ERIC Number: EJ1468621
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025
Pages: 11
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0143-4632
EISSN: EISSN-1747-7557
Available Date: 0000-00-00
Living a Diasporic Space Online: Semiotic Landscape and Landscaping of Chinese Students in the UK under COVID Pandemic
Fengzhi Zhao1,2
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, v46 n2 p262-272 2025
Recent linguistic landscape studies have increasingly underscored an online-offline agenda to understand the entanglement of people's digital and physical lifeworlds. In this light, this study concerns itself with the diasporic space lived online by Chinese overseas students residing in the UK during COVID, taking it as a nexus of their experienced semiotic landscape and practiced landscaping. Drawing on research diaries and interviews collected during a stretched time of fieldwork and observations, this research delineates shared semiotic landscapes shaped by homogeneous attention structure and health beliefs in the digital lifeworlds of Chinese overseas students during the pandemic. The shared semiotic landscapes reterritorialize the idea of local space in digital infrastructures, and constitute an online community space where cultural identities are articulated and practiced. By advocating the analytical strength of linguistic landscape in digital settings, this study articulates and makes sense of the social-semiotic dynamics of a discrete diasporic group specifically conditioned by COVID on a broader spatial level.
Descriptors: Computer Mediated Communication, Asians, Foreign Countries, COVID-19, Pandemics, Study Abroad, Student Attitudes, Geographic Location, College Students
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: United Kingdom; China
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: 1Department of Applied Linguistics. Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. Suzhou, People's Republic of China; 2Department of Languages, Cultures and Applied Linguistics. Birkbeck, University of London. London, UK