2 meetings and 2 job interviews

Today I have attended two meetings and chaired two job interviews. I also had a work lunch.

2 meetings

Today I have attended two meetings, one of them in relation to Cognitive lab (specifically about localities).

#45,5

Today I have had an article writing day devoted to my wasted growth articles, with some reading done and some 400 words added to the articles, primarily the first one, for which I designed and compiled part of the comparative table on wasteful growth in the USA and the Nordic countries. Number of writing days so far this Spring is up to 45,5.

Book "Innovation and the Arts" available in Google Books; includes my chapter on the true value of "doing well" economically

The book Innovation and the Arts: The Value of Humanities Studies for Business (Eds. Piero Formica and John Edmondson, published by Emerald Publishing in 2020) is available in Google Books. It includes my chapter "The true value of "doing well" economically" (pp. 91-109).

See also the publisher´s webpage for the chapter (login/payment required). You may also ask me to share the chapter privately via ResearchGate.

#44,5

Today I have had an article writing day, with some 1.500 words added to my wasted growth articles and my article "Introducing a notion of accumulated GDP". Among other things, I added a number of references, and finished compiling a table on the occurrence of wasted growth in the USA and the Nordic countries (with some commentary).

Total number of writing days this Spring is up to 44,5.

"Semiotic agency" manuscript revised and resubmitted

Alexei Sharov and I have now submitted a revised version of our book manuscript Semiotic agency: Science beyond mechanism to Springer Nature, after having incorporated revisions after peer review feedback.

3 meetings and summer semester end event

Today I have attended three meetings and the summer semester end event of Department of social studies, which was attended by some 25 people and involved two academic presentations.

2 meetings and 4 job interviews

Today I have attended two meetings and chaired four job interviews for the position as associate professor of psychology.

#43,5

Today I have had a second article writing day devoted to revising our book Semiotic agency - this time mainly editing the edits of first author Alexei Sharov. In the process I added some 300 words to the book manuscript.

Total number of article writing days this Spring is up to 43,5.

Google Scholar: 555 citations; articles tied for top spots

According to Google Scholar (cf. my profile), my research has by now attracted 555 citations (+4 since June 11th). This includes 56 citations in 2021 (+1 since June 11th). My i10-index remains 21 and my h-index 14.

"Umwelt Transitions: Uexküll and environmental change" (2009) and "Umwelt ethics" (2003) are now tied for the top spot with 44 citations each. "The biosemiotic glossary project: Agent, agency" and my ph.d. dissertation (2011) are tied for the 3rd place with 34 citations each.

Special issue "Anticipation and change" from NASS XI (Stavanger 2019) published

Sign Systems Studies vol. 49 No. 1-2 (2021), the special issue "Anticipation and change", has appeared. It draws on papers from NASS XI, held in Stavanger in June 2019 (I was chair of the organizing committee).

Table of contents:

Editorial: Anticipation and Change (7-11)

Lauri Linask, Inesa Sahakyan, Aleksei Semenenko

Articles

Anticipating the societal transformation required to solve the environmental crisis in the 21st century (12-62)

Morten Tønnessen 

Solar energy discourse in the Sunshine State (63-85)

Prisca Augustyn 

Music as a non-arbitrary avenue for exploration of the social (86-107)

Juha Ojala

Towards the semiotics of the future: From anticipation to premediation (108-131)

Katre Pärn

Towards an integration of two aspects of semiosis – A cognitive semiotic perspective (132-165)

Piotr Konderak

Metaphor, induction and innovation: Getting outside the box (166-190)

Inesa Sahakyan

Trajectories of anticipation: Preconceptuality and the task of reading habit (191-215)

Sebastian Feil

Narratives and the semiotic freedom of children (216-234)

Sara Lenninger

The dialogic nature of double consciousness and double stimulation: Implications from Peirce and Vygotsky (235-261)

Donna E. West

#42,5

Today I have had an article writing day devoted mostly to revisions for our book Semiotic agency: Science beyond mechanism, which we are now conducting after having received a peer-review with some points to work on, with some 300 words added.

Total number of writing days this Spring is up to 42,5.

A job interview, a meeting, and a faculty seminar

Today I have attended a job interview (which I chaired), a meeting on extra academic support for students, and the summer seminar of the leadership group at Faculty of social sciences. Tonight we´ll have dinner.

