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DTSTART:20180101T000000
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DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20191107
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20191108
DTSTAMP:20200130T102222Z
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LAST-MODIFIED:20200130T102222Z
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SUMMARY:Liquid Power: A Social Semiotics of the Infinity Pool
DESCRIPTION:Professor Crispin Thurlow – University of Bern (https://www.ens.unibe.ch/about_us/staff/prof_dr_thurlow_crispin/index_eng.html) \nAbstract\nThe prime technique of power is now escape\, slippage\, elision and avoidance …\nZygmunt Bauman (2000: 11) \nThe infinity pool is currently an epitomic\, ubiquitous marker of distinction and prestige in so-called luxury tourism. Arguably the supreme example of these vanishing-edge illusions is to be found atop the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore\, but Hong Kong evidently has its fair share of them. In this talk\, I develop a social semiotics of the infinity pool using a three-part analytic structure. I first demonstrate how the infinity pool is mediatized as a status marker which is thereby circulated and normalized. I then consider the semiotic and ideological ways these pools emerges as a mediated practice\, paying particular attention to their spatial and embodied logics. I then examine how the infinity pool is distinctively remediated in Instagram. In this regard\, digital media offer two very good opportunities for researchers: we find empirical evidence for the ubiquity of tourist practices and also for tourists’ reflexivity and ‘creativity’ – the ways they themselves take up and make sense of their practices. Ultimately\, my contention is that the infinity pool materializes a strategically\, euphorically (dis)ordered vision of space; this\, in turn\, tells us something important about both the social semiotics of privilege/inequality and the raw politics of contemporary power relations. \n ||  \nBiography\nCrispin Thurlow is Professor of Language and Communication in the Department of English at the University of Bern\, Switzerland. His publications include Elite Discourse: The Rhetorics of Status Privilege and Power (2018\, Routledge) and Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media (2011\, Oxford). His most recent books are The Business of Words: Wordsmiths\, Linguists and Other Language Workers (2020\, Routledge) and Vizualizing Digital Discourse: Interactional\, Institutional and Ideological Perspectives (2020\, De Gruyter). He is on the editorial board of journals like Language in Society; Discourse\, Context & Media; Critical Discourse Studies; Visual Communication; Linguistic Landscape; and the Journal of Language and Sexuality. 
URL:https://hku-english.visibleone.dev/event/liquid-power-a-social-semiotics-of-the-infinity-pool/
LOCATION:Room CRT-7.45\, 7/F\, Run Run Shaw Tower\, Centennial Campus\, HKU
CATEGORIES:Events
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