A very Special Special Issue

I was relieved when the special issue on ‚Multimodal Argumentation‘ finally saw the light of day in the Journal of Argumentation in Context (JAIC 13/2) in the summer of 2024. This joint publishing effort with my esteemed colleague, Assimakis TSERONIS meant both enjoyment and stresses. I am very grateful for the editorial experience, which was shaped by an intuitive mutual understanding, similarly rigorous standards, and a smooth way of cooperating and sharing the work for the benefit of the project.

Thanks to my involvement with many interesting and clever people, I learnt a lot about argumentation theory in the last couple of years, which made me gauge better how multimodal aspects might effectively be carried into argumentation studies. It is my/our hope that the special issue will be a small step on the way towards establishing multimodal argumentation and rhetoric as a relevant and challenging cross-disciplinary field of study.

I still vividly remember the first round of discussions we had about multimodal rhetoric and argumentation, when I had been invited to present at the training school of the European Network of Argumentation and Public Policy Analysis (APPLY) at Örebro University in the spring of 2022. Since then interested scholars have met twice for the Multimodal Argumentation Workshop – in Salzburg and Groningen. All this lively engagement with many experienced and versatile argumentation scholars has jogged my imagination and enriched my ways of thinking about my own research. So, I guess the special issue is also a big THANK YOU to all the community of like-minded people.

I am indebted to Salzburg University and the Department of English and American Studies for their generous support of the open access publication of my own chapter in the special issue. We are generally very happy that almost all contributions are now available open access, thanks to agreements the participating universities have with Benjamins.