Short Abstract

This panel seeks multimodal contributions that address beyondness—practices and spaces beyond singular disciplines, expertise, and perspectives—to foster collaboration, embrace complexity, and dis-engage from a polarized world, and imagine otherwise.

Long Abstract

This panel invites contributions that engage with multimodal practices that go beyond categories, binaries, boxes, addressing “beyondness”. Beyond (op)positions, beyond being one or the other, beyond expert and non-expert, beyond different knowledge systems, beyond disciplines, beyond margin and periphery – the beyondness of a polarised world and how this translates to imagining otherwise.

How can multimodality as a practice and theoretical frame help us pay attention, listen deeply, and share knowledge about existing spaces, as well as enable the creation of new spaces, supporting people and ideas from seemingly opposite ends to come together? Spaces that acknowledge the undercurrent of biases, power relations, and thought-worlds that exist when different parties meet.

From its outset, multimodality aims to embrace heterogeneous meaning-making and is envisioned to be an umbrella for a variety of research modes, methods, and processes. Multimodal work is shaped as much by entangling moments as by disentangling ones. The research interest lies in analysing these very processes, their conditions of possibility, and their effects. Multimodality, understood as transdisciplinary spaces, are often collaborative and thus partially non-expert spaces, generating for everybody involved non-expert moments. How can an oscillating motion and moving beyond (op)positions – refusing to be either or, embracing the grey instead of the black and white – be useful for better understanding and navigating a world made up of countless bubbles and niches, with little or no exchange in between? We encourage contributions that feel comfortable in the uncomfortable space in-between and beyond.

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