Rania Fawzy

Arab Academy for Science, Technology & Maritime Transport | AAST · College of Language and Communication

The aim of this study is to surface pragmatic forces and the semiotically constructed self-governed persona in the self-tracking context. In so doing, the article adopts a pragma-semiotic approach to investigate the self-tracking app “Habiticia” as an example of the construction of new regimes of algorithmic self-governance. The adopted approach be...

Bringing together narrative elements, virtual affordances, and participants’ embodied interactions, virtual reality (VR) movies instantiate new narrative techniques by offering an immersive experience. This study examines virtual narrative beyond mere interactional engagement and extends the phenomenon to include worlding, metaleptic embodiment, an...

This article addresses the socio-cognitive conceptualizations of the notion of ‘citizenship’ within the space of smart cities. It discusses how smart cities expos are endowed with ideological bearings that mark a shift in these conceptualizations. This ideological shift is explored in the policy releases of Barcelona expo media centre 2019/2020 as...

PDF EPUB Share icon ABSTRACT The current study investigates the intersection between crowdsourcing apps and postdigital affective polarization of online communities as manifested in the mobile app Safecity. The main thesis is that the embodied, affective semiosis, as enacted by the app algorithmic agency and participants’ testimonials, produces a n...

The current study proposes the concept of ‘postdigital temporality’ as a technologically enabled configuration of the intra-actional interplay of ventriloquized time-bound agencies. To this end, it draws on the model of ventriloquism and the postdigital concept of intra-actional agency. The notion of ‘postdigital time’ is a key concept in the paper...

Digitality is closely related to and expressed within analogicity, offering a sense of intersectional continuity between the online and offline realms. However, this poses a theoretical and conceptual challenge, particularly when addressing the heterogenous notion of contemporary diaspora as a phenomenon of online/offline and past/present co-consti...

The present study seeks to untangle the courtroom trial’s sequential categorization of the topical device of Amber Heard’s ‘lies’ as YouTubed by the Daily Mail . Towards this end, the study develops and utilizes a synergetic approach of the ethnomethodological method of membership categorization analysis (MCA), the reconsidered model, the forensic-...

Mobile technologies mark an increasing construct of heterogeneous semiotic resources which coexist in a networked symmetrical interrelations. This area of research is still understudied, especially in terms of demonstrating how app-mediated touristscapes are co-told, transduced, and augmented by networked assemblage between participants and mobile...

This study investigates the potential socio-political commentaries entailed by the multimodal metaphorical conceptualizations in Egyptian and American coronavirus memes. A contrastive qualitative and quantitative analysis is carried out on 80 multimodal memes, retrieved from Facebook, in which Coronavirus is the target domain. The sample is compose...

The present study proposes the notion-complex of “spatiotemporal glocalization” as a potentially postdigital phenomenon inhering in the touristscape representations mediated by mobile apps, with an analytic focus on the Dubai Travel mobile app. An integrative tripartite approach has been adopted with three theoretical models at work: (1) Don Ihde’s...

Drawing on VR affordances and its relevant discourse of embodiment, immersion and engagement, Indigenous Futurisms (IF) challenges mainstream stereotypes of indigenous cultures. This article explores how the VR movie Crow: The Legend mediates an intercultural experience of IF. The framework proposed for understanding the virtually-mediated IF inter...

The article examines, through the lens of cognitive semiotics, temporal agency and experiences that define the protestors’ identity within the space of the Floyd protests as visualized in AP sequenced news photos. The analysis points to the role of resemiotized chronotopic motifs that bring together the past, present and future times of racial disc...

This study approaches the question of how text generic structure acts as semiotic instantiations of evaluative stance, particularly in the online context. In this respect, it explores the generic structure of online reportage stories with its multitude modes, distinctive rhetorical structure and layout with a view to differentiating them from their...

Signs in the urban landscapes are never neutral; they always enact connections to power relations and social hierarchies. By examining the New Administrative Capital of Egypt’s (NAC) advertising billboards, the current study relates itself to the literature of Linguistic Landscape (LL). The study examines the NAC from a semio-discursive perspective...

Gamification redefines news reading activity by turning it into a playful experience. The shift from a reading mode to a playing mode marks a shift in news semogenesis strategies that need to be investigated to provide a better understanding of the emerging genres of news gamification and to build some reflections on the ongoing changes in journali...

The paper examines the ways IKEA home design catalogue (2019) reflects and promotes the values of neoliberalism that underpin today’s society. It seeks to relate the ideological and cognitive aspects of promoting home design to the verbalised materiality of the design as reflected in the catalogue. Doing so, the paper adopts a pragma-cognitive appr...

Gamified news is a clear example of contemporary convergent practices which conflate the functionalities of formerly separate entities, video games and journalism. This practice marks a shift in the journalistic norms, positioning journalism and news users within the neoliberal paradigm. In this view, the study proposes a discursive approach to exa...

Both Al Tahrir and Rabaa Squares have a significant iconized value especially after being involved as places in which to stage protests. Since, protests and revolts take place in public spaces, the visualization of these spaces reveals much about the representation and circulation of the protesters’ ideologies, trends and attitudes. This article ex...

News photos of refugees and migrants tend to be highly evaluative since they capture the moments of human suffering, vulnerability and helplessness. Informed by the works of Martin and White (2005) and Economou (2009, 2008) on Appraisal Theory and evaluative stance, the current paper identifies the visual evaluative resources in Reuters’ Pulitzer-w...