Bennett (ludmila.bennett at upol.cz), including their
institutional affiliation and contact information. Authors whose
abstracts are accepted will be invited to submit full papers of
6,000–8,000 words (including references). Manuscripts should be
written in English and prepared according to the journal’s style
guidelines. Acceptance of the abstract does not guarantee publication,
given that all research articles will be subjected to peer review.

Linguistic Field(s): Clinical Linguistics
                     Discourse Analysis
                     Linguistic Theories
                     Philosophy of Language
                     Psycholinguistics

Subject Language(s): English (eng)




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