Chronotopic resolution, embodied subjectivity, and collective learning: A sociolinguistic theory of survival

In our contribution to this special issue on “Chronotopes & the COVID-19 Pandemic”, we discuss the complexities of human survival and its dependence on collective learning. We argue that collective learning – and thus survival – is a sociolinguistic phenomenon and lay out a fractal system in which the related sociolinguistic processes play out. This system highlights the chronotopic-scalar situatedness of survival and captures the material, textual, and imagined aspects of learning and meaning-making. Drawing on interactions among a small group of Iranian migrants dealing with the effects of COVID-19, we discuss the processes through which participants dynamically construct and update their chronotopic images of their new circumstances, as they interact with material and semiotic data coming from multiple scales/centers. We show how the normative-semiotic indeterminacies caused by COVID-19 are navigated by social actors as they make sense of their spatiotemporal surroundings in pursuit of material and ideological survival. © John Benjamins Publishing Company.