Autumn School in Semiotics was born as an initiative of a group of students in 1999 to discuss the position of semiotics and semioticians in Estonian society. In 2000 it took the form of an academic seminar, however, it is still organised mainly by students.

The aims of the Estonian Autumn School in Semiotics are:
- to promote the dialogue between different disciplines and cultural spheres and to find new topics in semiotics and culturology;
- to use and adapt different cultural theories for analysing Estonian culture and place it in the international context;
- to create a forum for students, academics and professionals of different fields.



Place and Locationis the series of conferences that focuses on the various aspects of human-environment relations. Over the years, it has gathered people from different disciplines - environmental aesthetics, human geography, semiotics, urban studies, art history etc. - to investigate the phenomena of landscape, space, and topos, of natural and built environment in the human experience. Last conference in the series, called Culture, Nature, Semiotics: Locations IV, focused on the changing relations between the environment and human experience and activities, the transformation of places and the practices of their signification over time, and the analysis of changing processes in the environment.

The first conference also gave birth to the English language publication series Place and Location that is published as a yearbook since 2004.