Selander, Staffan
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Against the background of a longstanding collaboration between Gunther Kress’s research group in London and my own research group in Stockholm, I reflect, in this paper, on the role of Kress’s ideas in our joint development of a social semiotic, multimodal, and design-oriented approach to learning, an approach which sees learning as performative, a...
Sarangi, Srikant
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van Leeuwen, Theo Bezemer, Jeff
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Jewitt, Carey
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Hodge, Bob
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This article addresses the issue of motivated signs in semiotic theory and practice. It examines two influential versions of the term, Saussure’s and Kress’s, focussing on and triggered by Kress’s influence. It claims Kress’s importance lies not so much in theory as such, as in his analytic practice, multimodal analysis, as underpinned by this theo...
Wirzén, Madeleine
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This study examines how Swedish prospective adoptive parents display parental suitability in assessment interviews with social workers. In adoption assessment interviews, applicants are invited, through question-and-answer sequences, to present their knowledge about adoption-related issues and demonstrate their suitability as future adoptive parent...
Newfield, Denise
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This article is a practitioner-based account of the uptake of Kress’s ideas on literacy, literature and meaning-making in South African educational contexts, in particular, his integration of politics, semiosis and literacy. It examines the affective force of these ideas in South African classrooms in certain institutions during the immediate post-...
Bezemer, Jeff
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This paper presents a conceptual analysis and critical review of the notion of ‘affordance’ and its uptake, transformation and application in the work of Gunther Kress. It traces its origins and explores how Kress, co-founder of social semiotics, (re)conceptualised affordance and incorporated it in his social semiotic theory of sign making, definin...
van Leeuwen, Theo
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In this paper I show how Gunther Kress, throughout his work, struggled with the contradictory poles of intellectual attraction that lead many other thinkers to firmly anchor themselves to fixed positions and safeguard themselves from doubt. I will focus on two issues, the tension between social determination and individual agency, and the tension b...
Englebretson, Robert
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