Instagram research has expanded rapidly across sociolinguistics and social semiotics, yet few replicable models exist for conducting robust analyses of its data. In this vein, I propose a qualitative approach to Instagram research that foregrounds the role of platform affordances, infrastructural constraints and ethical decision-making in research design. Drawing on a case study of 404 geotagged Instagram posts, this methods paper applies theoretical perspectives from multimodality studies to four persistent methodological challenges of Instagram research: (1) the absence of best practices, (2) incoherence between research conventions and constraints imposed by the research site, (3) legal concerns and (4) ongoing ethical debates surrounding consent and data privacy. Adopting an iterative, grounded approach to data collection and analysis, I exemplify how platform-specific features can be strategically integrated into research design, rather than construed as ‘hurdles’, a framing now commonplace in academic circles. I then propose a methodology that exploits a wide range of Instagram’s affordances to measure their efficacy in addressing the various constraints that frame this work. In so doing, I argue for a more substantive approach to research design through which methodology would reflect the very attributes of Instagram data that motivate their study.
This editorial introduces textu(r)alities as a framework for understanding the ongoing texturing of social life through the interweaving of embodied actions, signs, senses, artefacts, built environments, and affects. While multimodality scholarship has demonstrated that meaning is distributed across multiple semiotic resources, less attention has been paid to how such resources acquire sensory and affective force, become inhabitable through embodied experience, and sediment into recognisable social worlds. Textu(r)alities centre these dimensions through two interconnected understandings of texture: the patterned organisation that gives semiotic formations coherence and the material, sensory, and affective qualities through which they are apprehended. As such, textu(r)alities are relational, processual, and political modes of world-making through which bodies, environments, and semiotic resources are continuously woven together. The contributions to this special issue examine how such processes of texturing organise attachment and estrangement, memory and anticipation, conviviality and exclusion, while simultaneously creating possibilities for disruption, resistance, and reconfiguration.
This article explores staircases as multimodal sites for semiotic and epistemic reflection on meaning-making. Building on the shared etymology of staircase and scale , and drawing on a scalar understanding of semiosis, I analyze three installations— A Stumbling Staircase , An Affective Staircase and A Staircase of Memories —to examine how built environments solicit embodied engagement and texture social experience. Rather than serving as neutral architectural structures, the staircases orchestrate distinct multimodal configurations of movement, vision, touch, affect and memory. The first produces instability and fragmentation, disrupting bodily orientation and the visual field. The second semiotizes relations among space, time and people through affective scaling. The third indexes chronotopic complexity and racialized TimeSpace, inviting embodied performances that resignify the staircase, its surroundings and those who traverse it, while fostering memory, resistance and alternative ways of inhabiting place. I argue that these multimodal semiotic-scaling practices emerge through textu(r)alities, i.e., the ongoing weaving of bodies, material environments and semiotic resources through which worlds become apprehensible, inhabitable and transformable. By foregrounding the texturing of embodied experience, the paper challenges modernist understandings of meaning-making that marginalize bodies, affect and materiality.
Academic environments heavily restrict movement and sensory exploration. However, researchers in multiple disciplines have challenged this instructional norm, showing the role of bodily action in developing concepts ( embodied learning in the learning sciences) and of sensory experiences in regulating affect ( sensory regulation and sensory seeking in occupational therapy/psychology). Drawing on embodiment theory, I problematize the intersection of these two perspectives to propose an integrative framework for inclusive pedagogical design that fosters bodily action as both sensory/affective and embodied/conceptual, centering the somatic senses: sensory-adaptive embodied design (SA-ED). I present findings from a task-based interview study with sensory-neurodiverse children exploring a proof-of-concept SA-ED: Balance Graphing. Balance Graphing invites bodily movement, specifically rocking on balance boards, as means of both exploration of math concepts through dynamic graphing activities, and of dynamic sensory regulation through flexible-intensity activation of the vestibular sensory modality. Findings suggest that SA-ED can (1) allow children to adapt stimulation to their sensory needs, (2) legitimize and amplify movement as a meaningful dimension of thinking and communication.
This article examines how narrative emotion and embodied experience take shape as textural atmospheres in olfactory multisensory story design. Drawing on two Norwegian digital picturebooks enhanced with four abstract scents, the analysis traces how smell organises the felt rhythm of reading – orientation, suspension, crisis and closure – through shifts in affective texture rather than explicit description. Guided by critical sensory multimodal literacy (CSML) as the primary interpretive framework, and informed by phenomenological perspectives on embodiment, the analysis reads each scent encounter as a moment of embodied attunement in which meaning emerges through sensing, not only through language. We situate olfaction within multimodal and socio-material relations, demonstrating how designed scent cues mediate attention, proximity, and belonging in shared reading experiences. The article contributes to discussions on corporeality and texture by framing smell as an atmosphere of narrative experience, an inclusive pathway where the somatic becomes semantic. Rather than treating odour as novelty, we argue that olfactory pacing and valence weave coherent textures of anticipation, tension, and repose that make stories lived as much as read.
