Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 3, No.3/Vol. 4, No. 1, Winter 2018/2019 | Page 5

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
The essays included in the double issue spell out the potential of multimodalities to
speak to meaning-making. Yet, they also point toward a more affective dimension of
multimodal scholarship that precedes cognition and intellectual stimulation. This emotive
capacity of multimodality is what makes it so powerful; it is also what challenges its
own usefulness. In the conclusion to this essay, we attend to a few of its limitations.
The Necessity of Multimodality
Multimodal research and publishing can be challenging. More precisely, the challenge
lies in uprooting or at least rethinking established research and publishing
practices, which revolve around the hegemony of the written word and the
occularcentrism of knowledge production. The primacy of vision for a long time hindered
previous attempts at transcending the inherent visualism of academic practices,
especially in the realm of publishing. But privileging textual representations over other
forms of knowledge-making is not only ethnocentric; as anthropologist Elisabeth Hsu
writes: “An ocular-centric culture need not necessarily result in a more logo-centric one”
(2008:435). And this without even beginning to question the validity of the claim that
the “West” is indeed a visual culture.
One of the main objectives, therefore, is to embrace multimodality in ways that stem
from our research participants’ practices. This is not a call for uncritical cultural relativism;
rather, it seeks to underscore the pluralism and heterogeneity of the term as well as
the practices under its rubric. For example, in a recent article on the topic, anthropologists
Collins, Durington, and Gill (2017) call for attention to the processual and collaborative
nature of the research continuum, from pre-fieldwork encounters and complex
media interactions with respondents to the residual, unfinished nature of research and
the problematic hierarchies of scholarly publishing. In many ways, multimodality is not
particularly “innovative,” in the sense that it encompasses practices that are already taking
place, as any researcher knows, while it still seems to privilege the visual to the detriment
of other “modes,” such as sound, especially in “visual studies.” Multimodality as
an umbrella term can indeed help to foreground disparate research practices; however,
we believe that its main dynamic lies in its capacity to question the existing knowledge/
logos and authority of entrenched institutional publishing practices. Arts & International
Affairs as a forward-thinking journal and an outlet for the creative interpretation
and publication of high-quality research is at the forefront of the effort to break down
textual authority.
Apart from the content of multimodality and how to adopt a multimodal approach to
research and publishing, another question emerges: multimodality for whom? In other
words, how do our published outputs become more inclusive? More dialogic? How do
we establish a “subject–subject” relationship, not only with our research participants but
also our audiences? The current issue of Arts & International Affairs demonstrates what
multimodality can achieve in this respect.
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