Organizing the panel:

While the majority of research in multimodality often departs from a semiotic
framework (Kress, 2009) exploring objects, people and signs in the world by
providing understandings of the semiotic resources, the tradition of multimodal
ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA) (Mondada, 2014) has mostly
resisted using a ‘full-blown’ semiotic framework. The argument is typically, that
semiotic theorizing reduces the empirical phenomena to semiotic terminology and
thus, rather than providing new knowledge, just theoretically re-describe the world in
structural or cognitive terms. On the contrary, EMCA has been criticized for at times
being empiricist and not engaging enough with theory. In this panel, we will discuss
the usage of and problems with different semiotic frameworks in a pursuit of bridging
and/or highlighting differences between a social semiotic and an EMCA approach to
multimodality, and also touch upon the semiotic tensions within each branch of
research traditions. Each presentation will not “just” be a theoretical discussion but
also be based on empirical examples to support the argument. The panel consist of
three presentations that is organized so that the first emphasize the overall differences between semiotics in EMCA and in Social Semiotics by taking an EMCA stand, the
second by taking a Social Semiotics stand and the last by providing an account for,
how EMCA could expand its notion of member to include other forms of agency.