This article explores how transnationalism can be understood as an interdiscursive process. By making connections with chronotopes of past places along a transmigrant's trajectory, interdiscursivity allows for the emergence of complex indexical meaning associated with different speakers and different ways of speaking, imbuing the transmigrant's mobility with specific social significance. This article demonstrates this point through an analysis of how South Korean mid-level managers of multinational corporations in Singapore imagined their positioning in the global workplace. By tracing the ways the managers employed metapragmatic discourse associated with multiple chronotopes to make sense of their reasonably successful but limited careers, it offers an account of how interdiscursivity shaped their understanding of their own positionality as Koreans working beyond the time-space of Korea. (Interdiscursivity, transnationalism, chronotope, Korea, English, intercultural communication)*

This article is about the discursive pathway of grammatical structures such as y'a bon ‘there's good’, documenting how, in Hexagonal France, it has become an ‘enregistered emblem’ for indexing sub-Saharan Africans and, by extension, any African as allegedly incapable of speaking French competently. I argue that tracing pathways makes it possible to unveil the intricacy of the historicities of production, circulation, and interpretations of such racially based linguistic stereotypes. One of the central questions addressed in this article is: What are the sociohistorical conditions of the emergence and maintenance of these linguistic stereotypes? I show that these are grounded in long-standing linguistic ideologies of French as an exceptional language and of African languages and, therefore, their speakers, as primitive. I demonstrate how the rise of first age mass culture in the nineteenth century contributed to both the entextualization and the circulation of these stereotypical representations. (Stereotypes, mediatization, enregisterment, language ideology, France, Africa)*

Mobility raises specific issues with regard to what we understand by ‘context’, and in this commentary I suggest that Bakhtin's concept of chronotope could be a useful instrument enabling a precise and detailed, mobile, unit of ‘context’. This unit connects specific time-space arrangements with ideological and moral orders, projecting possible and preferred identities. The articles in this issue offer rich material in this direction.

The value of health states is often understood to depend on their impact on the goodness of people's lives. As such, prominent health states metrics are grounded in particular conceptions of wellbeing – e.g. hedonism or preference satisfaction. In this paper, I consider how liberals committed to the public justification requirement – the requirement that public officials choose laws and policies that are justifiable to their citizens – should evaluate health states. Since the public justification requirement prohibits public officials from appealing to controversial conceptions of the good life, liberals committed to this principle face a significant puzzle.

The western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) is a hotspot of rapid recent regional ‘climate change’. This has resulted in a 0.4°C rise in sea temperature in the last 50 years, five days of sea ice lost per decade and increased ice scouring in the shallows. The WAP shallows are ideal for studying the biological response to physical change because most known Antarctic species are benthic, physical change occurs mainly in the shallows and most research stations are coastal. Studies at Rothera Station have found increased benthic disturbance with losses of winter sea ice and assemblage-level changes coincident with this ice scouring. Such studies are difficult to scale up as they depend on SCUBA diving – a very spatially limited technique. Here we report attempts to broaden the understanding of benthic ecosystem responses to physical change by replicating the Rothera experimental grids at Carlini Station through collaboration between the UK, Argentina and Germany across Signy, Rothera and Carlini stations. We argue that such collaborations are the way forward towards understanding the big picture of biota responses to physical climate changes at a regional scale.

This introduction presents a framework for analyzing the semiotic dimensions of mobility. Drawing upon the notion of pathway (Wortham & Reyes 2015), it examines how mobility is facilitated by semiotic processes that link linguistic emblems with speaker images across time and space (Agha 2007). It focuses on the circulation of discursive forms, facilitated by media technologies and complex patterns of transnational interaction, which ascribe identities to people on the move and root such identities within hierarchical structures of the market on local, national, and transnational scales. Looking at how interdiscursive networks intersect with people's experience of mobility and the way they position themselves in social space, this article problematizes the divide between ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ approaches, offering a historically grounded approach to operations of power that permeate both metapragmatic discourse and experiences of mobility. (Mobility, metapragmatics, mediatization, interdiscursivity)*