Abstract
The growing conduction of multimodality studies over the last decade has aimed to respond to and inquire about communication beyond words in an ever-changing and globalised society. Rooting from this idea, the book Multimodality Studies in International Contexts: Contemporary Trends and Challenges (2024) places its focus on two major variables in contemporary multimodality research. On the one hand, it aims to examine the variety of theoretical and methodological frameworks existing in international studies on multimodality. On the other hand, it seeks to showcase the diversity of contexts across cultures, languages, and countries, and the challenges these factors entail in multimodality research. This book is included in a book series edited by Kay O’Halloran, Routledge Studies in Multimodality, which endeavours to enhance comprehension of multimodal resources encompassing sound, gestures, spatial elements, language, 3-D artifacts, visual imagery, architecture, music, and actions. Furthermore, it aims to elucidate how these resources harmonise to engender significance within multimodal entities and occurrences. This volume is organised into four parts, each examining an aspect of current trends in international approaches to multimodality. The first part consists of a historical review of multimodality from a critical perspective in South and Central America and South Africa. After presenting this chronicled inspection, the second part discusses the queries that arise through the examination of the multimodal dimension in education in Uruguay, Canada, Spain, and New Zealand. Another context in which multimodality is considered is that of the third part, which features the role of this field of study in social interaction and meaning-creation in the Netherlands, Brazil, Canada, and Chile. Lastly, the fourth part is dedicated to offering a brief review of the aspects commented on in the aforementioned sections through a focus on a Swedish context.
The chapters of this book are written by different scholars around the world specialising in multimodality studies. A total of 13 chapters can be found in the volume, and 30 researchers are featured as authors of the different chapters that constitute the volume and that are organised in thematic sections. Regarding the editors of this book, three well-acknowledged figures in the field of multimodality research can be found. The first editor is Liliana Vásquez Rocca from Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile, whose research interests encompass Media Discourse Analysis from a multimodal perspective. Secondly, editor Natasha Artemeva is from Carleton University in Canada and has investigated learning theories, multimodality, and Genre Studies. Finally, editor Chloë Grace Fogarty-Bourget researches Multimodal Discourse Analysis, Genre Studies, university training, and Writing.
The last decade has been referred to as “the new media age”, which is characterised by the growing influence of digitalisation processes on the communicative landscape (Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2019; Lim, 2018). As a consequence, communicative genres have been redefined, featuring a greater expressive potential which is attained through complex multimodal interplays (Girón-García and Bernad-Mechó, 2024). The construction of meaning through the combination of semiotic modes has, therefore, received significant attention. In this line, three main approaches to studying multimodality have been developed, namely, multimodal discourse analysis (O’Halloran, 2004), multimodal social semiotics (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996), and multimodal interaction analysis (Norris, 2004). Following the variables in contemporary multimodality research addressed by the present volume, the increasing interest in exploring the communicative particularities across cultures through a multimodal lens is evident. In that sense, Kress (2011) examined whether multimodality and ethnography are compatible. Similarly, Adami and Ramos-Pinto (2019) focused on the reconceptualisation of cultural boundaries regarding semiotic knowledge, within the scope of Social Semiotic Multimodal theory. Additionally, Kohn and Weissbrod (2023) addressed the fields of translation, multimodality, and cultural studies, and focused on how subjects familiarise themselves with new signs across cultures.
The first part of this volume furnishes an expository analysis concerning the evolutions of multimodality investigations contemplating the impediments presented by the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin American and South African contexts while positing the diversity of efficacious methodologies for conducting multimodal research. The author of the first chapter, Arlene Archer, offers a theoretical revision of the approaches adopted in South Africa to study multimodality. She emphasises that the historical privation from the schooling of these marginalised collectives has fostered an interest in inquiring about the multimodal dimension inherent in South African instructive contexts. Following that, multimodality research in Latin America is introduced in the chapter by Dominique Manghi, Carolina Badillo, and Danielle Almeida, which reflects upon the idea that decolonising power in Latin America allows for the promotion of critical multimodality studies about the rethought way of communicating demanded by social changes, especially in academic and professional networks. The discussion about the consolidation of multimodality studies in Latin America and the Caribbean is reinforced through the contribution of Carolina Pérez-Arredondo and Camila Cárdenas-Neira in the third chapter of this section. These two authors highlight the undoubted influence of the Global North in the investigations undertaken in Latin American and Caribbean research. In addition, they suggest that the promotion of academic work elaborated by multimodality researchers in these arenas should be encouraged, for example, through the dissemination network Red Latinoamericana de Estudios sobre Multimodalidad (REDLEM). In the last chapter in the first part of this book, authors Anna Pedrazzini, Clarice Gualberto, Styliani Zaratza, Maryam Ghiasian, and Elisabetta Adami cover some of the challenges encountered by multimodality researchers during the COVID-19 pandemic. They present the initial steps taken by PanMeMic, a collective research enterprise aimed at stimulating academic dialogue beyond semiotic analysis and showcasing multifaceted remarks on the observations collated about shifts in communication and interactions consequent to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The second section of this volume underscores multimodality studies across Uruguay, Canada, Spain, and New Zealand that scrutinise educational discourses employing a variety of methodological approaches. Author Edgar Bernad-Mechó opens the part of the book