Toward Critical Multimodality

<p class=ql-align-justify>This edited volume seeks to answer the question What does it mean to be a critical multimodal scholar in educational spaces? <em>Toward Critical Multimodality</em> highlights how choices made throughout multimodal design and research processes are critically-oriented and inextricably linked to power. We show how social semiotics and multimodality inform engagement with criticality in educational spaces through questioning dominant narratives (e.g. white cisheteropatriarchal ableist classist perspectives) exploring relationships between selves and space problematizing and reimagining educational practices and dreaming of educational futures that are just anti-oppressive and with room for all to thrive while learning. </p><p class=ql-align-justify> </p><p class=ql-align-justify>These chapters demonstrate how studying multiple modalities in interaction (e.g. image writing color spatial layout gaze proxemics gestures) can reveal how power operates provide students with opportunities to explore themselves and their identities with respect to power and provide a vehicle for scholars to disrupt and transform oppressive educational practices. Furthermore multiple chapters show alternative ways to display construct and share knowledge as transformative pedagogical practice in learning environments. We reframe social semiotics and multimodality as an integral part of decentering dominant ideas of power and what counts as purposeful meaning making by highlighting how criticality and multimodality integrate theoretically and methodologically.</p><p> </p>