Living in textu(r)alities, weaving inhabitable worlds

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.