The semiotic landscape of a university campus : discursive place-making and ideological framing of a contemporary higher education institution in Hong Kong

Abstract

Space and language are in a dialectic relationship: language takes place in time and space, and space is shaped and organized into place(s) by the words and actions, or discourses, of social actors. In sociolinguistics, two overlapping fields of study that have been concerned with the discursive construction of place are linguistic landscape (LL) and semiotic landscape (SL) studies. In these research traditions, signs located in our material world negotiate and contest different ideologies (including language ideologies), claims to ownership and preferred ‘meaning(s)’ of space, selective representation of different ‘voices’, or the gate-keeping function of inclusion and exclusion of various social actors. Semiotic landscapes of institutions are, thus, rich sources of information on the ideological foundations of institutions and the potential tensions between different agendas or priorities of different social groups in the institutions. Nevertheless, a relatively small number of LL and SL studies have focused on institutions which are culturally, politically, and ideologically significant elements organizing social life. Exploring the discursive place-making process in a public university in Hong Kong, this PhD thesis examines three types of texts, signs, and artefacts displayed or distributed on the campus of the University of Hong Kong (HKU) between 2016 and 2018: (1) student service materials from a major service center at the University, (2) posters advertising academic events across different departments and faculties, and (3) political protest signage. The empirical data of this thesis consists of photographic images of the signage under discussion, including its location and interdiscursive links to other texts (e.g. policy documents, institutional websites, other materials displayed on campus), and interviews with a number of signage producers and readers. Data analysis draws on approaches from Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories on language, text, and discourse, critical (multimodal) discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, and geosemiotics. The findings show that these three genres of emplaced discourse position the University as a place entangled in multiple social and ideological shifts and tensions experienced by universities globally and, in some cases, specifically in Hong Kong. On one hand, the student services materials and the academic event posters prominently position the University as a neoliberal institution by foregrounding its consumerist and ‘free-market’ stances. On the other hand, the political protest signage positions the University as an academically free and politically autonomous institution which serves as a driving force for societal democratization. Together, the three genres of discourse manifest the processes of neoliberalization and repoliticization in the local higher education sector that arise from particular local-global social, economic, and political dynamics in contemporary Hong Kong.