This collection brings together a range of perspectives on intercultural communication in multimodal interaction, bridging cognitive, social and functional approaches toward promoting cross-disciplinary dialogues and taking research at the intersections of these fields into new directions. The volume brings together conversationalist, socially-oriented, cognitive, and sensory approaches in considering culture as a dynamic construct, co-constituted and (re)negotiated between participants in interaction, and filtering it through a multimodal lens, drawing on a range of examples, such as educational settings or online video platforms. Each chapter offers a unique perspective on 'culture' and 'intercultural' while also situating their own definitions of these labels against those of the other chapters. Taken together, the chapters form a fluid conversation on the nature of intercultural encounters in today's globalized world, as digital environments intertwine with the physical mobility of people, encouraging researchers across these fields to adopt a more holistic multimodal perspective to approach intercultural interaction. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in intercultural communication, multimodality, sociolinguistics, cognitive and interactional linguistics, and semiotics.

This book is the beginning of a conversation across Social Semiotics, Translanguaging, Complexity Theory and Radical Sociolinguistics. In its explorations of meaning, multimodality, communication and emerging language practices, the book includes theoretical and empirical chapters that move toward an understanding of communication in its dynamic complexity, and its social semiotic and situated character. It relocates current debates in linguistics and in multimodality, as well as conceptions of centers/margins, by re-conceptualizing communicative practice through investigation of indigenous/oral communities, street art performances, migration contexts, recycling artefacts and signage repurposing. The book takes an innovative approach to both the form and content of its scholarly writing, and will be of interest to all those involved in interdisciplinary thinking, researching and writing.

This book is the beginning of a conversation across Social Semiotics, Translanguaging, Complexity Theory and Radical Sociolinguistics. In its explorations of meaning, multimodality, communication and emerging language practices, the book includes theoretical and empirical chapters that move toward an understanding of communication in its dynamic complexity, and its social semiotic and situated character. It relocates current debates in linguistics and in multimodality, as well as conceptions of centers/margins, by re-conceptualizing communicative practice through investigation of indigenous/oral communities, street art performances, migration contexts, recycling artefacts and signage repurposing. The book takes an innovative approach to both the form and content of its scholarly writing, and will be of interest to all those involved in interdisciplinary thinking, researching and writing.

The book offers a social semiotic take on contemporary communication, by providing a thorough description of video-interaction, a new form of communication started on YouTube thanks to the introduction of the 'Video Response' option. A multimodal analysis of over 2,000 videos responding to one another explores the affordances of the medium and the way these are used creatively in the interactants' practices. It highlights how, in contemporary sign-making practices, traditional patterns of coherence are often disregarded and successful communication is driven by new principles, as the result of representations produced through the selection, copy-and-paste and recontextualization of other texts. The book offers insights to those interested in communication, language and semiotics. At an empirical level, its original contribution consists in providing a description of a new form of communication. At a theoretical level, it highlights the inadequacies of traditional theories to the description of contemporary forms of communication and points to new analytical tools that seem more apt to the task.