Editorial

This special issue seeks to provoke, challenge, and inspire more multimodal scholars to engage with and interrogate touch. Collectively the contributions situate touch as part of a multimodal and multisensorial experience at the intersection of the body, technology and environment. The contributions offer different routes to critically explore the social, sensory and affective roles of touch in a changing communicational and interactional landscape. They draw on approaches from multimodality, ethnography, material engagement theory, Human Computer Interaction, speculative research, as well as artistic and design-based research. To situate the special issue, we give a brief overview of why touch matters and outline the extended view of touch that informs it. We comment on the challenges of researching touch and suggest the potential of multimodality as one way forward, and we point to the benefits of combining multimodality with other approaches.