In the long sweep of history, definitions, meanings and social attitudes towards conflict have dramatically changed. While scholarship in international relations, international law, or peace studies is addressing conflict in terms of ‘conflict resolution’, ‘post-conflict reconstruction’, ‘post-conflict justice’, or “post-conflict trauma”, little or no attention has been given to the broader investigation of conflict as a semiotic mechanism, appearing as the result of various semiotic acts by social groups that advocate conflicting denotative or connotative meanings. This course aims at addressing how conflict, along with its representations, is a semiotic phenomenon. The course will focus on how conflicts – e.g. climate change or armed conflicts, and their representations – constitute privileged loci for a semiotic analysis. For example, we will focus on the ways in which 20th and 21st-century (post-) conflict (visual) texts address and (re)mediate memory; along with cultural identities in post-conflict contexts.
- Lehrende(r): Laura Imhoff
- Lehrende(r): Maida Kosatica