Hallyu, or the “Korean Wave,” has evolved from a regional phenomenon into a global force shaping media, consumption, and international perceptions of South Korea. As Korean cultural products circulate worldwide, they operate as instruments of soft power while being reinterpreted through local histories of race, gender, class, and nation. Moving beyond media and cultural studies approaches, this special issue foregrounds language and semiotics as central to processes of circulation, advancing a sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological perspective on how Korean popular culture is localized, resemiotized, and negotiated across transnational digital networks. The contributions examine how mediatized discourse and diverse engagements with Korean genres shape the global circulation of Korean popular culture across linguistic, cultural, and ideological boundaries. Rather than treating hallyu as a homogenous export, the issue conceptualizes it as an ongoing set of projects in which various actors negotiate authenticity, modernity, and belonging, underscoring how language mediates global cultural flows.

This special issue pursues a social semiotic study of improvisation. The approach considers the phenomenon both as a constitutive dimension of action and as a socially recognizable achievement. Contributions share a common focus on interaction, which is analyzed across multiple modalities including virtual reality, heavy machinery, paint and canvas, rock, theater, war, and the ethical relation between self and other.

This paper examines virtual reality gaming as a form of embodied interaction at the intersection of digital mediation, improvisation, and agency. In VR environments, players act through avatars, and their actions are shaped in real time by shifting relations among embodiment, disembodiment, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity. The analysis brings together Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the Body without Organs, Charles Goodwin and Marjorie Harness Goodwin’s work on cooperation and multimodal interaction, and Alessandro Duranti’s account of improvisation. Focusing on Population: One and Richie’s Plank Experience, I argue that improvisation emerges through the unstable relation between the biophysical body and the digital body. Glitches, misalignments, and other breakdowns create moments in which participants must adjust ongoing action spontaneously, thereby destabilizing established physical and linguistic categories. These moments reveal a continuing process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization through which bodies, joint action, and agency are continuously reconfigured.

In this article, we investigate the semiotic practices of Filipino K-pop fans (KpopStans) who supported the 2022 presidential bid of former Philippine Vice President Leni Robredo. Through digital ethnography, we analyze the ways in which fans entextualized and resemiotized signifiers of K-pop (e.g., lyrics, imagery, fancams) to create hybrid political messages that translated familiar fandom aesthetics into forms of electoral participation. We argue these practices constitute “civic stanning”—enactments of fan-based citizenship that leverage the cultural resonance of K-pop to build solidarities around Robredo, exercise political agency, promote values of conviviality and progress, and navigate the restrictive political climate of the Philippines. The study highlights the role of popular culture in mediating transnational flows and shaping emergent modes of political activism.

This article examines representations of the Modern English Speaker of Korean (MESK) in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), as lexicographers listened to and documented the language of this figure over the past century. I show that, until the early twenty-first century, the most salient type of MESK was the Koreanist, a white, masculine expert on and translator of Korean, the language of a racial other. By contrast, more recent Korean entries, influenced by the global spread of hallyu, have invoked the Korea Fan, a figure that potentially unsettles longstanding ideologies of language, race, and gender. I argue, however, that the dictionary’s techniques of linguistic regimentation continue to represent the MESK, even when expressing Korean fandom, as fundamentally aligned with the Koreanist.

In this study, we build on our previous work that examines the creative dancemaking collaboration between choreographers and arborist-dancers as they work together in rehearsals to create a performance featuring the workaday skillfulness of urban foresters. They face unique challenges and contingencies because to step into each other’s professional worlds requires a provisionally shared way of thinking that cuts across their diverse experiences; therefore, the two groups create external representations with their bodies (i.e., marking) to bridge epistemic divides. We extend our previous analysis of this microethnographic context—analyzing a routine where an arborist drives a loader truck to distribute mulch—by further demonstrating the semiotic purchase of Charles Goodwin’s interactional semiotics. Goodwin’s notion of “situated improvisation” is especially helpful for making sense of the embodied diagrams that emerge in marking together—a jointly crafted conceptual world makes perceptual experiences of both groups readable and deployable for dance creation.

