Call for Papers

"Vital Signs: the Semiotics of Life, Creativity, and (Re)vitalization"

Michicagoan Graduate Student Conference in Linguistic Anthropology

May 8–9, 2026

At a time of rising authoritarianism, political violence, growing environmental catastrophe, and economic precarity, life itself is under attack. But which forms of life are under attack, by whom, and for what purposes? How, too, are these attacks being resisted, by whom, and toward what alternative ends? These questions compel us to reconsider what counts as “life” and how life becomes an object of value, governance, violence, and struggle. To turn toward the vital is not simply to attend to what is irreducibly alive, but to recognize that this vitality is neither opposed to nor contained by (human) semiosis. We call for papers that think through these often-opposed fields of signs and life together; that is, to think the vital as coextensive with sign formation, interpretation, and circulation. Signs are not only human inventions and conventions but also vital processes of life-making, sensed and enacted across ecosystems composed of human, non-human, and more-than-human agents.

One orienting axis for thinking sign-making as life-giving is the framing of (re)vitalization. To revitalize is to act within and upon the world, reclaiming and reconfiguring relations of energy, meaning, and matter. Endangered languages, ecosystems, and bodies are often, but not unproblematically (Leonard 2023), “revitalized” through language policy, cultural projects, medical intervention, or environmental restoration. These practices show that vitality is not a state but a processual activity. As a resource for ethico-political images of action and agency, change and stasis, among many others, revitalization frames threats to life and their concomitant resistance as both discursive accomplishment and material reality.

In addition to papers that think with vitality’s necro-political valence, we seek papers that explore how the vital underpins acts of creativity. While it forecloses some possible entextualizations, socially situated (re)vitalizing activity propels semiosis forward through presupposition, staking moral claims to signs’ rightful intensity, organization, and value. Across artistic, scholarly, commercial, and digital contexts, actors revitalize forms rendered obsolete or endangered: artists reintroduce crafts to remake “community”; scholars recuperate marginalized lines of thought; production companies reboot beloved series to retain control over IP; and social media users resuscitate the dead through online memorials (Hale 2019).

We also seek work that demonstrates how vitality is negotiated through technologies and digitally mediated experiences. People increasingly experience conversational agents and LLM-based chatbots as conscious interlocutors, attributing intention, care, or understanding to technologies whose sense of vitality emerges through stochastically recombined human language. Discourses of “emergence” around artificial intelligence frame life as arising immanently. At the same time, images and videos have become a charged site of struggle, as media forms that promise vital connection and bearing witness are censored and recontextualized across platforms and publics. Scenes of state violence and mass death circulate through livestreams and recordings even as political authorities deny visible harm and deepfakes proliferate, both reaffirming and destabilizing the evidentiary force and indexicality of witnessing itself.

We might think of these cases as contests over animation (Silvio 2010; Manning and Gershon 2013; Nozawa 2013), inquiring into how presence is accomplished through the projection of agentive roles and human-like qualities onto objects. Together, they foreground vitality as a semiotic force animating creativity, value, and attachment across cultural, institutional, and technological domains. We invite work on acts of vitality and revitalization (linguistic, biological, cultural, or ecological) that engage these dynamics and their consequences.

• How does vitality circulate across bodies, technologies, and ecologies?

• How do acts of revitalization reveal the politics and semiotics of sustaining life, energy, and relations?

• What expressive capacities do words, acts, materials, living things, and algorithms share, and where do they diverge?

• Who are the agents and audiences involved in revitalizing signs, and how is vitality mobilized to produce, differentiate, or align objects or social groups?

• How do semiotic technologies render flows of signs visible or actionable, enabling forms of intervention?

• How do perspectives on vitality scaffold ideas of time or presence, such as loss, change, or stasis?

The theme’s breadth is intended to accommodate diverse approaches to vitality and revitalization across disciplines. The conference brings together students whose projects differ in subject yet converge around shared questions of language, materiality, and life.