This article employs a gendered analysis to explore work and workplaces in Naples during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Using a work-task approach with judicial sources, it offers a novel investigation into the economic activity of women in southern Italy. The results demonstrate that women played an active role in all sectors of the economy, beyond domestic and care work. Spatial analysis unveils an intricate labour system characterized by dynamic and flexible boundaries and thus challenges the conventional dichotomy between public and private spheres. The findings call into question traditional schemas by offering a more nuanced interpretation of the division of labour in early modern Mediterranean urban contexts.

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 response memo offers a critical reassessment of the claim that ideological self-placement in Chile reflects a form of social identity. While the article under discussion provides compelling evidence of ideological stability, it risks conflating political linkage with social identity formation. In contexts of partisan decline, such as Chile’s post-authoritarian landscape, ideological categories may persist not as thick communal identities but as affective rejection fields. Drawing on insights from political psychology and Latin American party system research, this memo proposes an alternative hypothesis: ideological stability is structured by negative partisan identities—emotionally charged, ideologically coherent rejections that shape voter behavior without requiring strong organizational anchors. A stylized conceptual map illustrates the geometry of rejection in Chile’s political space. These affective coordinates help explain voter alignment in the absence of coherent in-groups or traditional parties. While preliminary, this framework underscores the importance of moving beyond ideological self-placement as a proxy for social identity and calls for renewed attention to the emotional architecture of opposition. In doing so, it invites a broader research agenda on how negative partisanship operates across fragmented democracies in Latin America.

This rebuttal responds to the argument that negative partisan identities, such as opposition to past regimes or to specific political parties, provide the primary explanation for political stability in contexts of partisan decline. While rejection dynamics do shape some voting behavior, especially in second-round contests, we contend that they cannot account for the persistence of structured electoral competition over time. Our evidence shows that many voters are defined not only by whom they reject, but also by the ideological families they belong to. We provide survey evidence demonstrating that, when ideology and negative partisanship are measured on comparable terms, the apparent advantage of the latter in explaining vote choice disappears. Recent electoral cycles further illustrate that candidates with clear ideological identities consistently capture the majority of electoral support, whereas alternatives lacking a defined ideological anchor struggle to gain traction. We conclude that ideology, understood as a social identity, is the central force generating long-term stability in electoral competition, while negative partisanship intensifies conflict in short-term, high-stakes contests.

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)

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)

How can electoral competition remain stable despite a weak party system? We argue that ideological identification can stabilize electoral behavior, serving as a substitute for weak or delegitimized political parties. Focusing on Chile, we combine repeated cross-sectional surveys, a conjoint experiment, and text analysis. We find that while partisanship has declined sharply over the past three decades, ideological self-placement remains remarkably stable. Conjoint results show that ideological alignment outweighs issue alignment in shaping vote choice. Drawing on survey questions and topic modeling of open-ended responses, we uncover emotionally charged and moralized language tied to ideological groups, suggesting that ideology in Chile displays features of a social identity, including intergenerational transmission, symbolic boundaries, and in-group affect. We also examine how intense political events, such as a plebiscite to end a dictatorship, shape long-term ideological attachments. Our findings offer insight into how electoral competition can remain ideologically structured even in the absence of strong parties, a pattern increasingly relevant in contemporary democracies.

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)