This article explores the semiotic and embodied dynamics of improvisation by focusing on tactile interaction, risk, and the temporal conditions under which meaning must emerge. Drawing on ethnographic examples from competitive and free solo rock climbing, as well as greeting practices among Swahili women in Lamu (Kenya) and Toronto (Canada), I explore how improvisation operates not as a deviation from routinized behavior, but as a generative force. Through an examination of these disparate tactile encounters, I argue that under high-stakes temporal pressure, improvisation becomes a form of semiotic labor: an interpretive responsiveness to emergent signs that are not only felt in the moment but are also anticipated and evaluated against embodied memory. Rock surfaces and handshakes are treated as communicative environments that elicit the anticipation of qualia and require semiotic attunement when such anticipation fails. In such moments, I argue, improvisation does not simply fill a gap but constitutes a recalibration of meaning through the body.

A particular fashion and lifestyle aesthetic called kankokuppo (Koreaish) has gained popularity among young Japanese women in the early 2020s, who increasingly admire what they perceive to embody the “atmosphere (fun’iki)” of South Korea. This article examines the semiotic rendering of a sensuous perception of Korea identified as “Koreaish” through aesthetically embodied practices and mediatized discourses. The analysis reveals the centrality of what I call a “soft unity”: softness that arises from ambiguated boundaries, taken up across discrete objects, practices, and social value regimes. Alongside growing calls to change Japanese society from a divisive to a borderless one, this softness is valorized as the quality of idealized sociality despite its association with highly normative femininity. The emergent “Koreaish” is emblematic of the postfeminist reformulation of the feminine ideal in neoliberal Japan, which manifests as a nexus of the demanifestation of differences and the reversion to conservative feminine values.

An old improvisational semiotic practice is gesturing by hand. Hand gestures have often been regarded as spontaneous embodiments of psychic processes, and also as a primal and universal mode of human expression. The view not only characterizes some psychological and lay theories, but also schools of modern art, most explicitly Abstract Expressionism. This article is a study of hand gestures by an art historian discussing two Abstract Expressionist painters. It shows how an ideology of gestures and brushstrokes as spontaneous emotion-driven expressions is articulated by the expert’s hand gestures, but also shown to be a calculated effect of the images, a figuration. Following the analysis of the videotaped episode, the construal of gesture as primal and emotional is shown to match conservative ideologies seeking to suppress the alleged wildness of gesture. A review of the art-historian’s own improvisational, kinesthesia-driven gesture practices concludes the article.

As Korean cultural genres circulate globally, they acquire local meanings that may travel back to Korea, generating additional connotations. Drawing upon semiotic theory from linguistic anthropology, this article examines the resemiotization of morpheme “K-”, tracing how it detached from a few lexical items to become a productive morpheme and index of Koreanness in global cultural production. K-’s entextualized iterations take on new meanings across contexts, disrupting straightforward notions of transnational circulation. Global circulation in turn shapes domestic usage, reflecting the iterative relationship between consumers and Korean industry. While terms like K-drama and K-beauty remain relatively stable, newer ones like K-culture and K-wave are more open to negotiation. Ethnographically following K- across online and offline spaces, this study argues the morpheme emerges as a domestic index of outward-facing possibility—a locally global orientation—underscoring language’s pivotal role in shaping and advancing Korea’s national brand.

This paper presents the theory of improvisational emergence, an account of how social phenomena emerge from improvisational processes. I build outward from the small-group improvisational encounter to provide an account of the relationship between individuals, groups, and societies. Social entities, including groups and societies, emerge from people engaged in group improvisation. But even though social entities emerge from individuals in interaction, their study cannot be reduced to the study of individuals, because once having emerged, social entities have causal power over individuals. The theory of improvisational emergence addresses the structure-agency relationship and the micro-macro debate in sociological theory. It moves beyond practice and structuration theories in positing an ontological separation between people and society. Improvisational emergence allows us to explain the relationship between the improvisational creativity of each participating individual and the collective improvisationality of the group. A complete understanding of social phenomena, including social structures, norms, and cultures, must be grounded in the theoretical and empirical study of creative improvisation.

