Shifts+in+Sign+Systems

For this sketch, write a few hundred words describing a critical discursive shift that you think is going on in or around your object of concern. A shift in sign systems is a shift in what is common sensical. The concept of a "shift in sign systems" comes from Gayatri Spivak 's essay introducing the work of the South Asian Subaltern Studies collective as charting shifts in sign systems.

See, for example, I. Scoones description of a shift in conceptualization in nature (with implications for environmental management as well as the social sciences) in Scoones, I. (1999) “New Ecology and the Social Sciences: What Prospects for a Fruitful Engagement,” Annual Review of Anthropology Vol 28, p479-507.

See also the description of shifting constructs of nature in Daniel Botkin's essay.

Steve Lansing's essay in Annual Review of Anthropology," [|Complex Adaptive Systems]," asks what it would look like for social scientists to shift to thinking in terms of complexity theory.

Also see [|Ali Kenner's essay] on a shift in sign systems around asthma care and disease/health more generally.