Multimodal Communication

The research group Multimodal Communication is interested in how different forms of communication create preconditions and limitations for meaning-making in relation to social, political and didactic phenomena and challenges. The group includes researchers from the subject areas of Swedish Language, History, English, Rhetoric and Media and Communication Science as well as Computer Science and Musicology. The research group  has a joint interest in how semiotic modalities such as photography, language, sound, architecture, movement, color, texture and gesture – and their multimodal combinations – are used in meaning-making processes from historical and contemporary perspectives.

The research group conducts theory and method development as well as empirical studies within the field of multimodality. The theory and method driven research partly deals with queries of how social phenomena such as affect, destruction and argumentation can be understood as multimodal practices. Theory and method development is conducted through interdisciplinary collaborations, for example, together with researchers in computer science and pedagogy. The applied studies are primarily conducted in the fields of critical discourse analysis, social semiotics, sociolinguistics, critical and visual rhetoric, new literacy studies and media history, and are mainly based on qualitative semiotic and rhetorical analyses, ethnographic observational studies and sociolinguistic experiments as well as AI-laboratory studies. Within the research group, "classic" multimodal texts, where writing, image and layout interact, are analyzed, but also artefacts such as clothing, interior design and architecture.

The research group also offers the course Multimodality: Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives, 7.5 credits, within the framework of the postgraduate subject Humanistic Studies.

John Bateman, Professor in English at Bremen University, is honorary member of the research group.

Schedule for Multimodal Communication

Publications from the research group about multimodal communication