International Semiotics Workshop of Balıkesir 

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE THROUGH SEMIOTICS 

16-18 June 2022, Avlu Congress and Culture Center-Balıkesir / Turkiye 

The International Semiotics Workshop will be held on 16-17-18 June 2022 in Balıkesir, Turkiye. The workshop will be held under the title of "International Balıkesir Semiotics Workshop: Looking to the Future Through Semiotics" and in the context of the relations of different disciplines with semiotics. The workshop in questionwill be organized in Balıkesir, which is an important cultural center with its region and the programs it offers, and with the generous support of Balıkesir Metropolitan Municipality.  

The main purpose of the workshop is to reveal the researches carried out both in Turkey and in other countries in the field of semiotics, which means the systematic examination of all factors related to the production and interpretation of signs and the processes of understanding signs, to bring together scientists working in the field of semiotics, to exchange information and to discuss the role of indicators in the future and to develop collaborations for further studies.  

For this purpose, it is to question how semiotics will develop in the short, medium, and long term by gathering our internationally renowned colleagues with their work on semiotics in our workshop as invited or participant. Thus, on the one hand, scientists who do or want to do research in the field of semiotics at an international level will come together and discuss the possibilities of cooperation and joint work areas; On other hand, communication opportunities between semiotics experts will be improved. 

Semiotics and Tomorrow 

The world's problems are increasing. Theories and approaches developed to solve these problems are increasing day by day. Which one offers the best solution? It's hard to decide right now. We will see these results much later. 

Our field of interest is developing approaches to understand today's people and their problems for the future. Semiotics, which deals with how people can live with the signs that surround the individual more and more every day, and what kind of approaches can be developed to make sense of these signs, is one of the fields that show the most development in the humanities. Communication styles are developing day by day and indicators are always used in the communication process. Where there is communication, there will always be a semiosis process. This situation shows that today's people and future people need semiotics more. 

From a broader perspective, which areas should semiotics prioritize in the future? For example, for a visual society, to what extent and at what level will semiotics be beneficial to humanity? Or is there a need for semiotics at every stage of communication between human and human, human and animal, human and machine, machine and machine? Will semiotics and semiotics experts be needed at any stage of artificial intelligence? Who should work in future city planning or object design? The questions can be increased.  

In addition to these, will there be a profession called semiotics in the future? Is this job necessary? If necessary, in which fields a semiotician can work. Should there be semiotics in the formation of the image of a supermarket or politician? Discussing such questions and inquiries with a certain method by experts in the field, finding answers or answers to these questions are among the future tasks and research topics of semiotics. 

The theme of the workshop was determined as looking to the future in the light of semiotics. As a requirement of the century, we live in, the role of interdisciplinary interaction in daily life, between people, societies and cultures, and in science is quite large in order to achieve satisfactory results in making sense of the phenomena and events around us, and to develop different perspectives and thinking models. Thanks to this interaction, science, social life and therefore humanity are making meaningful progress. Semiotics develops research methods in many fields of science, especially in the humanities, and is a metalanguage. It is also a fact that semiotics is in close interaction with disciplines produced by the meaningful sequences of signs and with all areas of social life. Based on these considerations, we believe that the re-evaluation of the ever-expanding domain of semiotics and semiotics in the light of current studies and the results of these evaluations will contribute to semiotics and other fields it interacts with. With this belief, we invite all national and international scientists who go beyond traditional single-disciplinary studies and apply semiotics in the production of interdisciplinary studies to the International Balıkesir Semiotics Workshop. 

The organizers of this workshop are the Anatolian Semiotics Association from Turkiye and the Semiotics Circle of Turkiye. The international organizations that cooperate are the Asian Countries Semiotics Association (ASIA: AsianSemiotics International Association). society organization joined forces to look to the future in the light of semiotics.