Can multimodal analysis help us to understand superdiversity in place?

Dr Elisabetta Adami, University Academic Fellow in Multimodal Communication, University of Leeds

You are cordially invited to the next meeting of the Visual and Multimodal Research Forum. We are delighted to welcome Dr Elisabetta Adami, who will discuss a multimodal social semiotic approach to the analysis of a market place and the experience of diversity in a place.

In this seminar, Dr Adami will discuss how she is using a social semiotic approach to conduct a multimodal analysis of (super)diversity in Kirkgate Market – a large socially and ethnically diverse indoor market in Leeds city centre, currently undergoing rapid changes due to redevelopment plans in the area.

Elisabetta Adami is studying it as part of the project “Leeds Voices: Communicating Superdiversity in the Market” (funded by British Academy/Leverhulme Trust). She is looking at signs of diversity as expressed in the market place through font, writing, colour, display/layout, objects, and image. Drawing on the work of Scollon & Scollon (2003) in their book, Discourses in Place, Dr Adami is setting out to develop a multimodal mapping of the place in order to understand:

• how socio-cultural diversity shapes the experience of the place, and
• how diverse people’s activities shape the environment that they inhabit.