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This issue, the first of volume 4, marks the start of Multimodality & Society’s fourth year and provides a good moment to look across the past 3 years to review and reflect on the journal’s contribution to multimodality. Multimodality & Society aims to consolidate and advance multimodal theory, methodologies, and empirical understanding of interaction and communication. This editorial considers the collective contribution of the 12 issues published to date and points to how the journal can continue to push the boundaries of multimodality forward. We highlight the significance of the journal’s expansion of multimodal formats, and several directions embedded in the journal scope which we have advanced.

This issue, the first of volume 4, marks the start of Multimodality & Society’s fourth year and provides a good moment to look across the past 3 years to review and reflect on the journal’s contribution to multimodality. Multimodality & Society aims to consolidate and advance multimodal theory, methodologies, and empirical understanding of interaction and communication. This editorial considers the collective contribution of the 12 issues published to date and points to how the journal can continue to push the boundaries of multimodality forward. We highlight the significance of the journal’s expansion of multimodal formats, and several directions embedded in the journal scope which we have advanced.

This issue, the first of volume 4, marks the start of Multimodality & Society’s fourth year and provides a good moment to look across the past 3 years to review and reflect on the journal’s contribution to multimodality. Multimodality & Society aims to consolidate and advance multimodal theory, methodologies, and empirical understanding of interaction and communication. This editorial considers the collective contribution of the 12 issues published to date and points to how the journal can continue to push the boundaries of multimodality forward. We highlight the significance of the journal’s expansion of multimodal formats, and several directions embedded in the journal scope which we have advanced.

This issue, the first of volume 4, marks the start of Multimodality & Society’s fourth year and provides a good moment to look across the past 3 years to review and reflect on the journal’s contribution to multimodality. Multimodality & Society aims to consolidate and advance multimodal theory, methodologies, and empirical understanding of interaction and communication. This editorial considers the collective contribution of the 12 issues published to date and points to how the journal can continue to push the boundaries of multimodality forward. We highlight the significance of the journal’s expansion of multimodal formats, and several directions embedded in the journal scope which we have advanced.

The launch of Multimodality & Society by Sage is a recognition, if any were needed, that the field of multimodality has reached a new level of maturity. It serves to further establish multimodality as a significant and dynamic area of investigation in contemporary communication and interaction. Multimodality & Society marks an important shift in the status of multimodality. In its early days, with its origins in the distinct but interconnected work of linguistic scholars, multimodality largely occupied a somewhat marginal position within linguistics. It was seen as a kind of ‘Linguistics-Plus’ approach, an optional analytical layer over existing linguistic paradigms. Over the past two decades or so, multimodal theory and methods have been honed and developed through the intensive work of scholars within distinct areas of linguistics and semiotics, that seek to understand communication, interaction and representation to be more than about language. With attention to the full range of modes – gesture, gaze, movement, posture, and so on, multimodality interrogates how the resources and processes of meaning-making shape and are shaped by people, institutions and societies. The power of multimodality lies in the concepts, methods and theoretical frameworks it provides for the collection and analysis of a wide variety of visual, aural, embodied, material, and spatial aspects of interaction and environments, and insight on the relationships between these. This has led to the emergence of different theoretical approaches to multimodality, each articulate and emphasize multimodal concerns differently through their concepts, methods, and empirical interests. Approaches, such as, for example, multimodal conversation analysis, multimodal corpus design, multimodal ethnography, multimodal (critical) discourse analysis, multimodal metaphor, and multimodal social semiotics, are taught and used within disciplines including linguistics, discourse studies, media and communicat