July 30, 2022 / 2pm (EDT), 7pm (UTC+1h)
Gary Shank is a Professor of Educational Research at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA. He has been active in semiotics since 1979, when he attended his first Semiotic Society of America meeting at his alma mater, Indiana University. He has been active in semiotics and educational research since then. He was a founding member and Past-President of the Semiotics in Education SIG at the American Educational Research Association. He has published in Semiotica and the American Journal of Semiotics. He has been plenary speaker for the Biosemiotics Convening, where he talked about the Semiotics of PS 101. He has also published extensively in qualitative research, where he has authored or co-authored three related books. In this Educational Semiotics book series titled “Signs and Symbols in Education,” Dr. Shank is looking for visionary works on education and semiotics and how they can reinforce and build from each other.
Marita Soto holds a PhD in Social Sciences, UBA – University of Buenos Aires. At the UNA – Argentinian National University of the Arts, she was dean of the campus of the Transdepartmental Area of Arts Criticism. Under her administration, a Bachelor’s Degree in Arts Curatorship and one in the Art of Writing were launched, along with the postgraduate Specialization in the Production of Critical Texts and Media Dissemination of the Arts (distance learning) and the Master’s Degree in the History of Modern and Contemporary Art, all of which designed from a well-defined semiotic perspective. She fostered the development of the UNA Institutional Archive and reinforced its publishing activities.
Professor and researcher at different Argentinian universities (such as UBA, IDAES, UNSAM, UNLP, UNA), where she has trained teachers, researchers and younger semioticians, Soto has been in charge of specifically semiotic subjects such as Semiotics of Contemporary Genres and Semiotics of the Arts.
She is both a partner and the director of Punctum, a studio specialized in research applied to the fields of consumption, aesthetics and gender issues.
In 2001-2002 she was the head of the crisis laboratory (Moiguer & Associates) where the research activities revolved around the problems of audience segmentation to observe new habits and mores in periods of crisis.
Among her books, Telenovela/telenovelas (coord.), El volver de las imágenes (with Oscar Steimberg and Oscar Traversa), La puesta en escena de todos los días and Habitar y narrar (2016) bring together the results of her research.
Soto was awarded the prize for the best paper presented at the Esomar Conference, São Paulo 2002, which was published in Excellence in International Research, 2003 (with Fernando Moiguer, Jorge Karol and José Luis Petris).
She was a member of the Organizing Committee of the 14th World Congress of Semiotics in Buenos Aires.
She has been trained and has worked together with Oscar Traversa, Oscar Steimberg and Eliseo Verón.
2022 International Open Seminar on Semiotics (IO2S) | Website
This collaborative international open scientific initiative and celebration is jointly organized by the Institute for Philosophical Studies of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra, the Lyceum Institute, the Deely Project, Saint Vincent College, the Iranian Society for Phenomenology at the Iranian Political Science Association, the International Association for Semiotics of Space and Time, the Institute for Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Semiotic Society of America, the American Maritain Association, the International Association for Semiotic Studies, the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies and the Mansarda Acesa with the support of the FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P., of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education of the Government of Portugal under the UID/FIL/00010/2020 project.
