REport on the 20th annual meeting of the SSA
BPenuel who-is-at aol.com
Tue, 24 Oct 95 09:33 CDT
Just thought I would offer the members of this list a quick report
on the 20th Annual Semiotic Society of America meeting held this past
weekend in San Antonio. Personally, I found the meetinq quite
rewarding, if for no other reason than I had the chance to meet and
chat with the two main speakers -- Kenneth Pike and Susan Haack.
Pike is a genuine living legend and, in his 80s, he is still strong
and energetic and most importantly, intellectually lively and fluid.
Haack is brilliant (but we all knew that already) and charming and
quite modest about the enormous scope and applicability of her
work.
The Semiotic Society has been a small but active group since its
inception in Atlanta in 1976. Thomas Sebeok was an early and
vital leader, but he has 'retired' from the society for some time
now, on an amicable basis. Currently, the membership totals some
600 people and the annual meeting draws between 150 and 200 people.
The Society has traditionally been quite friendly to graduate
students, and was the first society to take a paper from me, in
1979. The society publishes a proceedings of the meeting, and
inclusion in the proceedings is at no cost to presenters -- a
raretiy for small organizations.
Papers were quite diverse as usual at this meeting, ranging from
discussions of art, anthropology, philosophy, linguistics, cultural
studies and popular culture, film studies, gender studies, and more
and so on. The main reason for my message is to announce that next
year's meeting will be held in Santa Barbara on the third weekend
in October. I think it would be quite nice if this list could
put together some papers on vygotsky, activity theory, etc. I
can assure you that such a session(s) would be welcomed. Anyone
interested? Perhaps the best person to really put this together
would be another SSA regular attendee, Don Cunningham? What do
you think, Don? I think that the ideas of LCHC/MCA etc would be
of long-term interest to a large contingent of SSA members.
thoughts?
gary shank'
gshank who-is-at niu.edu
ps if you are interested in SSA membership, then Terry Prewitt at
tprewitt who-is-at uwf.cc.uwf.edu would be more than happy to help you.
Terry is the Executive Director of the SSA. Dues are I think $45
and include a subscription to the American Journal of Semiotics.