Multimodal Peircean Semiotics of Sustainability: A Communication Study of the Slow Food Movement

Abstract

GRINDULO, HANNAH KIMBERLY O. University of the Philippines Open University. (September 14, 2021, Multimodal Peircean Semiotics of Sustainability: A Communication Study of the Slow Food Movement) Adviser: Dr. Jean A. Saludadez This study is an attempt to understand food as a communication phenomenon from the lens of the Semiotic Tradition (ST) of Communication Theory (CT). This study highlighted the relationship between food and sustainability, and why the study of food as a communication phenomenon is theoretically important. This research pursuit posed the question: How does a semiotic study contribute to the understanding of Slow Food as a communication phenomenon? Anchored on the general principles of Peircean Semiotics, Grounded Theory and multimodality, this study argued that Slow Food (SF) is an important sign system produced by the merging of conversational domains of food and sustainability-a characterization of inter-domain communication as essential in the emergent theory of Semiotic Convergence, and which serves to enrich our current semantic system (system of meanings). The converging sign systems surfaced the significant impact of food (primarily in consumption and production) to sustainability. Semiotic analysis of multimodal resources such as transcribed speech from selected publicly available SF video content, and textual and visual data in SF digital documents, were instrumental to the conception of Semiotic Convergence. Results of the study showed that signifiers used by the Slow Food community pertain to interconnected issues on the food system, health, environment, and economy; Slow food signs (representamen/signifier) and their corresponding features (signifying elements/sign-vehicle) represent the meaning (interpretant) of Slow Food using the "good, clean, and fair" philosophy; and associating sustainability to the "good, clean, fair" philosophy (representation of meaning/interpretant) defines the communicative practices of the Slow Food community.