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Article published In:
Chronotopes and the COVID-19 Pandemic
Edited by Anna De Fina and Sabina M. Perrino
[Language, Culture and Society 4:2] 2022
► pp. 189–217

Chronotopic resolution, embodied subjectivity, and collective learning

A sociolinguistic theory of survival

| Salisbury University
| City University of Hong Kong

In our contribution to this special issue on “Chronotopes & the COVID-19 Pandemic”, we discuss the complexities of human survival and its dependence on collective learning. We argue that collective learning – and thus survival – is a sociolinguistic phenomenon and lay out a fractal system in which the related sociolinguistic processes play out. This system highlights the chronotopic-scalar situatedness of survival and captures the material, textual, and imagined aspects of learning and meaning-making. Drawing on interactions among a small group of Iranian migrants dealing with the effects of COVID-19, we discuss the processes through which participants dynamically construct and update their chronotopic images of their new circumstances, as they interact with material and semiotic data coming from multiple scales/centers. We show how the normative-semiotic indeterminacies caused by COVID-19 are navigated by social actors as they make sense of their spatiotemporal surroundings in pursuit of material and ideological survival.

Keywords: COVID-19, chronotopes, collective learning, survival, scales, fractality
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Sociolinguistics and the complexities of survival
    • 2.1Conceptualizing survival within a fractal system
    • 2.2Text, context, and the chronotope
    • 2.3Rechronotopization: From the material to the social and back
    • 2.4Collective learning within a system of images and resolutions
  • 3.Navigating the indeterminacies of embodied experiences of COVID-19
  • 4.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgement
  • References cited
Published online: 25 November 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lcs.22005.kar
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