Linguistics and Education 61 (2021) 100902 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Linguistics and Education journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/linged The Geosemiotics of a Thai University: The narratives embedded in schoolscapes Andrew Jocuns a,b a Assumption University of Thailand, Bangkok, Thailand b Assumption University, Huamak campus, Graduate School of Human Sciences, ELT Program, Building D, 592/3 soi Ramkhamhaeng 24, Ramkhamhaeng road, Huamak, Bangkapi, Bangkok, 10240, Thailand a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 10 July 2020 Revised 6 January 2021 Accepted 7 January 2021 Keywords: Schoolscapes Thailand, socialization in higher education Geosemiotics Narrations of place Multimodal interaction analysis Collective historical body a b s t r a c t The present study reports on the geosemiotics (Scollon & Scollon, 2003) of a Thai University. Walking interview tours (Lou, 2017; Stroud & Jegels, 2014a) of Thammasat University’s Tha Prachan campus were conducted. These interviews reveal how students narrate and take stances towards the geosemiotic arti- facts that are found on their campus. The purpose of the study was twofold: 1) to gain an understanding of how students react to the geosemiotics on campus, and 2) to get a sense of their understanding of Thai history. For the latter the university has been the site of several historical events pertaining to Thailand’s spotty relationship with democracy, most notably the Thammasat massacre, and much of this history has been repressed (Huebner, 2017; Winichakul, 2002, 2020). Using the geosemiotic framework to discuss the multimodal make-up of this university’s signs and space, I illustrate how the narrations that emerged during walking interviews serve as lenses through which we are offered a glimpse of how students are socialized to think about the material environment of their campus. We can observe how students take different stances to the signs and places of their campus as well as Thailand’s history. Such narrations reveal traces of socialization on the one hand and the emergence of an affective regime of reverence on the other (Wee & Goh, 2019). The findings contribute to the growing body of literature on schoolscapes in multilingual educational settings (Gorter, 2018; Gorter & Cenoz, 2015). What emerges from these narra- tions are traces of a collective historical body regarding Thailand’s history and struggles with democracy. © 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction This article reports on an analysis of students’ stances towards the geosemiotics embedded within the schoolscape of a Thai Uni- versity. Thirty walking interviews were conducted with undergrad- uate students at two campuses of Thammasat University, fifteen at each campus. The goal of these interviews was to understand how students perceived and reacted to geosemiotic artifacts in the schoolscape of this university. The focus of this article is on the fif- teen interviews conducted at Thammasat University’s Tha Prachan campus which has been the site of several historical events related to Thailand’s history with democracy. These interviews highlight that students take up different and sometimes conflicting mean- ings and stances (epistemic and affective) with regards to geosemi- otic artifacts. Specifically, students’ narrations reveal how students at this university are socialized into the meanings of objects in the material world. The contribution made here indicates that narra- E-mail address: ajocuns@au.edu tions of geosemiotic artifacts serve as lenses that enable an under- standing of the shared and individual historical bodies of students which serve as evidence that socialization has taken place. Stu- dents are socialized to take up stances not only towards ideological positions of the institution but also towards objects that make up the schoolscape, and in so doing these stances are a part of a col- lective historical body that serves to un-silence (Winichakul, 2002, 2020) an otherwise silent past with regards to political violence in Thailand. Thammasat University was established as an open national uni- versity by Pridi Bonomyong in 1934 as the University of Moral and Political Sciences. Following a coup in 1947 the university changed its name to Thammasat (Baker & Phongpaichit, 2014). Thammasat University’s Tha Prachan campus rests in the heart of Bangkok, in walking to distance to the Grand Palace alongside the Chao Praya river (River of Kings) resting between Tha Prachan (The Moon Pier) and Tha Praathit (The Sun Pier). The Tha Prachan campus has been the epicenter for several violent democratic uprisings in Thailand (October 1973, October 1976, and May 1992). The Thammasat Mas- sacre, sometimes referred to as the October 6 th event, was the vi- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2021.100902 0898-5898/© 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.