Thanks, Vatnak! Vaccination passports will further restrict international travel and make it a luxury of the privileged … only yesterday, I was listening to a show on the New Books Network podcast, which explored the invention of the passport as a form of travel restriction by the state. Surprisingly, the passport system is less than a century old. The show is at https://newbooksnetwork.com/indian-migration-and-empire. It’s a conversation with Radhika Vivas Mongia about her new book Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State.

Thanks, Fathima! You are right – even something as seemingly mundane as grocery shopping now requires checking in with the QR code. I wonder how older people or people without a smartphone are coping … and I also feel uneasy about the increased (potential for) surveillance and control.

Thanks, Sofie! Could I please get the title of that 2012 article by Stevanovic and Peräkylä that you mentioned in your other comment? Always good to learn a bit more about important themes like ambiguity. ^_^

Thanks, Agi and Sofie! You both make very interesting points. Agi, I find your view of imperatives refreshing. Reflecting on my own use of imperatives as a language teacher, I think it has been motivated more consciously by the priority to deploy instructions in a way that would facilitate compliance, as in class policies and assessments. Your framing of it as a device for inclusivity, or if I may say accessibility, proposes a more compassionate view of something that in my view is intended for control more than care. But of course, care is also an important part of classroom discourse. (That you see this more plainly speaks to the kind of teacher that you are.) I think this ambiguity between the two stances–thanks, Sofie, for pointing this out–the orientation of interactions in the specific social context (more or less transactional or relational), and the habitus of the sign reader, among other factors, all contribute to the way the discourse is interpreted. I appreciate how you both engaged with my interpretation of these signs!

Hi Agi
Since I just expressed my preference for the sentence about directives in Pia’s work, I may say what I thought about this (Pia, please add your point or correct mine): the directives in this context as the post states entail both care and control? So emotive stance of care can be interpreted as one type of inclusivity, perhaps? And the line between stances of authority (also known as deontic stance) and emotive stance is ambiguous in most communications. There is a great article by Stevanovic and Peräkylä 2012 about ambiguous stances. (Actually I was told by a reviewer to read it and found it quite useful)

Thanks, Ingrid! There are actually more things happening in that sign than I had noticed. Demonstrating more multilingualism, inclusivity, and compassion makes it a very good sign, I believe.