Salons

Genevieve Vaughan

Genevieve Vaughan (b.1939) is an independent researcher who lives part time in Italy and part in Texas. She created the multicultural all-woman activist Foundation for a Compassionate Society (1987-2005) and the Temple of Sekhmet in the Nevada desert (1992 – ongoing) and she co-created the network: International Feminists for a Gift Economy (2001 – ongoing). Her books are For-Giving, a Feminist Criticism of Exchange (1997), Homo Donans (2006) and The Gift in the Heart of Language: the Maternal Source of Meaning (2015). She has edited Il Dono/The Gift (2004), Women and the Gift Economy (2007) and The Maternal Roots of the Gift Economy (2019). A volume of the Canadian Women’s Studies Journal dedicated to the maternal gift economy has just appeared (2020).

More information @ www.gift-economy.com.

Susan Petrilli

Susan Petrilli is Full Professor of Philosophy and Theory of Languages, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy, where she teaches Philosophy of Language, Semiotics, Semiotics of Law and Intercultural Translation, Semiotics of Translation. She has been affiliated with the University of Adelaide, Australia since 2016, where she is Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Psychology, Faculty of Health Sciences and Medical Sciences. She is honorary member of the Institute of Semiotics and Media Studies, Sichuan University, China. For the International Association for Semiotic Studies she has served as treasurer (2004-2014) and subsequently as vice-President (2014-2020). She is Fellow of the International Communicology Institute, Washington. In 2008 she was installed as the 7th Sebeok Fellow of the Semiotic Society of America. As part of this honour, a volume of her essays was distributed on and for that occasion as a Special Issue of The American Journal of Semiotics (TAJS 24.4). This included an expanded version of her keynote lecture, “Semioethics and Responsibility. Beyond Specialisms, Universalisms and Humanisms”, delivered for the occasion in the framework of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America, 17th October 2008. A main focus of her theoretical work is the relation between signs, values and behaviour. This has led to her conceptualization of “semioethics” and of the “semiotic animal”. She develops translation theory in the framework of global semiotics, linking philosophy of language, semiotics and biosemiotics. Victoria Welby’s “significs” is another special focus in her work. The results of her research are reflected in her numerous publications including monographs and essays. Recent publications in English include: Signifying and Understanding (2009), Sign Crossroads in Global Perspective. Semioethics and Responsibility (2010), Expression and interpretation in Language (2012), The Self as a Sign, the World and the Other (2013), Victoria Welby and the Science of Signs (2015), Sign Studies and Semioethics (2014), The Global World and Its Manifold Faces (2016), Signs, Language and Listening. Semioethic Perspectives (2019). And collective projects edited by her include: Translation and translatability in intersemiotic space, Punctum – International Journal of Semiotics, vol. 06/01 (2020); Brian Medlin, The Level-Headed Revolutionary. Essays, Stories and Poems (2021); Exploring the Translatability of Emotions. Cross-Cultural and Interdisciplinary Encounters and Intersemiotic Approaches to Emotions. Translating across Signs, Bodies and Values (2022).

Arianna Bellantuono

Arianna Bellantuono, a communication and interior designer, is a PhD candidate at the Department of Design at Politecnico di Milano and has collaborated with the DensityDesign Lab. She graduated with a thesis in the field of semiotics on the relationship between communication and gender binarism. Her main research interests include the semiotics of otherness as applied to gender studies, subjectivities, and multiculturalism, with a particular focus on the cognitive domain and public communication.

Fatima Festić

Fatima Festić is currently a Senior Researcher at the University of Amsterdam (School for European, Regional, and Transnational Studies), where she is developing a theory of postdiasporic sociocultural dispersion. Festić has taught and lectured at universities intercontinentally (in USA, Europe, South Africa, Turkey), and she has published widely in literary, cultural, and critical theory, semiotics, trauma and gender studies. Among her major publications are the books The Body of the Postmodernist Narrator: Between Violence and Artistry (2009), Betraying the Event: Constructions of Victimhood in Contemporary Cultures (2009), Gender and Trauma: Interdisciplinary Dialogues (2012), and Responsiveness to Comparison in Literature (2022). The monograph Body, Mediality, Hi/Story is forthcoming (2026). She has published around 70 articles and chapters with leading publishers. Forthcoming in 2026 are Festić’s chapters on “Mediating Witnessing” in the ACLA State of the Discipline Report 2014-2024: Worlds of Comparative Literature; on “Reinscribing European Narratives: Dispersion and Policymaking” in the Handbook: Decolonializing European Studies; “Responsiveness to Suffering” in the collection Semioethics as Social Dialogic, and articles (in the journals Tropos, Migrating Minds, Comparative Literature Studies, and several conference proceedings.

Sophia Melanson Ricciardone

Sophia Melanson Ricciardone is a scholar of social psychology, cognitive linguistics, and digital semiotic philosophy. Her research examines the social, emotional, and cognitive dimensions of human behaviour within human-AI interactions, focusing on how resulting dynamics inform intersubjectivity and collective reasoning, including our social capacity for joint attention and shared intentionality. Drawing on interdisciplinary frameworks, Sophia explores how systems of communication, knowledge, and meaning inform our understanding of ethical responsibility in the age of digital mediation. She approaches questions about the ways in which human-AI interactions in digitally mediated environments impacts social organization and collective well-being, and how economies of post-truths generated online confound how we think through important issues together.

Sophia completed a PhD at York University in Communication and Culture and recently concluded a 2-year Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour at McMaster University. She currently teaches with the Department of Linguistics and Languages at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada and is co-editing a forthcoming volume with Routledge titled Semioethics as Social Dialogic: On Precarity, Insecurity and Crisis in the Twenty-First Century with Susan Petrilli.