Embedded Files
The Sheffield School of Architecture and Landscape welcomes researchers in any discipline with an interest in biosemiotics to join us in Sheffield, the UK, for the 26th Annual Gathering in Biosemiotics Studies.
The Sheffield School of Architecture and Landscape welcomes researchers in any discipline with an interest in biosemiotics to join us in Sheffield, the UK, for the 26th Annual Gathering in Biosemiotics Studies.
The Gathering will be hosted by the University of Sheffield's School of Architecture and Landscape, which is part of the Faculty of Social Sciences.
The gathering will be held across two venues. The Arts Tower (home to the School of Architecture and Landscape) and the home for the Faculty of Social Sciences; known as the Wave.
Annual Gathering in Biosemiotics Studies
As always, we welcome paper proposals on all themes in biosemiotics, semiotic concepts and models of living systems. The typical Gathering will take place over four days (Tuesday 28th - Friday 31st July 2026) at the Wave.
On the Monday 27th July a special one day pre-event will be held at the Arts Tower, dedicated to presentations and discussion deliberating connections/agency between built environment and nature, and effects on non-/human occupants, and how biosemiotics may advance thinking of these central topics of existence, deliberated as matters of communication and signification, and of sign processes.
Biosemiotics and the (built) environment
The built environment is pregnant with messages, communicating numerous and varied ideas. Consequently, if architecture is fundamentally a communicative discipline biosemiotics (being the study of communication and signification in and between living systems) inherently has a place in trying to understand architecture and architectural endeavour, and the deliberation involved in creating buildings and place-making. Reversely, by understanding architecture through the biosemiotic framework, an opportunity is offered to enhance biosemiotic enquiry by providing some empirical evidence, and in so doing help substantiate the field in areas not generally correlated with the biosemiotic project.
Recognising the variety of information sources spread throughout the environment, as well as quantifying their respective importance, is key to understanding the dynamics of biological constructions, from the harnessing of air flows by termites (Camazine et al., 2003; King et al., 2015; Ocko et al., 2017) to traffic jams (Resnick, 1997; Helbing, 2001) and the human (built) environment (Cobley, 2016a; Ireland & Cobley, 2022).
Page updated
Report abuse