For a while now, I have been entertaining the idea of bringing together like-minded people engaged in the study of multimodal argumentation. After conversations with my colleagues Janina WILDFEUER and Assimakis TSERONIS, we thought it’d be good to provide a forum for projects/papers in the making on multimodal argumentation. On the one hand, these will be empirical research articles Assimakis and I are putting together for a special issue in the Journal of Argumentation in Context (JAIC). On the other hand, I have invited researchers and groups of scholars who are currently working on multimodal argumentation.
The workshop is scheduled to take place on 20 and 21 of April 2023 at the UNIVERSITY OF SALZBURG. It will be hosted by the Department of English and American Studies (English and Applied Linguistics). Here is what it said about the aims of the venue in the invitation I sent out to selected parties:
The aim of the 2023 workshop will be to bring together scholars interested in multimodal argumentation who are engaged in work which develops approaches (both theoretical and analytical) to the study of semiotic mode combinations in the service of discursive argument construction.
My email to fellow researchers in the field, November 2022
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If anyone out there reading this post is interested in contributing, do send me an email. I am looking forward to getting in touch. The thematic scope of the workshop is as follows:
The focus of the workshop will be on the reconstruction and evaluation of multimodal argumentation in real-word contexts. It will look at the necessary multimodal underpinnings and modelling of arguments as well as promising ways to study instances and stretches of multimodal argumentative discourse empirically through systematic case studies and corpus-based work. A vital question posed in much of this work is about the role of rhetorical figures/operations in argumentation, and generally about possibly fruitful interconnections between the three areas of work: argumentation theory/analysis, rhetoric, and multimodality studies.
My email to fellow researchers in the field, November 2022
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Prof. Dr. Hartmut Stöckl 