Book review: Sebastián Moreno Barreneche, The Social Semiotics of Populism BarrenecheSebastián Moreno, The Social Semiotics of Populism, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc: London, 2024; xii + 212 pp., GBP 28.99 (pbk), GBP 95 (hbk), GBP 26.09 (eBook)

Recent years have seen a growing scholarly interest in the meaning-making dimensions of populism, driven by its increasing prominence in contemporary politics (Brubaker, 2017;Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017).Much of this scholarship approaches populism from a discursive perspective, examining how language is used to construct political identities and divide society into opposing groups with conflicting interests and values.From a discourse-theoretical standpoint, Laclau (2005) conceptualizes populism as a discursive logic that constructs 'the people' in an antagonistic relation to 'the elite'.Similarly, Wodak (2015), working within Critical Discourse Studies, demonstrates how fear, exclusion, and political polarization are produced through specific linguistic and textual strategies.While these approaches have significantly advanced our understanding of populist meaningmaking, they remain predominantly language-centered.More recently, a small number of studies have begun to examine other semiotic channels, such as visual imagery and bodily gesture, in the communication of populist leaders (Divita, 2023;Hart, 2024).However, these analyses often treat non-verbal modes in isolation, rather than examining how they interact with language.As a result, the field still lacks a comprehensive social semiotic framework that explains how populists construct meaning across multiple modes including speech, gestures, clothing, and media performance.This monograph addresses this gap by offering a systematic study of how populist actors generate political meaning through the coordinated use of linguistic, visual, and embodied resources.The book is organized into eight chapters.Chapter 1 reviews the academic literature and theoretical frameworks on populism, outlines the structure of the book, and argues that clarifying the core characteristics of populism is essential for further research.The chapter highlights the concept's ambiguity, noting how scholars, journalists, and political commentators apply the term 'populist' to a wide range of political actors across the political spectrum.Because the term carries multiple meanings and strong rhetorical connotations, defining what counts as populism remains analytically challenging.To address this problem, the author proposes to re-examine populism through the lenses of 1456859D AS0010.