Sociolinguistic scales and the texturing of three staircases: Bodies, memories and affect

This article explores staircases as multimodal sites for semiotic and epistemic reflection on meaning-making. Building on the shared etymology of staircase and scale , and drawing on a scalar understanding of semiosis, I analyse three installations— A Stumbling Staircase , A Staircase of Affects and A Staircase of Memories —to examine how built environments solicit embodied engagement and texture social experience. Rather than serving as neutral architectural structures, the staircases orchestrate distinct multimodal configurations of movement, vision, touch, affect and memory. The first produces instability and fragmentation, disrupting bodily orientation and the visual field. The second semiotizes relations among space, time and people through affective scaling. The third indexes chronotopic complexity and racialized TimeSpace, inviting embodied performances that resignify the staircase, its surroundings and those who traverse it, while fostering memory, resistance and alternative ways of inhabiting place. I argue that these multimodal semiotic-scaling practices emerge through textu(r)alities, i.e., the ongoing weaving of bodies, material environments and semiotic resources through which worlds become apprehensible, inhabitable and transformable. By foregrounding the texturing of embodied experience, the paper challenges modernist understandings of meaning-making that marginalize bodies, affect and materiality.