A meeting, a ph.d. defense, and a ph.d. celebration event

Today I have attended a meeting concerning development of a master degree, the ph.d. defense of Ida Bruheim Jensen of her thesis "Ways of seeing children: Perspectives of social workers in Chile and Norway", and helped organize a celebration event for Ida at the department, with food and drinks. Tonight I will attend the ph.d. defense dinner.

2 meetings and a master ceremony

Today I have attended two meetings, and taken part at this year´s master ceremony at Faculty of social sciences, at Clarion Hotel Energy, with 13 master students from Department of social studies receiving lithographies from the Dean while I read out their names.

Chronicle in Stavanger Aftenblad: "Vekst i velferdens og miljøkrisens tid"

Today a chronicle written by me was published in the regional daily Stavanger Aftenblad, titled "Vekst i velferdens og miljøkrisens tid" (Growth in the time of welfare and environmental crisis).

4 meetings

Today I have attended 4 meetings. This included a meeting with the child protection service in Stavanger municipality.

$41,5

Today I have had an article writing day devoted to proof-reading my Norwegian language article on CCS and climate justice ("Karbonfangst i lys av generasjonsrettferdighet"), and continuing my work on my wasted growth articles, primarily the first one, with work done on comparing wasted and wasteful growth in the Nordic countries with the performance of the USA. Some 150 words were added to the latter article manuscript. Total number of writing days this Spring is up to 41,5.

Commentary article published in Biosemiotics 14(1)

My commentary to Denis Noble´s Target article "The illusions of the Modern Synthesis" has been published in issue 14(1) of Biosemiotics.

Full reference:

Tønnessen, Morten 2021. Making the Umwelt Bubble of the Modern Synthesis Burst. Commentary. Biosemiotics 14(1): 121–125. Published online May 9th 2021. DOI: 10.1007/s12304-021-09430-2

Google Scholar: 551 citations, 55 in 2021, i10-index 21

According to Google Scholar (cf. my profile) my research has by now attracted 551 citations (+16 since May 28th). This includes 55 citations in 2021 (+11 since May 28th). My i10-index is now 21 (+1), meaning that 21 of my texts have been cited at least 10 times each. My h-index remains 14.

#40,5

Today I have had an article writing day devoted to my wasted growth articles, with some 700 words written on the first of them, and my conception of "wasteful growth" clarified.

Total number of writing days so far this Spring is up to 40,5.

4 job interviews; MSCA PF webinar

Today I have led 4 job interviews, and attended most of the second MSCA PF seminar offered by the UIS research department.

2 meetings

Today I have attended a HMS faculty meeting (annual) and a MSCA PF webinar held by the UIS research department.

2 meetings

Today I have attended a meeting related to a new study, and chaired the second meeting following up on the employee survey 2021, which took place over 3 hours and involved group work and plenary discussion, with some 25-30 people attending physically or online.

5 meetings, including second Cognitive lab steering group meeting

Today I have taken part in 5 meetings. This included the second meeting of the steering group for Cognitive lab, which I chair. By now 5 of the 7 ph.d scholars have been employed, two more are in the process of being recruited. Moreover, there will shortly be a call for an engineer position. The lab has also started working on a strategy, and remodeling of lab premises is currently under consideration.,

#39,5

Today I have had an article writing day devoted to my wasted growth articles, primarily the first one, with some 600 words written, data for a table updated, and one table made. Total number of writing days this Spring is up to 39,5.

Abstract for Tartu Summer School of Semiotics 2021: "Semiotic futures: Transformative semiotics and its role in facilitating change in human self-comprehension"

I have just composed the abstract below, for my invited talk at Tartu Summer School in Semiotics 2021, which has the theme "Semiotic horizons: time, memory and future(s)".

**

Semiotic futures: Transformative semiotics and its role in facilitating change in human self-comprehension  

Morten Tønnessen 

Abstract  

The human being is far from the only being that relates to the passage of time. All organisms that are endowed with an Umwelt (subjective lifeworld) live through what Jakob von Uexküll called an Umwelt-tunnel. Moreover, we can safely state that organisms with an Umwelt also go through Umwelt transitions and partake in Umwelt trajectories. But the human species is, however, unique in some of the ways in which it relates to time. We collectively negotiate our memory of the past and our assumptions about the future, and are furthermore consciously aware that we are mortal, and constantly strive to make our lives meaningful in light of this fact.  

