The Anthropocene concept has been widely embraced, with scholars and practitioners demonstrating its potential to challenge the most tenacious frameworks of modernity even as the Holocene remains the officially designated geological epoch. This special issue takes up the Anthropocene’s conceptual provocations as a heuristic for the study of space and semiosis, laying groundwork for new theoretical and methodological frameworks through which sociolinguistics can address planetary crisis. After locating the sociolinguistic study of space within the field of linguistic and semiotic landscapes, this introduction critically reviews the colonial origins of the Anthropocene. Three directions for the study of space and semiosis are then proposed: (i) entangled and expanded space, (ii) attunement as method and praxis, and (iii) political economy as planetary actor. Six contributing articles are summarized, followed by a discussion that charts a path forward for sociolinguistics in planetary crisis. (Linguistic/semiotic landscape, environment, nature, posthumanism, climate change, space, attunement, political economy, coloniality)

In the face of ever accelerating climate change, the ability to resist such change and work with nature to secure a more environmentally just future poses a striking but necessary challenge. From this perspective, the present article asks: Can a posthuman reimagining of the human, non-human, and more-than-human nexus in the context of a semiotic landscape analysis of the seas (henceforth, seascape) create new possibilities beyond the Anthropocene? This approach, which I call MARA—mapping and applying a rhizomatic assemblage of the seascape—aims to offer an exploratory framework for rethinking the interaction of the multispecies entanglement and the consequences in terms of vulnerability and resilience to climate change. This is achieved through a multisensory semiotic landscape approach to a case study of a blue tourism initiative in Ireland’s seascape. The results of the case study serve to undo the previously accepted binary structure of power which favours human over non-human. (Multisensory semiotic landscape, seascape, rhizomatic assemblage)

A growing infrastructure of digital conservation surveillance is transforming human-wildlife relationships in the ‘Digital Anthropocene’, an epoch characterized by the increasing mediation of interspecies encounters through digital surveillance technologies, the tracking affordances of social media platforms, and citizen science networks. This article examines how digital surveillance technologies are generating magnetic landscapes where digital surveillance practices are ‘pulling’ humans and endangered marine wildlife into new relations of cohabitation, as well as unpredictable multispecies futures of care, commodification, and control. I explore how digital practices of wildlife surveillance and tracking are generating new forms of digitally-mediated human-wildlife intimacy. As this ‘digital intimacy’ increasingly shapes possibilities for human coexistence and co-adaptation with monk seals under climate change, I suggest how sociolinguistic research on semiotic landscapes might fruitfully contribute to these emerging lines of research on the multispecies entanglements that technologies of digital tracking and surveillance are generating in the Digital Anthropocene. (Multispecies, semiotic landscape, nexus analysis, mediated discourse analysis, conservation, Anthropocene)

The condition of planetary crisis widely referred to as the Anthropocene is ubiquitous, but it is often unmarked or unseen. This article examines why through a study of Oman’s ‘Grand Canyon of Arabia’, where the absence of birds provides a lens for two sociolinguistic approaches to planetary crisis: (i) a planetary perspective on semiotic landscapes indicates that allegedly ‘natural’ landscapes are produced by human and more-than-human semiotic interventions, and (ii) the perception of space is shaped by attention, as the power of orientation around a discourse structures semiotic ideologies. An analysis of ethnographic fieldwork and digital data subsequently describes how orientation around Nature/culture dualism produces the Grand Canyon of Arabia as a ‘natural’ landscape, which is disturbed by disorienting Anthropocenic signs. Rather than resisting such disturbances, it is suggested that disorientation presents a way forward into planetary crisis, as attunement to more-than-human signs and entanglements yields relational landscapes. (Nature, tourism, posthumanism, semiotic landscapes, attunement, environment, Oman, Gulf, Anthropocene)

This article explores how the Anthropocene is semioticized in people’s everyday consciousness in conflict over urban redevelopment. Focusing on the multi-billion-dollar Atlantic Yards project, in Brooklyn, NY, we examine how political economy is discursively mobilized with urban Anthropocenic landscapes. Using ethnographic and sociolinguistic methods, we present three case studies (blight studies, architectural renderings, and activists’ manipulations of architectural renderings) to show how semiotics and discourse are utilized to depict the project as either a utopia, on the part of the developer, or as a dystopia, on the part of opponents. We examine the opposition’s critiques within a political context of discursive and physical extraction of people, resources, and value. At the same time, we consider how both utopian and dystopian assessments through semiotization continue to inhabit a neoliberal, my-topian, Anthropocenic framework in which not only are humans centered, but they are the only species that matter. (Anthropocene, blight, renderings, Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park, Brooklyn, urban redevelopment)

