Rule by law versus rule of law: A multimodal analysis of persuasion and legal ideologies in anti-corruption discourse in China

The authors conduct a multimodal analysis of the anti-corruption discourse in China by employing the SFL genre theory and the SF-MDA approach. Anti-corruption discourse that popularizes the anti-corruption mechanism and educates the officials constitutes an important part of China’s anti-corruption campaign. This paper first presents a genre analysis of a corpus of 51 anti-corruption videos on the official public legal education website to examine how these videos are designed in their overall organization to achieve the persuasion purpose—alert officials to stay away from corruption. It is found that most anti-corruption videos are expositions that are embedded with different story genres and emphasize the negative consequence of corruption on one’s family. Using Multimodal Analysis Video software, the authors then analyze the different reader stances enacted through a range of multimodal resources in three representative anti-corruption videos. Based on the detailed multimodal analysis, the authors finally explain how the use of linguistic and visual resources in the videos realizes the underlying ideologies of rule by law and rule of law and future implications of this study.

Resemiotized experience in classroom interaction: A student teacher’s interactional use of personal stories during teaching placement

One of the most important points of contact that student teachers have with the teaching profession occurs during placement, as placement provides a prime opportunity for them to interact with pupils and to further develop their teaching. In this article, a mediated discourse analytical perspective is employed as a lens to study a student teacher during his final teaching placement, with the aim of exploring how resemiotizations of previous experiences in the shape of oral stories can be interactionally used in the classroom. The data consist of three video recorded oral presentations, two video recorded sessions in a classroom, interview data, and observational field notes. Due to its potential to link past multimodal semiosis to present-time actions, nexus analysis is employed as the method for analysis. By unpacking a student teacher’s use of oral stories in the classroom, the study demonstrates how stories are adaptable resources that can be used to mark proximity to pupils, and thus serve as a means to manage the interaction order in the classroom. This is an activity with relevance for the teaching profession and, by extension, student teachers' development of professional identity.

Reading runes with the sun. A geosemiotic analysis of the Rök runestone

In the field of runestone research, the importance of multimodal understanding has been downplayed although it is obvious that several semiotic resources interact when it comes to carving a stone and erecting it in the landscape. This study examines if it is possible to deal with the methodological challenges of a historical material and make a multimodal approach deepen our understanding of the Rök runestone, one of the most famous and enigmatic Viking Age runestones. The study applies Scollon and Scollon’s geosemiotic framework (2003). Through an investigation of how the visual semiotics interacts with place semiotics and interaction order, it turns out that the marked reading direction of the lines of the inscription symbolizes the movement of the sun, and that the change of font size in two lines probably mimics the change of solar brightness at sunrise and sunset. Further, it is suggested that the big crosses of cipher runes and the small crosses between some information units may represent the sun and stars, respectively. The conclusion is that the monument was risen for the enactment of a counsel of the gods with the aim of securing the rhythm of celestial light. Finally, implications for multimodal research are discussed.

Huni kuin: Yube Baitana - An anthropological game adventure

The article presents the development process of the video game Huni Kuin: Yube Baitana (The ways of the boa constrictor) created by a group of Brazilian anthropologists with a Huni Kuin indigenous community from Acre, Brazil. Understood from a perspective in which video games must be taken seriously, a reflection is made on how the game Huni Kuin: Yube Baitana is inserted in the discussions and productions arising from multimodal anthropology.

ArtClimateRoad and RevelationsWood textures and experiential metaphors

This Multimodal Sensations article explores embodied experiential metaphors. It focuses on the salient modalities of interaction with wood texture. As both an artist and researcher, I have been particularly concerned with how social semiotic theory can be applied to my work, and specifically, how concepts from multimodal analysis can be transformed into the process of multimodal artistic creation. This article reflects on an example linking a historic anniversary, the texture of ancient wood and interaction of a local participant audience. The analysis applies a combination of concepts gleaned from the theories of Theo van Leeuwen (2016), Juhani Pallasma (2012) and Kjetil Røed (2019) to participant reflections from an art project called ArtClimateRoad.

Exploring embodied memories of terror through a multimodal research-creation practice

Pivoting on the body/life of the ethnographer as a point of impact, this article will offer a multimodal account of the ripple effects of state sponsored terror as lived in Argentina (1976–1983) and re-sensed in Canada throughout the Maple Spring and its aftermath (2012). Threading a series of theoretical and ethnographic vignettes, a conceptual weaving emerges that travels back and forth in time, working against the perceptual attack on the population produced by the military regime.

Making sense: Reflections on an event-based memoir in an existential mode

I began this contemplation of skull and mind after a concussion in 2017 meant that I had to stop reading and engaging in the variety of daily, cognitive activities that comprise academic work. Making Sense documents the subjective sensorium of this injury through a multimedia memoir and autoethnographic analysis that is attuned to ‘existential modalities’. I contemplate an emerging, perceptual repertoire alongside other knowledge practices that recognize the more surreal dimensions of a life-interrupted. Materiality and colour and painting (and text) are considered as evocative modes for apprehending embodied experience and textures of memory and imagination. As an experiment with methodologies of perception, Making Sense includes an abridged, event-based memoir (in stone, text and paintings). An animated pptx version is linked.

Tangled, tangy, microbial threads: Textural methods for rendering past, present, and future sensory memories

How to render sensory memory? In this article, I speculate on the possibilities of textural methods which attend closely to textile forms, specifically embroidery, as a way to explore this enduring question in multimodal research. To open up concerns about bodily relations between humans, as well as the more-than-human bodies we share worlds with, this article focuses on sensory memory fragments of encounters with the microbial conglomerations of sourdough bread starter. I offer three bubbling, sour-sweet texts: 1) an archived auto-ethnographic account of learning how to make a sourdough starter; 2) a social-media inspired piece on the sticky home archives of quarantine; and 3) a future speculative citizen science project. These fragments co-exist with microbes I have embroidered on ancient linens. From the tangy strings of sourdough histories, and the tangled threads in cloth I draw concrete methodological suggestions for new directions in textural research projects, such as material fieldnotes and crafted data. In doing so, I join other authors in this special issue in the call for multimodal forms of ethnographic storytelling about sensory memory, in this case one that attends not only to messy entanglements with bodies but also their textural, material, layered histories extending into the depth of their surfaces.