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Choose the right methodological tools to answer your research question and know how to use them with this anthology of textual analysis approaches. 

Each chapter provides not only relevant theoretical background behind each methodology, but also its advantages and challenges, its potential applications, and its relationship to studying social phenomenon. Through step-by-step worked examples of real-world data, you get an in-depth window into each method in action and learn how to apply the same techniques successfully and confidently in your own research. 

Methods include:

• Content analysis
• Narrative analysis
• Critical discourse studies
• Multimodal discourse analysis 

This issue, the first of volume 4, marks the start of Multimodality & Society’s fourth year and provides a good moment to look across the past 3 years to review and reflect on the journal’s contribution to multimodality. Multimodality & Society aims to consolidate and advance multimodal theory, methodologies, and empirical understanding of interaction and communication. This editorial considers the collective contribution of the 12 issues published to date and points to how the journal can continue to push the boundaries of multimodality forward. We highlight the significance of the journal’s expansion of multimodal formats, and several directions embedded in the journal scope which we have advanced.

Departing from Lefebvre’s work on the social production of space, this paper explores the intersection between perceived and lived space from the perspective of spatial discourse analysis. Empirically, the paper studies how the spatiality of international airports performs affective discursive work and establishes prerequisites for air travelers’ feelings of being “in control” and “excited” vs. feelings of being “controlled” and “surveilled”. The concept of binding is applied in order to understand how affect is spatially afforded at Stockholm Arlanda Airport and Vienna International Airport. The analysis reveals that alternations between bound and unbound spaces construe the airports as distinctly ideological sites with different affective potentials. Accordingly, this article adds to the understanding of how airport atmospheres are construed by means of spatial resources such as the height, depth, and shape of walls and ceilings and by the transparency and opaqueness of the built material, as well as by more dynamic elements such as carpets, colors, signage, and retractable belt barriers.

The contemporary textual landscape of public authorities is flooded with ‘vision and values’ or ‘platform of values’ texts. Some of these texts contain multimodal offers of affects, such as ‘happiness’ or ‘courage’. This chapter presents an analysis of the functions of the ‘affect-driven civil servant’ in multimodal ‘vision and values’ texts of public authorities in Sweden, along with a discussion about the organizational and professional practices of which they are a part. Departing from social semiotics and multimodal critical discourse studies, the analysis draws on Wetherell’s notion of affect as discursive meaning-making and Bhatia’s critical genre analysis in order to discuss the affective aspects of multimodal texts as part of professional practice and culture. The primary data comprise ‘platform of values’ texts of public authorities in Sweden from 2016, which have been matched with secondary data in the form of a video recorded two-hour focus group discussion with seven senior civil servants/managers responsible for ‘value work’ at their respective public authority. The results show how affect as semiotic potential is used to create a new type of identity for the civil servant – as a means of ‘softly’ governing organizations through multimodal texts.

Endometriosis is a disease that affects women. This article focuses on endometriosis communication outside of, but in relation to, institutionally organized health care. The discursive use of affects and emotions in endometriosis communication in internet forums, social media and the press is analyzed: Which emotions are represented? Which affective communities are readers invited into, and how is this performed? Drawing on appraisal analysis and affective discourse analysis, the article shows how not only negative affects, but also those of happiness and gratitude are represented, and how narratives and specific visual formats function as affective affordances that invite readers to become part of ‘endo-communities’.

This chapter employs a social semiotic perspective to explore global/local discourses of upcycled artefacts. Social semiotics bring a focus on meaning-making to the emerging field of upcycling studies: in what ways does the social practice of upcycling produce meanings of, for instance, value adding, emancipation, or sustainability? In particular, this chapter focuses on the aesthetic and functional values that are added in upcycling that address the demands of different local and global markets. An interest in the relation between social practices, materiality and meaning-making is at the core of social semiotics, and this chapter focuses on how discourses in and around an upcycled artefact make it possible for it to move between cultural and geographical spaces, whilst both maintaining and transforming the meaning potential of the artefact.

The launch of Multimodality & Society by Sage is a recognition, if any were needed, that the field of multimodality has reached a new level of maturity. It serves to further establish multimodality as a significant and dynamic area of investigation in contemporary communication and interaction.

Multimodality & Society marks an important shift in the status of multimodality. In its early days, with its origins in the distinct but interconnected work of linguistic scholars, multimodality largely occupied a somewhat marginal position within linguistics. It was seen as a kind of ‘Linguistics-Plus’ approach, an optional analytical layer over existing linguistic paradigms. Over the past two decades or so, multimodal theory and methods have been honed and developed through the intensive work of scholars within distinct areas of linguistics and semiotics, that seek to understand communication, interaction and representation to be more than about language. With attention to the full range of modes – gesture, gaze, movement, posture, and so on, multimodality interrogates how the resources and processes of meaning-making shape and are shaped by people, institutions and societies. The power of multimodality lies in the concepts, methods and theoretical frameworks it provides for the collection and analysis of a wide variety of visual, aural, embodied, material, and spatial aspects of interaction and environments, and insight on the relationships between these. This has led to the emergence of different theoretical approaches to multimodality, each articulate and emphasize multimodal concerns differently through their concepts, methods, and empirical interests. Approaches, such as, for example, multimodal conversation analysis, multimodal corpus design, multimodal ethnography, multimodal (critical) discourse analysis, multimodal metaphor, and multimodal social semiotics, are taught and used within disciplines including linguistics, discourse studies, media and communication studies, as well as education studies. These collectively position multimodality at the forefront of understanding communication, interaction and representation.