As a founder and leading figure in multimodality and social semiotics, Theo van Leuween has made significant contributions to a variety of research fields, including discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, communication and media studies, education, and design. In celebration of his illustrious research career, this volume brings together a group of leading and emerging scholars in these fields to review, explore and advance two central research agendas set out by van Leeuwen: the categorisation of the meaning potential of various semiotic resources and the examination of their uses in different forms of communication, and the critical analysis of the interaction between semiotic forms, norms and technology in discursive practices. Through 11 cutting-edge research papers and an experimental visual essay, the book investigates a broad range of semiotic resources including touch, sound, image, texture, and discursive practices such as community currency, fitness regime, film scoring, and commodity upcycling. The book showcases how social semiotics and multimodality can provide insights into the burning issues of the day, such as global neoliberalism, terrorism, consumerism, and immigration.
1. Social Semiotics: A theorist and a theory in retrospect and prospect
Emilia Djonov and Sumin Zhao
2. Changing academic common sense: a personal recollection of collaborative
work
Gunther Kress
3. "Strangers in Europe": A discourse-historical approach to the legitimation
of immigration control 2015/16
Ruth Wodak
4. The limits of Semiotics epistemology and the concept of race
Philip Bell
5. Can a sign reveal its meaning? On the question of interpretation and
epistemic contexts
Staffan Selander
6. Towards a multimodal social semiotic agenda for touch
Carey Jewitt
7. Reading that which should not be signified: community currency in the UK
Annabelle Mooney
8. A sound semiotic investigation of how subjective experiences are signified
in
Ex-Machina (2014)
Gilbert Gabriel
9. Unravelling the Myth of Multiple Endings and the narrative labyrinth in
Mr. Nobody (2010)
Chiao-I Tseng
10. New codifications, new practices: the multimodal communication of
CrossFit
Per Ledin and David Machin
11. The Semiotics of Value in upcycling
Arlene Archer and Anders Björkvall
12. Multimodal Recontextualizations of Images in Violent Extremist Discourse
Kay L. OHalloran, Sabine Tan, Peter Wignell, and Rebecca Lange
13. Revisiting the family silver: A visual essay on the grammar of visual
design
Morten Boeriis
Sumin Zhao is a Carlsberg Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Southern Denmark and the book review editor for Discourse and Communication. Her most recent publications apply a social semiotic approach to analyzing selfies and mobile applications. Her edited volume (with Djonov) Critical Multimodal Studies of Popular Discourse is now in paperback.
Emilia Djonov is a Lecturer in early childhood at Macquarie University, Australia. Her research inmultimodality, social semiotics,critical discourse analysis,and multiliteracies has been published in journals such asVisual Communication,Social Semiotics, andText & Talk. Shehas co-edited the volume Critical Multimodal Studies of Popular Discourse(Routledge, 2014, with Zhao).
AndersBjörkvall is Professor of Swedish at Örebro University, Sweden. His mainresearch interests include multimodality and ethnographies of artefacts andtexts. Recent publications: "Multimodal discourse analysis" inAnalyzingText and Discourse(2017) and "Places and spaces for multimodalwriting in one-to-one computing" inMultimodality in Writing(2015).
Morten Boeriis is an Associate Professor at University of Southern Denmark. His most recent publications are on multimodal visual theory and film analysis. His interview book (co-written with Andersen, Maagerų and Tųnnessen) Social Semiotics: Key Figures, New Direction is out on Routledge.
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