The poetics of openness, as formulated by Umberto Eco in his pre-semiotic work The Open Work (1962), has already been useful and applicable to cultural studies and textual analysis. I propose that this poetics of openness be applied to critical educational practices as well. In this article, I argue that a poetics of openness when coupled with active ‘on the ground’ “critical public pedagogics” can provide a flexible framework for approaching the education of interpretation. Through this framework, a text or sign system is understood as ‘closed’ if it elicits univocal meanings: expecting a predetermined response from a generic/average reader. A text is ‘open’ when it fosters a plurality of interpretative possibilities that actively engage the “existential credentials” of the interpreter. Aesthetic openness is part of adopting a semiotic perspective toward educational processes. A theory of model reader pedagogically helps protect against the kind of radical constructivism this interpretative approach can seem to foster. Openness is not presented as a system or methodology of education, but as a pedagogical value: encouraging both educators and students to bring a perspective of critical openness to all the sign systems and discourses they engage with.

This article examines the reparticularization of Chinese language and culture in a teaching-learning context at the University of Rwanda. It critiques models of dissemination that suggest direct inscription of semiotic value onto local contexts of use. Ethnographically, the article demonstrates that students’ uptake of what their teachers deem real or authentic is in fact a metapragmatic reconstrual of teachers’ lexemic tokens “real” and “original” that teachers enact in their teaching activities. Students’ reconstrual incrementally alters teachers’ sign values and links their users to one other. Students’ reparticularized sign values, in turn, link their users to distinct activity routines beyond learning Chinese and kung fu in the classroom. The article argues that language and kung fu classes for students are one phase segment of larger sets of activities students undertake to become competitive in a challenging job market.

Romantic notions that the advancement of archaeological knowledge depends on the thrill of unanticipated discoveries departs from the standard practice of interpreting data according to impartial research designs. However, the unexpected find commonly stymies the deductive testing of hypothesis, and the material traces (signs) upon which research relies often disrupt the course of archaeological investigations. The main objective of this article is to demonstrate that the distinct semiotic affordances of material remains can significantly affect archaeological interpretations. The undertheorized epistemological problems of revelation in archaeology are brought to bear through an examination of the spectral quality of graffiti etched onto the walls of the Moche ceremonial site of Huaca Colorada in northern Peru (CE 650–850). An interpretation of the graffiti in relationship to rituals of human sacrifice and architectural renovation demonstrates that the power of the monument was founded on its semiotic density; the complex layering of signs—that continually spawned new signs—created a place of limitless discovery and affect that profoundly shaped perceptions of the huaca for both Moche visitors and later archaeologists alike. Ultimately, the graffiti provide a rare data set that permits a consideration of the effects of signs as “intepretants” in the tradition of Peirce.

This article draws on interpretative semiotics to address how spatial designers endow the built environment with meaning. From a semiotic perspective, designing the built environment is an activity that extends beyond its physical reshaping. Designers use complex sociosemiotic strategies to funnel users’ interpretations, drawing upon their manifold resources. Analyzing these strategies is important to not naturalize the dominant meaning that is inscribed in the built environment. As a case study, we analyze spatial design in the city of Forlì, Italy, during the Fascist regime (1922–43). Through the case study, we delineate two complimentary design strategies: typification and environmental propaganda. Typification establishes and uses familiar types of buildings to channel individual interpretations; environmental propaganda spreads cultural artifacts and enacts political rituals about the built environment. Both of these strategies try to steer users’ interpretations of the built environment in everyday life. Finally, we provide a detailed analysis of a particular built form in Forlì—the headquarters of the Opera Nazionale Balilla—showing how these strategies were deployed for this particular building.

The resolution of publicly available satellite photography is limited to 50 cm a pixel. Every pixel in a satellite image is a single, solid color. The reasons for the resolution limit are tactical as well as protective: according to forensic architect Eyal Weizman, it maintains the privacy of individuals on the ground as well as makes the consequences of state violence harder to investigate. A uniformly colored pixel can be evidence of a drone attack or proof that it never happened. The indexical evidence ambivalently sustains both interpretations. If camouflage has been traditionally thought of as a blending into the contiguous environment, often geared toward a camera’s gaze, in this essay I look to the reorientation of camouflage away from the adjacent surroundings and toward the mediating structures of the interface and database. The objective of camouflage is now to merge into arrays of information and to slip below the threshold of detectability. This essay examines the work of artists and activists, such as Hito Steyerl, Zach Blas, and Adam Harvey, who strategize ways of becoming “rogue pixels” hiding in “the cracks of our standards of resolution,” resisting the means by which our bodies are indexed on virtual interfaces and algorithmically parsed as data.

A moral panic is afoot in contemporary France surrounding what place French-Muslim youth hold within the national identity. The French state, in particular, is actively engaged in regimenting what it means to be a young Muslim person from France. This article examines how, during Marseille’s year (2013) as the European Capital of Culture, the municipal government and the local branch of the Ministère de l’Éducation Nationale spearheaded several initiatives, a number of which focused on Arabic-language education, with the aim of transforming French-Muslim youth from Marseille’s housing projects into secular, upwardly mobile individuals. Ethnographic inquiry with the youth targeted by such “linguistic gentrification” programs reveals that the state’s reimagining of them in these terms remained largely at odds with how they themselves understood their identities. This article, as such, illustrates the analytical importance of attending to people’s uptake when evaluating the eventual scope of top-down discourses and projects, while also offering an example of how the label “Mediterranean” functions as a spatiotemporal shifter, deployed by different groups to activate alternative accounts of history, the present, and the future.