SEING II 2020: Isabel Corona delivers a plenary talk on the framework of multimodality: ‘Attending to the Meaningful Whole’
Our InterGedi colleague Isabel Corona participated last Friday, 25th September 2020, as a keynote speaker at the second edition of the Predoctoral Seminar on English Studies (SEING II) of the University of Zaragoza, which this year was organised online under the motto "Research in English Studies Across Genres, Media and Modes".
In her plenary talk, entitled "Attending to the Meaningful ‘Whole’: Research for a Multimodal Perspective", Isabel discussed the functionality and relevance of the theoretical framework of 'multimodality' to understand both traditional and novel generic and discursive practices. Particular emphasis was made on how using this analytical tool can be helpful and effective in various disciplines within and beyond linguistics, what was interesting for the predoctoral candidates attending the event and developing their doctoral projects in fields as diverse as Applied Linguistics, Film Studies, Translation and Literature.
Isabel's encompassing communication included insights into Kress and van Leeuwen's metafunctional framework in order to understand compositional, interpersonal and representational meanings of multimodal elements and ensembles. Based on their work, she also provided extensive examples from her recent research so as to illustrate how she has applied multimodality in her own analyses, especially focusing on meaning-making devices in journalistic and the exploration of 'newsworthiness' in research project websites.
Meaningful scholarly work in multimodality was outlined, by referring to seminal books and volumes written and edited by authors such as Susan Herring, Carey Jewitt, John Bateman and Sigrid Norris, to name some of them, and in order to highlight how multimodal theories and analyses have been evolving in the last years. Moreover, a number of representative, high-quality journals were also presented to seminar participants, so that they were familiar with fora where to find information and potentially publish. To close Isabel's contribution, implications on the use of multimodal resources in off- and online genres were presented and later discussed in the Q&A after the plenary session.
If you want to find out more information about the event and have access to the abstract of Isabel Corona's talk, click here.