Robert Hodge

• Western Sydney University

A partir de la perspectiva de la semiótica social y de los estudios del discurso, se examina el papel de las contradicciones en los complejos ideológicos. El estudio de caso es el acto encabezado, en julio de 2016, por el entonces presidente de México, Enrique Peña Nieto, quien, luego de una crítica popular sin precedentes en torno a la corrupción,...

This article contributes to this special journal issue by developing concepts and methods from social semiotics to analyse, interpret and comment on text and ideas from the issue plus an RFS-project on interdisciplinarity, knowledge transfer and methodology convergence within and across STEM and HASS disciplines. It follows and extends this project...

This article analyses a complex text and event to examine the role of ramifying contradictions in strategic social semiotics analysis. The focus was a paradoxical intervention into corruption by then-Mexican President Peña, who responded to an unprecedented wave of popular criticisms of corruption by simultaneously launching an Anticorruption Syste...

This article looks at multilingual, mother-tongue-based language policies influenced by colonial and postcolonial histories and globalization processes. We use multiscalar analysis to show these policies as creative responses to problems affected by national and international forces. Our study focuses on Timor-Leste, specifically a pilot mother-ton...

Cellular automatons and computer simulation games are widely used as heuristic devices in biology, to explore implications and consequences of specific theories. Conway’s Game of Life has been widely used for this purpose. This game was designed to explore the evolution of ecological communities. We apply it to other biological processes, including...

There is an increasing adoption of large-scale, multisectoral collaborations which draw upon diverse expertise and innovative processes to tackle complex issues. How social change emerges through such transdisciplinary research alliances is the focus of our paper. Yet, broader participation and openness to uncertainty exacerbates issues of multidim...

This paper brings together concepts and perspectives from biology and cultural studies to explore different understandings of the meaning of being a person in Mexican society. It argues that the dominant concept of ‘person’ represents social tensions in intercultural contexts of socialisation and education in a nation strongly divided on class and...

This paper brings together concepts and perspectives from biology and cultural studies to explore different understandings of the meaning of being a person in Mexican society. It argues that the dominant concept of 'person' represents social tensions in intercultural contexts of socialisation and education in a nation strongly divided on class and...

This article examines a single virtual incident, a hostile review by climate-change sceptic journalist Andrew Bolt of an Australian Museum exhibition on climate change, to explore its implications for contemporary museums curating controversial topics. It takes both topic and attack as aspects of new conditions which science and museums alike must...

This paper will propose, as a model, a cybernetic device, deeply embedded in human language and social processes, which produces both separation – of groups and meanings – and unity and convergence. Drawing on evidence from linguistics and sociology it will argue that both movements, of separation and convergence, must be managed by the same device...

Un efecto crucial de la globalización es una forma de intercambio cultural tan radicalmente nueva que demanda una redefinición de lo que concebimos como multiculturalismo y junto con ello de la naturaleza de la cultura misma. No sólo basta con analizar a las culturas nacionales y a sus identidades manteniendo la idea de una cultura fija, homogénea,...

This report provides a strategic evaluation of the Mother Tongue-based Multilingual Education Pilot (MTB-MLE) of the Timor-Leste Ministry of Education (ME) and its advisory body, the Timor-Leste National Commission for UNESCO (TLNCU). The pilot implemented the principles of the MTB-MLE policy, applied in the specific educational and sociolinguistic...

This chapter investigates and endorses the integration of two existing research traditions, electronic discourse analysis (EDA) and critical discourse analysis (CDA), into a more powerful and comprehensive form of analysis of electronic discourses, Critical Electronic Discourse Analysis (CEDA). It sets this analytic project against the massive, unp...

In this article I consider Castells's network society trilogy as a key site for examining claims that globalization today is driven by a new paradigm, in which networks and digital technologies play a decisive role in producing revolutionary new forms of economics, politics, culture and society. To theorize this change I draw on a rich, explicit ac...

This article explores issues of disasters and their management, against a backdrop of multiple crises that are seen as defining the current condition of globalisation, driven by an ongoing dialectic between forces from above' and below'. The article draws on forms of chaos theory, treating disasters and their management as a key site in which to ex...

