Mu, Y., & Vásquez, C. (2025). “Waste-sorting is the new fashion”: waste, power, and the semiotic landscape. Social Semiotics, 1–22.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2025.2543085
ABSTRACT
This study examines how the Chinese government uses multiple semiotic resources, in both online and offline contexts, to (re)shape citizens’ behaviors and construct knowledge about wastesorting under the recent national waste-sorting policy. Informed by Foucault’s notion of governmentality, we show how governmental strategies operate at the level of both material artifacts (e.g. rubbish bins in one city) as well as in national media reports (i.e. news articles from state-sponsored news websites). By integrating geosemiotics with multimodal critical discourse analysis, we demonstrate how rubbish bins visually, interactively, and spatially construct wastesorting as “fashionable” public behavior. At the same time, online news media reports complement these artifacts by highlighting certain elements of the new bins (e.g. CCTV cameras and card-swiping systems) and by capturing strategic moments of residents using the bins, thus supporting and promoting actions that are aligned with national policy.
KEYWORDS:
Semiotic landscape, Foucauldian power, multimodality, waste
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