The 15th World Congress of Semiotics aims to foreground semiotics as the socially engaged, critical investigation of the sign – and meaning-making processes forming the core of human worldmaking. Semiotic investigation is grounded in the historical lifeworld, in concrete timescapes and semioscapes, in the dense and dynamic weave of semiotic practices that structure human experience and communicative (inter)action by constantly (re)articulating the perceptual and the conceptual, the discursive, and the performative, the ethical and the aesthetic, the ideological and the figurative, the material and the immaterial, the human and the non-human, the natural and the man-made.