Museums and science centers hold a unique position in the media and political landscape as trusted information sources and are emerging as key players in climate change debates. The modes of engagement with audiences, visitors, and publics allow museums to provide sensorial and affective experiences though the agency of objects and immersive enviro...

This chapter investigates and endorses the integration of two existing research traditions, electronic discourse analysis (EDA) and critical discourse analysis (CDA), into a more powerful and comprehensive form of analysis of electronic discourses, Critical Electronic Discourse Analysis (CEDA). It sets this analytic project against the massive, unp...

This article focuses on the challenges confronted by contemporary universities when they undertake ‘community engagement’ activities through the lens of an active citizenship workshop we have designed and implemented. We begin by concentrating on the very concept of ‘engagement’, unpicking its ambiguities and returning its complexities to where the...

This article reports on a study of Sydney's rail system to argue that engaged research requires a problem-oriented complexity framework. This needs a richer method drawing on ideas from more scientific and mathematical forms of complexity/chaos theory to complement cultural studies understandings of complexity. The paper develops the idea of critic...

In January 2007, media outlets across Australia reported the local court decision Police v Rose. Mr Rose pleaded guilty and the presiding magistrate recorded no conviction. This event sparked a ‘butterfly effect’ that culminated in legislative amendments changing the make-up of the body responsible for oversight of judges in New South Wales. Key pl...

This article uses a case study of a TV programme, Atlantis Uncovered, an archaeological programme debunking popular ideas of Atlantis and the ancient past, as an instance of a discursive paradox, or discursive pathology, in which defenders of traditional canons of scholarship (science and rationality) decide they must go feral, fighting fire with f...

This article situates the theme of the new, in its many guises, within the framework of shifting concepts and uses of change. It adapts ideas from Freud, Foucault and Marx to establish the intractable complexity of ideas of change and to explore its symptomatology in different texts and contexts in management. The article finds good reasons for suc...

This article develops the term meta‐autoethnography to describe self‐transformative narratives of border‐crossings between paradigms and cultures. It focuses on one formative experience, a field trip by a Brazilian‐Australian sociologist on a Brazilian urban sustainability project, planned within a positivistic framework, which went badly wrong. Bu...

This article uses an autobiography as an object of research, to both illustrate some principles of chaos theory in analytic practice, and give those ideas a personal and social context, thereby producing a unique but explanation-rich history of chaos theory and recent intellectual history of transdisciplinarity and social research in the West. The...

This paper addresses the issue of change in organizations in the new conditions of the contemporary world. We argue that linear theories and models still dominant in organizational sciences are inadequate to understand different modalities of change today. We deploy Prigogine's concept of far-from-equilibrium dynamics, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Prin...

Multinational corporations have become players on the global stage, alongside nations. This article addresses one aspect of this development, the way leaders of nations now use discourses and ways of thinking formerly characteristic of business in major policy documents. The paper distinguishes different senses of ‘discourse’ to identify what is ma...

This paper uses some recent ideas in biology as starting point to explore analogous concepts and tendencies in semiotics and biology, leading to reflections on interdisciplinarity itself within the framework of theories of chaos and complexity. It sees affinities between the biological concept of species and the semiotic category of discipline. It...

This article outlines the terms and rationale for a ‘postmodern’ science of language, and illustrates it with reference to a single text: President George Bush's speech to Congress in the wake of September 11. It first addresses the issue of whether and how students of language can or should draw on scientific concepts and theories, and where the a...

This article explores McLuhan's famous slogan `the medium is the message' as a point of departure for examining current views of the nature of the new electronic media understood as a revolutionary form, associated with a new (`post-modern') stage of society. It argues that this slogan packs into itself more layers of meaning than he was able to ar...

In 2000, just before the start of the third millennium, Fuzzy Logic reached its 35th year. It is a good time to take stock of what it has achieved up till now, and what lines it should seek to follow for the future. Fuzzy Logic emerged in Zadeh’s famous article [1] as a proposal to use logic closer to the ways of thinking inherent in human language...

