Two decades ago, in 1994, in the context of the 4(th) EU Framework Programme, ELSA was introduced as a label for developing and funding research into the ethical, legal and social aspects of emerging sciences and technologies. Currently, particularly in the context of EU funding initiatives such as Horizon2020, a new label has been forged, namely Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). What ...

One of the fundamental tasks of practical medicine has always been to identify the signs of health and disease. In this paper, I contrast the Oxford English Dictionary (henceforth OED) entries of four of the most common medical signifier terms (token, sign, symptom, and accident) in English vernacular medical texts from the end of the 14th century to the beginning of the 18th with their occurre...

Urban informality is typically ascribed to the urban poor in cities of the Global South. Drawing on Judith Butler's concept of performativity and taking the case of Rio de Janeiro in the context of the 2016 Olympic Games, this article conceptualizes informality as a signifier and a procedural, relational category. Specifically, it shows how different class actors have employed the signifier inf...

Recent work on the relationship between rhetoric and magic has tended to pivot around the issue of magic’s perceived identification of signifier and signified and what that might mean for its relationship to larger theological, empirical, and rhetorical approaches to language. This article seeks to problematize the assumptions underlying this issue through an examination of the work of Corneliu...

Two decades ago, in 1994, in the context of the 4 EU Framework Programme, ELSA was introduced as a label for developing and funding research into the ethical, legal and social aspects of emerging sciences and technologies. Currently, particularly in the context of EU funding initiatives such as Horizon2020, a new label has been forged, namely Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). What is i...