Floating Signifiers: Troubling Society’s Heroes and Deconstructing Its Dominant Narratives

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Worldviews and Narratives: The BioDoc SIG Roundtable II (Table 6)

Abstract

This paper represents a form of critical pedagogy that is based around the idea of “Floating Signifiers” as described by Carlson (2003). Floating signifiers are defined as “a sign open to diverse usages, available to be inscribed with multiple and even contradictory meanings, and thus a sign whose meaning is contested and open rather than fixed and determined” (p. 56). In society, the floating signifier can often be depicted as a “monumentalist hero”. In this conceptualization, the “monumentalist” hero is constructed as a mythologized view of people and events. In the language of critical theory, these dominant narratives around monumentalist heroes produce a false consciousness that acts to construct and reinforce socially necessary illusions.

Authors

• Robert Lewis Lake, Georgia Southern University

• E. Anthony Muhammad, Georgia Southern University