On October 8, 2025, the candidates for the Professorship of the Semiotics of Culture at the University of Tartu – Maarja Ojamaa, Sara Bédard-Goulet, and Mari-Liis Madisson – delivered their venia legendi lectures. The public lectures can be re-watched via UTTV links available under each lecture title.
Maarja Ojamaa, Associate Professor of Semiotics, University of Tartu
"Kultuur kui haridus: digiajastu kultuurisemiootika vaade" ("Culture as education: a semiotics of culture view of the digital age"). The lecture will be delivered in Estonian.
This lecture offers an interpretation, rooted in the Tartu tradition of cultural semiotics, of culture as an educational mechanism. The focus is on the digital age, characterizsd, among other features, by screen mediation, transmediality (the communication of stories and, more broadly, messages across various media – verbal, visual, auditory, etc.), the logic of databases, and transformations in part–whole relations. All of these significantly affect practices of memory and interpretation. As an applied outcome of understanding these processes, my venia legendi lecture introduces the „Haridus Ekraanil „ (Education on Screen) platform developed by the Transmedia Research Group at the University of Tartu.
Maarja Ojamaa is Associate Professor of Semiotics at the University of Tartu. Her main research interests include the semiotics of digital culture, the semiotics of cultural education, and cultural autocommunication and transmediality.
Sara Bédard-Goulet, Visiting Research Fellow in Environmental Humanities, University of Tartu
“Semiotics of Loss in Contemporary Fiction and Art”. The lecture will be delivered in English.
In light of today’s increasingly precarious societies and ecological systems, we are faced with large-scale loss – be it cultural, environmental, or existential. This lecture examines how contemporary literature and art capture human responses to this loss. Focusing on a spectrum of responses, from denial to mourning, it explores the processes by which individuals navigate the disappearance of significant objects. Through their aesthetic strategies, fiction and art not only represent the dynamics of loss but also engage audiences in experimenting what loss means and how it is mediated.
Sara Bédard-Goulet is a Visiting Research Fellow in Environmental Humanities at the University of Tartu. Her main research interests include environmental humanities and ecocriticism, contemporary Francophone literature, and creative research.
Mari-Liis Madisson, Research Fellow in Semiotics, University of Tartu
“Kultuurisemiootiline vaade vandenõuteooriatele” (“A Cultural Semiotic Perspective on Conspiracy Theories”). The lecture will be delivered in Estonian.
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic and other cascading crises of the past decade, the study of conspiracy theories has undergone a veritable explosion: new academic analyses, task force reports, and anxious social media posts appear on a daily basis. Conspiracy theories are often linked to polarization and to the erosion of trust in democratic participation, scientific authority, and institutions. As a result, debates have largely centered on efforts to restore order to informational disorder and to suppress conspiracy speculation. In my venia legendi, I will demonstrate why a cultural semiotic perspective is indispensable for addressing these issues—an approach that moves beyond solutionist perspectives to examine the spheres of meaning-making, communication, and cultural memory in which conspiracy theories are embedded. I will also briefly outline the key focal points and analytical possibilities that this approach opens up.
Mari-Liis Madisson is a Research Fellow in Semiotics at the University of Tartu. Her main research areas include cultural, political, and media semiotics; identity processes; online culture; and conspiracy theories.
Zoom meeting ID: 929 4915 6567, passcode: 068306.
Venia legendi (Latin for “permission to lecture”) is the traditional public lecture given by candidates applying for a professorship to demonstrate their teaching skills.
