Gesture

Topics may include, but are by no means limited to: the relationship between gesture and speech; the role gesture may play in communication in all the circumstances of social interaction, including conversations, the work-place or instructional settings; gesture and cognition; the development of gesture in children; the place of gesture in first and second language acquisition; the processes by which spontaneously created gestures may become transformed into codified forms; the documentation and discussion of vocabularies of ‘quotable’ or ‘emblematic’ gestures; the relationship between gesture and sign; studies of gesture systems or sign languages such as those that have developed in factories, religious communities or in tribal societies; the role of gesture in ritual interactions of all kinds, such as greetings, religious, civic or legal rituals; gestures compared cross-culturally; gestures in primate social interaction; biological studies of gesture, including discussions of the place of gesture in language origins theory; gesture in multimodal human-machine interaction; historical studies of gesture; and studies in the history of gesture studies, including discussions of gesture in the theatre or as a part of rhetoric.

Gesture provides a platform where contributions to this topic may be found from such disciplines as linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, biology, communication studies, neurology, ethology, theatre studies, literature and the visual arts, cognitive psychology and computer engineering.

Gesture is accompanied by a book series, Gesture Studies. A lot of information on the field of gesture studies can be found on the website of the International Society for Gesture Studies.