One of the secrets of the success of fuzzy thinking has been its attitude to natural language and the human thinking encoded in it. Where classic forms of science distrust human languages and the ideas that have evolved over many millennia, fuzziology is open to these rich traditions. Fuzziology recognises their value in their own human sphere. It...

Fuzziology like every other field of thought has its key terms, and this chapter will outline some of them.

According to the proverb, two minds are more powerful than one, so one could expect that the collective mind of society (as reflected, for example, in all the books written up to now plus the world wide web) has better ability to understand and know than an individual mind. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

We will use a specific social science project we are currently investigating as an instance of the kind of issues that are raised by social phenomena, addressing ways in which these problems pose challenges to Fuzzy Logic different from what is the case with engineering applications. We will use our project as a task, presented in a ‘natural langua...

In social communication, most of the words are fuzzy, and this is the key to their social use.

Social fuzziology is inseparable from the new awareness of nonlinear dynamics in every area of human and social life, of living and non-living processes in the universe. The fuzziness of human thoughts, which is at the centre of fuzziology, is humanity’s most precious resource in understanding the new world of dynamics waiting to be explored and in...

In a broad sense, fuzziness is the opposite of precision. Everything that cannot be defined precisely (that is, according to some broadly accepted criteria or norms of precision) and everything that has no clearly described boundaries in space or time is considered a bearer of fuzziness. In a narrow sense, fuzziness relates to the definition of fuz...

In the previous chapter we discussed the ubiquity of nature’s dynamics and underlined that there is no reason for nature to select one ‘special’ engine to support human dynamics and another to support the dynamics of the rest of the world. Neither is there any reason for nature to separate the forces and energies sustaining our physical body from t...

Fuzziology studies the fuzziness inherent in what we know about ourselves, the sources and nature of our experience, our thoughts and feelings, drives for understanding and urges to create and realise our potential. This kind of fuzziness is at the core of our existence, at the essence of our humanness. It affects any field of human activity, be it...

Increased dissemination of meanings stemming from the different cultures which circulate in the new global communication media has brought about a transformation of contemporary cultures, which can no longer be understood isolated from the effect of exchange of multiple cultural meanings. Growing access to global communication media, the Internet,...

Increased dissemination of meanings stemming from the different cultures which circulate in the new global communication media has brought about a transformation of contemporary cultures, which can no longer be understood isolated from the effect of exchange of multiple cultural meanings. Growing access to global communication media, the Internet,...

This paper examines the interdependence between paradigms and pedagogy. This relationship is explored by looking at the lifecycle of a transdisciplinary academic program, called Social Ecology. A number of intellectual themes emerge from the exploration, and their influence on pedagogic organisation and practice is discussed. The themes include the...

This article takes the controversy over ‘Mad Cow Disease’ ('BSE') in Britain as the starting point to reflect on postmodern contexts for the production, circulation and control of scientific discourse. It looks at two competing models of scientific rationality, modernist and postmodernist, as they function in contexts we call ‘postmodern’. With BSE...

An original fuzzy approach to meaning and interpretation in the social sciences is developed. It leads to the concept of virtual meaning emerging at the overlap of fuzzy set theory and semiotics. Its relations both to classic and postmodern social theories are discussed. A case study is described to illustrate how the theory of virtual meaning help...

In this paper we analyse a text in Gooniyandi (southern Kimberley, Western Australia), a myth about the acquisition of fire. Our analysis, broadly structuralist-functionalist in orientation, uses a number of complementary modes of myth analysis, including a variety of structuralism which draws on Lévi-Strauss. Our main point, however, differs from...

Being a source of the richness of human interpretations of the social world, fuzziness of human understanding is, at the same time, vulnerable to abuses which exploit it in practices of corruption, and in so doing tend to corrupt vital processes in human understanding. This article draws on social fuzziology to argue that 'delusive' fuzziness is an...

This article reflects on the condition of CDA, by analyzing key terms in the 2010 CADAAD conference: ideology, identity, interaction. It uses ideological-complex theory to emphasize contradiction as key to ideological effects in a highly complex world, source of both dynamism and vulnerability in theory, analysis and action. It argues for a single...