Quite a bit can be known about future Umwelten. In some contexts, Umwelt predictions can be made about future lifeworlds, in others, we can develop a number of plausible Umwelt scenarios. Such predictions and scenarios can help us make more informed choices whenever we discuss actions, lifestyles or policies that have an impact on future lifeworlds. While Umwelt futurology, the study of future Umwelten, can help us understand aspects of the future, transformative semiotics allows semioticians to engage in discussions about value issues. By ‘transformative semiotics’, I mean a normatively conscious form of semiotics that explicitly relates to value issues and aims to frame a perceived need for normative transformation (i.e., normative change) in semiotic terms.   

To be of any use for contemporary society, Umwelt futurology as well as transformative semiotics should be empirically informed. I will briefly summarize and review major changes in common understandings of the environmental crisis, starting with the emerging awareness of a global environmental crisis and ending with the growing acknowledgement of the Anthropocene notion in recent years. While the current predominant understanding of the global environmental crisis is an improvement over earlier understandings on some points, it lacks direction with regard to necessary courses of action. 

In 1984, Thomas Sebeok wrote a technical report for the Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation (USA), titled “Communication measures to bridge ten millennia”. This is an interesting example of applied semiotics in the context of long-term future environmental and societal change. I will review Sebeok´s message in the report, and discuss its relevance for contemporary discussions about Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) as a climate mitigation measure, which has a similar time perspective.  

The question about how humans´ relation to nature has to change over the next century or so, is intimately related to the question about how the self-comprehension of human beings must or should change in the same process. This was a central premise for Deep Ecologist Arne Næss. In light of philosophical anthropology, just as much as it is concerned with environmental or societal change, transformative semiotics is concerned with human self-comprehension. This brings us back to the issue of what role semiotics can play in addressing the urgent issues of the Anthropocene.   

As John Deely stressed, human beings´ knowledge and awareness about our semiotic capabilities, and about the real-world consequences of our actions, makes us ethically responsible in ways that animals are not. It also opens up fundamental philosophical questions for renewed reflection. Before we can start acting in sustainable ways, we need to develop a sustainable notion of what it means to be human. This requires a thoughtful revision of our human self-comprehension. Increased sensitivity to our own semiotic capabilities, and to the ways in which our actions have an impact on the semiotic lifeworlds of humans and non-humans alike, is key to managing the sustainability transition.

Article "Anticipating the societal transformation required to solve the environmental crisis in the 21st century" published

My article on "how to solve the environmental crisis" has been published (June 4th).

Reference:

Tønnessen, Morten 2021. Anticipating the societal transformation required to solve the environmental crisis in the 21st century. Sign Systems Studies 49 (1/2) (special issue “Anticipation and change”, guest editors Lauri Linask, Inesa Sahakyan & Aleksei Semenenko): 12–62. https://doi.org/10.12697/SSS.2021.49.1-2.02  

At 51 pages, this is the longest article I have ever published.

The article is part of a special issue, "Anticipation and change", which draws on papers from the NASS XI conference with the same theme that was held at University of Stavanger in June 2019.

#38,5

Today I have had half an article writing day, with some 200 words written on the first of my wasted growth articles, and data for a table updated. Total number of article writing days this Spring is up to 38,5.

2 meetings

Today I have attended the meeting of partnership for public health in Rogaland, focused on region of partnership agreements, and a dialogue meeting between Department of social studies and Faculty of social sciences.

2 employee appraisals, 1 more meeting and a course

Today I have attended 2 employee appraisals (total to date: 65) and one more meeting, and also attended a HMS course in sick-leave follow-up.

3 meetings Tuesday

Yesterday I participated in 3 meetings. This included the weekly faculty leadership group meeting, and the fourth and last department leadership group meeting for this Spring.

Ph.d. project proposal on Norway´s HDI performance developed

Yesterday I completed a ph.d. project proposal titled "How did Norway become «the world’s best country to live in»? Understanding Norway´s HDI’s performance 1990-2020", and submitted this project proposal, along with one that I developed in January and resubmitted now ("Bærekraftig velferd"), for the faculty´s consideration now this summer.