Almira Ousmanova
“How to Make Our Ideas Clear?”, or Tricks and Tips for Teaching Semiotics to Beginners
Abstract
Taking some propositions formulated by by Charles Sanders Peirce – one of the «father figures» of contemporary semiotics, – in his seminal text How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878) as a starting point for my presentation, I would like to focus on discussing some problems that relate to the teaching of semiotics in post/structuralist, post/soviet, post/analog era. Dealing with the title alone, we can immediately pose a series of relevant questions, such as: Which (or whose) ideas we want to make clear? To make those ideas clear for what purpose and for whom? How, with what tools and with which didactic techniques we can make them «clear»? These and other questions reveal the dialectial complexity, ideological dilemmas and epistemological aporias, when it comes to the question of teaching to the «laymen» – to those who have never been passionate about semiotics as an academic tradition, did not perceive it as an intellectual challenge and who may have never been interested at all to learn more about it.
Bionote
Almira Ousmanova (Ph.D. in Social Philosophy) is Professor at the Dept. of Social Sciences and Director of MA program in Cultural Studies at the European Humanities University (Vilnius, Lithuania). She is director of the Laboratory for Studies of Visual Culture and Contemporary Art (since 1999).
Research interests: Genealogy and Methodology of Visual Studies, Semiotics, Gender Representations in Visual Arts, Soviet cinema, Marxism and Critical Theory.
She is an author of Umberto Eco: Paradoxes of Interpretation (2000); and editor of several collective volumes: Anthology of Gender Theory (ed., with Elena Gapova, 2000); Gender Histories from Eastern Europe (co-edited with Elena Gapova and Andrea Peto), Bi-Textuality and Cinema (ed., 2003); Gender and Transgression in Visual Arts (ed., 2007), Visual (as) Violence (ed., 2008), Belarusian Format: Invisible Reality (ed., 2008.), Feminism and Philosophy (ed., special volume of journal Topos, 2010), TechnoLogos: the Social Effects of Bio- and Information Technologies (special volume of journal Topos (ed., with Tatyana Shchyttsova, 2014). E-Effect: Digital Turn in Humanities and Social Sciences (special volume of journal Topos, co-edited with Galina Orlova, 2017). Her articles have been published in Russian, English, German, French, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish and Belarusian. Currently she is working on the book project Fluid Publicness.
As an art curator, she realized several projects: Museum (2011) and Not Looking at Anything (2014, monographic exhibitions of Ruslan Vashkevich (Belarus), 24hSolaris (audiovisual installation with Ales Tsurko, Natalia Nenanorokomova and Ales Potapenko (2014), Roland Barthes: Keywords (2015), Artes Liberales (art and educational festival in Minsk, since 2012) and others.
Abstract
Taking some propositions formulated by by Charles Sanders Peirce – one of the «father figures» of contemporary semiotics, – in his seminal text How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878) as a starting point for my presentation, I would like to focus on discussing some problems that relate to the teaching of semiotics in post/structuralist, post/soviet, post/analog era. Dealing with the title alone, we can immediately pose a series of relevant questions, such as: Which (or whose) ideas we want to make clear? To make those ideas clear for what purpose and for whom? How, with what tools and with which didactic techniques we can make them «clear»? These and other questions reveal the dialectial complexity, ideological dilemmas and epistemological aporias, when it comes to the question of teaching to the «laymen» – to those who have never been passionate about semiotics as an academic tradition, did not perceive it as an intellectual challenge and who may have never been interested at all to learn more about it.
Bionote
Almira Ousmanova (Ph.D. in Social Philosophy) is Professor at the Dept. of Social Sciences and Director of MA program in Cultural Studies at the European Humanities University (Vilnius, Lithuania). She is director of the Laboratory for Studies of Visual Culture and Contemporary Art (since 1999).
Research interests: Genealogy and Methodology of Visual Studies, Semiotics, Gender Representations in Visual Arts, Soviet cinema, Marxism and Critical Theory.
She is an author of Umberto Eco: Paradoxes of Interpretation (2000); and editor of several collective volumes: Anthology of Gender Theory (ed., with Elena Gapova, 2000); Gender Histories from Eastern Europe (co-edited with Elena Gapova and Andrea Peto), Bi-Textuality and Cinema (ed., 2003); Gender and Transgression in Visual Arts (ed., 2007), Visual (as) Violence (ed., 2008), Belarusian Format: Invisible Reality (ed., 2008.), Feminism and Philosophy (ed., special volume of journal Topos, 2010), TechnoLogos: the Social Effects of Bio- and Information Technologies (special volume of journal Topos (ed., with Tatyana Shchyttsova, 2014). E-Effect: Digital Turn in Humanities and Social Sciences (special volume of journal Topos, co-edited with Galina Orlova, 2017). Her articles have been published in Russian, English, German, French, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish and Belarusian. Currently she is working on the book project Fluid Publicness.
As an art curator, she realized several projects: Museum (2011) and Not Looking at Anything (2014, monographic exhibitions of Ruslan Vashkevich (Belarus), 24hSolaris (audiovisual installation with Ales Tsurko, Natalia Nenanorokomova and Ales Potapenko (2014), Roland Barthes: Keywords (2015), Artes Liberales (art and educational festival in Minsk, since 2012) and others.