Living a diasporic space online: semiotic landscape and landscaping of Chinese students in the UK under COVID pandemic

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. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Multilingual & Multicultural Development is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)