dedicated to pedagogical contexts by reflecting on his chapter on the examination of academic lectures through a threefold multimodal perspective: Multimodal Social Semiotics (MSS), Multimodal Discourse Analyisis (MDA), and Multimodal Interaction Analysis (MIA). Each of the multimodal analysis methodologies considered in this study offers distinct yet complementary insights into the multimodal nature of academic lectures, such as the lecturer’s meaning-making process through mode combinations resulting in engaging the audience or the lecturer’s conversational style being multimodally relevant for the effective convention of academic content. Also related to MIA and the creation of engagement through the modal intensity of professors delivering lectures, in the second chapter of this section of the volume authors Chloë Grace Fogarty-Bourget, Jesse Pirini, and Natasha Artemeva address educators using varied engagement strategies to transmit information to the students. These engagement strategies are generated through complex multimodal ensembles, from which modes such as gestures, gaze, kinesics, and intonation can be showcased as being salient. Part II also addresses Inmaculada Fortanet-Gómez and Miguel Ruiz-Garrido’s study of higher education ICLHE settings from a multimodal perspective. These authors examine teachers’ construction of multimodal ensembles and the influence that the distinct modal configurations may exert on their teaching practice. To do so, the role of higher-level, lower-level, and frozen actions within modal interplays is unveiled, as well as teachers’ foregrounding strategies to highlight specific actions. Additionally, the employment of non-verbal elements to underpin verbal discourse is also discussed. Following that, Germán Canale conducts an ethnographically aligned examination of textbooks’ discourse and introduces how the interrelation of multimodality and ethnography contributes to the production of contextualised textbook analyses. By doing so, he stresses that social reality is only included in textbooks as a basis for linguistic practice, which is homogeneously portrayed from a multimodal point of view and represented under the primary discourses in its corresponding culture.
The third section of the present volume addresses how meaning is multimodally constructed in interaction in diverse social settings, to reflect the challenges faced by researchers during the exploration of human interaction’s complex multimodal nature. In that sense, in the first chapter, Danielle Almeida and Jonathan Feitosa Ferreira examine toy design through a multimodal lens. These authors determine that the design and commercialisation of contemporary toys are highly influenced by the multimodal messages conveyed by mass media, leading to the promotion of prearranged playing dynamics. They also state that such a phenomenon is attributable to the prioritisation of toys’ sales rather than children’s free-playing dynamics. In the second chapter within the present section, authors Liliana Vásquez Rocca, Dominique Manghi, Felipe Pereira, Tomás Farías, and Katherine Malhue explore how two distinct Chilean social groups responded employing social media to the country’s Educational Inclusion Law, introduced in 2016. In particular, these authors adopt a qualitative socio-semiotic approach and emphasise two ways through which demonstrations can be resemioticised in social media through specific semiotic chains. Moreover, several comments are made on the effect that social networks’ multimodal functionalities have on the demonstrations’ depiction. Following that, authors Jarret Greenen and Austin Howard address how interactional alignment is influenced by distinct topical levels. They employ a MIA approach to examine a casual conversation between three individuals, which unveiled three main difficulties during the definition of conversational topics: topic multiplicity, topic layering, and individual differences such as motivations and aims that shape topical progression. Finally, Brad Mehlenbacher and Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher explore peer reviewing and peer review genres from a multimodal perspective. Through such a procedure, they determine how modalities are flattened within the primarily unimodal peer review report genre.
The studies compiled in the volume advocate for the weightiness of considering the theoretical and methodological background of previous multimodal investigations and the influence that sociocultural aspects place on them. Historial constraints or the COVID-19 pandemic account for just a few examples of how demographic and social changes can inspire international multifaceted initiatives for multimodality research collaboration. For multimodality researchers seeking to gain a further understanding of the variances and challenges that arise in instructional environments in contemporary studies, the authors of this volume also provide noteworthy results in their investigations conducted in substantially different settings. Methodological approaches for multimodality research in the classroom are also inspected, highlighting MDA, MIA, multimodal ensembles and ethnography considerations. Interaction is also explored in multimodality studies, encouraging researchers to inquire about meaning-making processes in fields such as trade, social networks, topical levels, and peer reviewing. In that sense, the meaning-making process is explored during interaction instances in distinct social settings, to unveil the challenges that multimodality researchers face while analysing complex human interactions.
This book seeks to showcase that current multimodal trends are constantly emerging, evolving, and interrelating. As depicted in the fourth part of this volume by author Christine Räisänen, interdisciplinarity and context-shifting in multimodality research aid in deepening the perspectives to be adopted by future scholars. She specifically enhanced the role of body work in multimodality as a meaning-making device that operates in individuals’ everyday interactions to communicate beyond language. Through the chapters included in this volume, the authors address the evolution of multimodality studies in a wide variety of contexts. In addition, special emphasis is placed on the idea that there are numerous effective approaches to research multimodality. The future of multimodal studies is also examined, and several comments are made on the need for new approaches, methodologies, and technological innovations. The broad scope of this book aims to encompass the need for the field of study of multimodality to expand toward new horizons beyond disciplines and sociocultural contexts. It is our view that the present volume showcases the primary variables in contemporary multimodality research, while it also offers extensive insight into the challenges that may be faced in forthcoming approaches to the field of multimodal studies.