Plenary Speakers
José Enrique Finol
José Enrique Finol has gained a Bachelor of Arts from Universidad del Zulia, Venezuela (1972) and a Ph.D. in Information and Communication Sciences from EHESS (1980), with a postdoctorate in Semiotics and Anthropology from Universidad de Indiana, USA, (1991-1993). He is the author of numerous books, including La Corposfera. Antropo-Semiótica de las cartografías del cuerpo (2015), which has just been published in English by de Gruyter (2021)
Shaun Gallagher
Shaun Gallagher is the Lillian and Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis (2011- ). He is also a founding editor and continues as a co-editor-in-chief of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, an interdisciplinary journal published by Springer (Google Metrics). His research interests include phenomenology and the philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, embodiment, intersubjectivity, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of time. His numerous books and papers have often addressed the issue of agency at different levels.
Jean-Marie Klinkenberg
Jean-Marie Klinkenberg is a Belgian linguist and semiotician. Professor at the University of Liège, Jean-Marie Klinkenberg taught language sciences there, and especially semiotics and rhetoric, but also francophone cultures. He developed part of his rhetorical and semiotic works within the Groupe µ. A significant part of his work within Groupe µ as well as separately has been devoted to the nature of images and visuality in general, notably the Traité du signe visuel (1992). He is a former president of the International Association of Visual Semiotics.
Alexandra Mouratidou
Alexandra Mouratidou is a doctoral student in Cognitive Semiotics at Lund University. Using a combination of phenomenological analysis and experimental studies, she is demonstrating that what cognitive scientists call “choice blindness” is really a case of “manipulation blindness”. In particular since she has used the choice of pictures in the experiments, her work poses important questions about agency in the interpretation of pictures, both before the act of manipulation, and after it.
Jacques Fontanille
Jacques Fontanille is Emeritus Professor of Semiotics at the Centre de Recherches Sémiotiques, University of Limoges. He served as President of the University of Limoges and the Fédération Romane de Sémiotique and is Honorary President of the University of Limoges, the International Association of Visual Semiotics and the French Association of Semiotics; and is Honorary Member of the Institut Universitaire de France. From 2012 to 2014, he was Advisor and Chief of Staff of the French Minister of Higher Education and Research. He has been visiting professor or guest lecturer in eighty American, European, Asian and African universities. He is the author of over 280 scholarly publications in the fields of theoretical semiotics, literary semiotics, visual semiotics, rhetoric and general linguistics, semiotics of practices and biosemiotics. His most recent books are : Corps et Sens (2011), Formes de vie (2015), Terres de sens. Essai d’anthroposémiotique (2018) et Ensemble. Pour une anthropologie sémiotique du Politique (2021). Most of his books have been translated into English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Korean, Arabic, etc. Most of his former PhD students now hold faculty positions at universities in Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, USA and Canada. jacques.fontanille@unilim.fr
Morten Tønnessen
Morten Tønnessen is Professor of philosophy at University of Stavanger´s Department of social studies, and Vice-Dean of research at Faculty of social sciences. He does research in the fields of biosemiotics, human ecology, human-animal studies, and welfare studies. Tønnessen is Main Editor-in-Chief of Biosemiotics, and the President of the Nordic Association for Semiotic Studies. He has recently written on the notion of agency.
Jordan Zlatev
Jordan Zlatev is Research Director for the Division for Cognitive Semiotics at the Centre for Languages and Literature at Lund University and editor-in-chief of the Public Journal of Semiotics. His research focuses on the nature of language as a semiotic system, in relation to consciousness and other sign systems like gesture and depiction. He is the author of Situated embodiment: Studies in the emergence of spatial meaning (1997) and over 90 articles in journals and books.