How binding and bonding communicate interpersonal meanings in a children’s museum to address Jordan’s energy and water challenges
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Ahmad El-Sharif
Abstract
Museums’ structures, spaces, and exhibits are understood as semiotic resources that make spatial texts that communicate a discourse defined by the authorities of the museum or its curators. The current study follows a social-semiotic approach in analyzing the spatial discourse of the Children’s Museum in Amman. It demonstrates that interpersonal meanings are semiotically communicated to children visitors in the Museum by firstly establishing a “comfort-zone” and secondly by aligning children visitors into groups with shared qualities, attitudes, and dispositions of affiliation and solidarity, and thirdly by providing abstract and material representations of the real world that encompasses participants, processes, events, and places. These interpersonal meanings produce a pedagogical discourse that semiotically addresses Jordan’s energy and water challenges, and that can “charge” the Museum’s role as a “Bonding Icon” that stands for shared communal ideals that Jordanians might identify with, or rally around.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- A pragmatic view of the poetic function of language
- “Little music” or “rough music”?: Ishion Hutchinson, modernist poet
- How binding and bonding communicate interpersonal meanings in a children’s museum to address Jordan’s energy and water challenges
- Autocommunication in crib speech and private speech
- From action to performative gesture: the Slapping movement used by children at the age of four to six
- An important chapter in the history of semiotics: inference from signs in Philodemus’ De signis
- Meaning and the evolution of signification and objectivity
- Shielding the learned body: a semiotic analysis of school badges in New South Wales, Australia
- The primordiality of representation
- The existential signs through the works of Alev Ebuzziya Siesbye
- Paratexts and the reframing of a classic: Korean translations of the Japanese Women’s Analects
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- A pragmatic view of the poetic function of language
- “Little music” or “rough music”?: Ishion Hutchinson, modernist poet
- How binding and bonding communicate interpersonal meanings in a children’s museum to address Jordan’s energy and water challenges
- Autocommunication in crib speech and private speech
- From action to performative gesture: the Slapping movement used by children at the age of four to six
- An important chapter in the history of semiotics: inference from signs in Philodemus’ De signis
- Meaning and the evolution of signification and objectivity
- Shielding the learned body: a semiotic analysis of school badges in New South Wales, Australia
- The primordiality of representation
- The existential signs through the works of Alev Ebuzziya Siesbye
- Paratexts and the reframing of a classic: Korean translations of the Japanese Women’s Analects
