Biosemiotica Lausannensia: The 17th Gatherings in Biosemiotics Lausanne, Switzerland June 6 - June 10, 2017
Biosemiotica Lausannensia: The 17th Gatherings in Biosemiotics Lausanne, Switzerland June 6 - June 10, 2017

Summary/Abstract: The idea to hold the 17th Gathering dedicated to Biosemiotics at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland was accepted by the biosemiotic community during the 16th Annual Biosemiotics Gathering in Prague in July 2016. I would like to acknowledge, first and foremost, that the organization of the 2017 conference became a great challenge for our Lausanne group. To begin with, until 2017 only I myself had participated in the annual Biosemiotics Gatherings and therefore had an idea about the general character of these conferences, both from the point of view of their academic content and their practical organization. Moreover, in 2016 there were still very few scholars in Lausanne who were aware of the very existence of biosemiotics as a discipline: this reality can be partly attributed to the fact that semiotics as such is not currently taught at the University of Lausanne as a distinct branch of knowledge. Amongst those of us who were aware of biosemiotics, there were no biologists: it was at the Faculty of Arts in the Department of Slavic and South Asian Studies (SLAS) that the 17th Gathering was to be organized. Finally, as far as I know, our little Slavic “half-department” (the “Slavic” making up only a part of the whole of the SLAS Department) had never organized any conferences of such scale - spanning over a full week and with several dozens of participants from so many countries and continents at once. It is no wonder, therefore, that even certain aspects of the practical organization of the event (including the creation of an event-specific website) raised questions from the onset.

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