The papers in this special issue, “Localizing Hallyu: The Semiotics of the Korean Wave in Media and Discourse,” observe how Korea-sourced popular semiotic forms recombine anew, and are recontextualized afar, through various pathways of mediatization. The authors analyze commodified semiosis in an era of late interdiscursivity. Under the conditions of late interdiscursivity, the relationship between intertextuality and interdiscursivity is profoundly stretched: tight but simplified intertextuality intersects loose but elaborate interdiscursivity. The ubiquitous presence of Korean cultural forms around the world signals both the continuity of South Korea’s export-oriented economic trajectory, as well as its adaptation to and well-timed entry point into late interdiscursivity’s cultural-industrial conditions.

This commentary for the Signs and Society special issue, “Localizing hallyu: The semiotics of the Korean wave in media and discourse,” considers how the contributions reveal the tensions underlying the way signs of the Korean wave are recontextualized through the material and embodied engagement of participants along pathways of its global circulation. It suggests that a transnational analysis of the Korean wave can serve as a useful laboratory for understanding the socially transformative power of semiotic practice.

This essay considers sign-processes in their open-endedness. The concern is specifically the non-purposiveness of semiosis for what it might intimate about the provisional nature of forms and the possibility of a radical openness to self-transformation. Sikh philosophy (gurmat), semiotics, and deconstruction here offer a heterogeneous problem-space for considering the anteriority of non-purposiveness in cosmic play (līlā) and equipoise (sahaj). The study first finds a recurrent commitment to the non-purposiveness of play across diverse approaches in metaphysics, modern aesthetic theory, and the more recent so-called ludic turn, developing from this thread a constructive treatment of cosmic play consisting of latitude, excess, indeterminacy, generativity, and expenditure, or endless textural differentiation. This essay then elaborates an account of equipoise in practical involvement whose pursuit of action is alive to that which is imperceptible amidst this endless textural differentiation, developing an account of action that realizes its own ludic workings in a non-coercive creativity as intimated by Peircean considerations of musement and cosmic love. Findings offer the study of signs an orientation to the un-fore-seen (im-pro-visus) constitutive of semiosis, in doing so heightening for social semiotic analysis a sensitivity to the indexical excess that conditions the formation of any text. In each instance, Sikh philosophy is found to offer key sources for considering semiosis as open-ended, non-purposive, and ludic-equipoisal.

This is the first multimodal analysis of a real—not mock or hypothetical—jury deliberation and consists of two parts. The first part investigates the interactive contours of laughter and how it integrates with co-speech gesture to provide an authoritative stance to the juror’s narrative. The second part examines the multimodal interplay among poetics, gesture, and stance in pursuit of justice during deliberation. Rather than consider justice as an abstract or theoretical concept I demonstrate how it circulates in and through embodied conduct.

This roundtable discussion convenes contributors to this special issue for reflections on the diversity of their research questions, approaches, and findings, as well as avenues for further inquiry. The discussion touches on several shared concerns, including the role of lexicalization in improvised forms becoming intelligible, enregistered, and reusable; how improvisational action might implicate action below the threshold of awareness; and more generally the relation between sign-processes and embodied action. In doing so, this roundtable discussion considers the importance of social semiotic analysis for understanding improvisation.

This article examines the semiotics of epistemic politics surrounding climate change denial on Tangier Island, Virginia, a shrinking inhabited island in the Chesapeake Bay, USA. Using long-term ethnographic field research, the paper analyzes how islanders’ professed disbelief in climate change functions not as ignorance but as political and poetic positioning. Denial is treated as a symbolic act, not reducible to misinformation or scientific illiteracy, but shaped by classed and embodied relations with state knowledge regimes, media discourses, and environmental governance. Drawing on Peirce’s pragmatism and Jakobson’s poetics, the article frames climate denial as both an imposed stereotype from without and an identification strategy from within, connected to multiply indexed relationships. To that end, the article advances a semiotic approach to climate politics that centers affect, professed belief (creed) and epistemic stratification.