On a link from Ontario, Canada, Prof. Munsterhjelm will present his recent research on how genetic research can be politically framed, and analyze this framing with the help of a framework based on Greimasian semiotics and cognitive linguistics. In this way, it should qualify as cognitive semiotics, and thus show how our field can deal with currently topical issues, and is not lost in "ivory towers". Welcome to the room or to the zoom link, from 15:00 for introductions! (This time I will insist that all zoom guests have their cameras on.)

In this talk, based on a recent paper in Public Journal of Semiotics, I describe how synecdochical and metonymic chains function in the semiotic narrative schema of forensic genetics articles. Greimas’s narrative schema and work on categories provides a framework that can be synthesized with cognitive linguistic advances on synecdoche and metonymy chains to understand how meaning is created in organizational interactions through the circulation of objects of value. Based on an empirical analysis of controversial forensic genetic articles involving Uyghur subjects on ancestry inference marker and phenotype (visible appearance) inference marker research projects, it shows how some scientists frame this through a shared manhunting narrative schema. In this schema, Society and/or Humanity send scientists quests to protect society by improving forensic genetic technologies to variously track down and capture or kill criminals, separatists, insurgents and terrorists. Utilizing recent advances in theorization of synecdoche, the article shows how synecdoche functions in the categorization of Uyghurs as “Eurasian” and “mixed East Asian and European” populations. It also shows how synecdoche and metonymy function through syllogisms to mediate relations and the exchange of objects of value such as Uyghurs’ genetic materials and data between the phases and sub-narratives of the scientific articles’ narrative schema