This article examines human-elephant engagements in the tourist town of Sauraha, Nepal, by focusing on the semiotic, spatial, and embodied practices that shape its eco-semiotic landscape. Using the heuristic of sites of engagement and ethnographic data, it analyzes how neoliberal conservation materializes through signage, sculptures, media, and corporeal performances. Findings show that the multispecies encounters are shaped by the political economy of wildlife tourism and reflect tensions between commodification, care, and tradition. Anthropomorphic events like elephant polo and beauty pageants spectacularize elephants by promoting conservationist rhetoric while obscuring the precarious conditions of elephants and the labor of mahouts. Meanwhile, ritual and affective practices of care reveal more reciprocal interspecies relationships. I argue that sociolinguistic inquiry is essential for understanding how animals are branded, consumed, and at times dignified in tourism economies and contribute to broader debates on neoliberal conservation, interspecies ethics, and human-wildlife entanglements in the Anthropocene. (Anthropomorphism, conservation, elephant, Nepal, political economy, wildlife tourism)

Inspired by a discourse-centred commodity chain analysis (Thurlow 2020), this study investigates beefy landscapes materialized in three organic grocery store chains in Germany. Organic food stores produce meat-intensive texts that may contradict their widely promoted and mediatized claims to sustainability, complicating the pleas for reducing meat consumption which is essential to limit global warming. Focusing on organic beef, with the largest climate footprint of any protein source, the study looks into semiotic material detached from scientific findings on environmental issues and composing an alarming part of the globalized clean food discourse that masks unsustainable realities. By putting forward cows as icons of organic cattle farming and the effortless convenience of preparation, while erasing environment-related impact categories, beef consumption is perpetuated. The article ultimately shows that our ‘meaty routines’ (Sundet, Hansen, & Wethal 2023) are deeply rooted in environmental escapism as we follow the hype to eat right. (Organic beef, Anthropocene discourse, semiotic landscape, discourse-centred commodity chain analysis, (Social) Life Cycle Assessment)

In this article, I hone in on complex, assemblaic relations of human, non-human, more-than-human, animal, spatial, digital, environmental, and political economic questions questioning the role that language and other modes of semiosis have in the powerful production of planetary matters and anthropocenic landscapes. New theoretical and methodological directions are paved in the field of linguistic and semiotic landscape studies that underscore entangled space, methodological attunement, and the political economy as planetary actor. In this issue, we encounter ‘epistemic rupture’ in real time among numerous sensescapes on land, sea, and in the sky. This means it is time for scholars to acquire planetary repertoires and different ways of semiotic de-coding and meaning-making as it pertains to the Anthropocene, where human language is devalued. Post-humanism and assemblage theorization are put forward as promising frameworks while methods from off and online spaces may be the new norm in LL studies. (Anthropocene landscapes, planetary repertoires, perceptual coding, political economy, multispecies communication, epistemic rupture, linguistic and semiotic landscapes, assemblage theory, post-humanism)

This ethnographic study examines literacy activities in a Tibetan-Canadian family, members of a heritage language community facing intergenerational language loss. Drawing from twelve months of video ethnography, as well as ethnographic interviews and participant observation, I show how children use sound, gesture, and objects to mediate a shared understanding of the Tibetan heritage language, despite the dominance of English in their spoken repertoires. Informed by anthropological methods of language socialization, I examine children’s multimodal articulations of metalinguistic knowledge to argue that literacy activities provide material anchors for Tibetan children to identify as heritage language speakers through a process that I term heritage language recognition—an interactive objectification of language as culture that does not rely on metapragmatic discourse. Analyses discuss heritage language recognition in conversational patterns of entextualization, demonstrating that metalinguistic knowledge can be located in young children’s multimodal repertoires. (Heritage languages, language socialization, literacy, metalinguistic knowledge, multimodality)