Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates scalar projections in online and offline semiotic landscapes, in which discourses about the murder of a gay black student on a university campus in Rio de Janeiro are located. This focus springs from our Brazilian socially-fascist times.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates scalar projections (Gal & Irvine, 2019; Carr & Lempert, 2016) in online and offline semiotic landscapes, in which discourses about the murder of a black gay student on a university campus in Rio de Janeiro are located. We have in mind how such projections construct semiotic landscapes as “places of affect” (Jaworski & Turnlow, 2010) and as assemblages of signs (Wu & Karlander, 2021), indexing hope and a new futurity (Bloch, 1986; Mattingley, 2010). This focus springs from our Brazilian socially-fascist times (Santos, 2016), which have been incremental in the spread of hate towards black and LGBTI+ populations. The interconnectivity typical of our times increasingly makes it necessary to account for how these two types of landscapes converse with each other (Seargeant & Giaxoglou, 2020) in meaning performance. This theoretical import also constitutes our first ethnographic move by carrying out what Blommaert (2008) has termed textual ethnography. As researchers, we reconstruct writers’ and landscape designers’ scale projections. Scales semiotizing affect and the need for creating new meanings about who we can be co-exist with scales which blame the victim, on the part of extreme-right wing anonymous groups in online semiotic landscapes. In our second ethnographic move, we interview three students and two professors as they walk into the offline semiotic landscape on our faculty building. Scales of affect and social trasformation are indexically projected as participants talk about the landscape and their performative effects. Spatial change may contribute to the rehearsal of new modes of futurity.