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27 Int'l J. Semiotics L. 1 (2014)

handle is hein.journals/intjsemi27 and id is 1 raw text is: Int J Semiot Law (2014) 27:1-5 DOI 10.1007/s11196-013-9330-0 Visual Semiotics of the Spaces We Inhabit: Preface Sarah Marusek Published online: 14 August 2013 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 In our everyday lives, we occupy a variety of places that, upon first consideration, do not seem either legal or political. Upon closer examination, the spaces where we live may reveal a uniquely visual semiotics of place, a semiotic system that generates meaning and contestation through structure, signage, and symbolism. As sites of power. these places can be urban, rural, or simply in between. The ways in which power manifests itself here is as law, legality, governance. Visual representations of meaning in our quotidian terrain of habitation constitute our relationships and they govern who we are and how we understand our place in the world. The visual engagement with the semiotic construction of who we are as individuals, as a collective, and the presence of both within different communities is visibly marked by the banal as well as by the overtly distinctive. In the routine places of our lives, identities fostered by rules and structures challenge us to reconsider how we conceptualize ourselves, each other, the state, and the spectrum of community therein. In this volume, cultural themes of consumption, normativity, deviance, identity, and governmentality contribute to this visually semiotic relationship shaping our understandings of law, power, and place. An impressive array of images, spaces, and notions of law lays the backdrop to this collection of scholarship critically engaged with everyday objects, uses, and understandings. Our world comes alive through images. What we see and how we see semiotically constructs our reality and contributes to a constitutive approach to law in which representation and image signify power, resistance, and the mundane. Images, spaces, and law work in conjunction with one another to sculpt our everyday lives. Through images, semiotic representations signify our world. Constructions of spatiality give meaning to how and where we live and spatiality constitutes our notions of what is public, what is less so, and what is not. Landscapes can be outside, in our homes, in the air, on our bodies. A constitutive S. Marusek (E) University of Hawaii, Hilo, HI, USA e-mail: skmarusek@gmail.com I Springer

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