This group brings together researchers whose interests encompass multimodality, language and communication in organisations. The group adheres to a broad understanding of organisations (including companies, health organisations, educational institutions and interest groups) as well as a broad understanding of communication (realised as and through language, visuals, technology, architecture, and other meaning-making resources).
Members of the group investigate meaning-making within fields such as health communication, sustainability communication, market communication, management communication and the role of technologies in organisational communication.
The group embraces a high degree of theoretical and methodological diversity, with approaches ranging from the predominantly theoretical to the predominantly empirical.
Members
Nina Nørgaard is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Department of Culture and Language, SDU, specialising in multimodal communication. She has a PhD in English stylistics (2002) and a dr.phil. in multimodal stylistics (2020). Her research interests include multimodality, multimodal critical discourse analysis, stylistics, health communication, sustainability communication and the semiotics of typography and architecture.
As a member of Multimodality, Language and Organisation, her research revolves around organisational sustainability communication and sexual health communication from a multimodal perspective. Her recent work in those fields includes multimodal studies of environmental sustainability and social (in)justice in a sports fashion campaign (Nørgaard 2022), the green rebranding of a Danish energy company (Nørgaard 2023), the semiotics of corporate testimonial videos (Dalby Kristiansen and Nørgaard 2023) and Danish health organisations’ contraception information for young adults (Nørgaard and Jepsen 2023).
Nina is the Principal Investigator (PI) of the research project Ignorance and Inequality in Sexual Health – Addressed from a Multimodal Communicative Perspective (2023-2027), funded by the VELUX Foundation. This project addresses ignorance and inequality in sexual health in Denmark through a communication perspective. The project members examine information materials, websites and social media to understand how organisations, health communication professionals and ordinary Danes communicate about sex, gender, diversity, contraception, STIs, consent and menopause, thereby aiming to create a basis for clear communication that can promote knowledge and break down taboos and barriers to equality in sexual health in Denmark.
Together with Theo van Leeuwen, Nina heads the International Sexual Health Promotion Network which researches the use of visual communication in sexual and reproductive health promotion globally. This collaboration has resulted in a special issue of the academic journal Visual Communication on Visuals in Sexual Health Promotion (Nørgaard, Jepsen and van Leeuwen 2023).
Nina teaches a broad range of disciplines in English language and communication, including courses on multimodality and sustainability communication.
Alberte Borggreen is an industrial PhD student researching diversity and inclusion in the construction industry in collaboration with the company Enemærke og Petersen A/S.
Alberte’s primary research interest has always been the inclusion of different minority groups in the Danish job market.
She has developed a model for recruiting and hiring neurodivergent people as well as an intersectional model for recruiting and hiring people belonging to one or more minority groups. Her PhD project builds upon this work by investigating how construction companies can recruit, hire and retain employees from diverse minority backgrounds.
Her primary interest in this field is how intersectionality and the double empathy problem can intersect and hinder mutual understanding between people – and what consequences this may have. She is particularly interested in how people with different backgrounds and lived experiences create meaning, and how this can contribute to a more inclusive workforce.
Alberte is also a member of the research network TRILO and is the co-chair of TRILO Diversity and Inclusion, where she engages in and facilitates discussions about inclusion, communication and business practices.
See Alberte’s research and other research activities
Cindie Aaen Maagaard is Associate Professor in Language and Communication at the Department of Culture and Language, SDU. Her research interests span a broad range of multimodal and narrative studies with a constant focus on how multimodal and narrative approaches to the analysis of communication can be mutually enhancing and challenging.
As a member of Multimodality, Language and Organization, her research centers on the uses of narratives within organizational and institutional contexts, with an evolving speciality in communication in clinical and organizational settings. She explores health communication in collaborations with the Health Sciences at SDU and Odense University Hospital in several areas, with a focus on the field of Narrative Medicine.
Cindie is a senior researcher in the research project Ignorance and Inequality in Sexual Health – Addressed from a Multimodal Communicative Perspective (2023-2027), funded by the VELUX Foundation. Her research aims to contribute to understanding representations of diversity in healthcare and health communication in Denmark, as well as to developing theoretical and empirical knowledge about how narrative authority in contexts of health communication is constituted and negotiated across media.
Overall, Cindie’s theoretical and analytical background, developed through her Ph.D. work on literary narrative and her experience with qualitative methods, provides a foundation for the study of narratives as they are used in practice — in the construction of identity, for patients’ sense-making of illness, for communication between health professionals and patients, and for understanding organizational changes.
Cindie is a member of the International Society of the Study of Narrative, the Nordic Network for Narratives in Medicine, and here at SDU, part of the transdisciplinary Human Health research project as well as MLO. Her teaching spans a number of disciplines, including courses in communication, narratives and writing at the BA, MA, and Ph.D. levels across a wide spectrum of degree programs such as the BSc in Medicine and the MSc in Health Professions, International Business Communication, English Studies and Cand. Negot.
Cindie is the editor of publications on narrative medicine and fictionality and has published in numerous international journals. Selected publications include articles in Narrative Inquiry, Discourse,Context and Media,MultimodalCommunication,and the International Journal of Nursing Studies.
Daniel Wolfgruber is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Culture and Language and a Fellow of the Danish Institute for Advanced Study (DIAS) at the University of Southern Denmark. He earned his PhD in Communication Studies from the University of Vienna. During his doctoral studies, he was awarded the Marietta-Blau Grant to conduct a year of research at the Université de Montréal under the supervision of François Cooren, later returning to Montreal as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Management at HEC Montréal.
Daniel’s research explores how communication constitutes organizational life, with a particular interest in the role of humor across various organizational and strategic contexts. He examines the communicative nature of ethics and responsibility, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), identity formation, and organizational culture. Furthermore, he investigates the multimodality of strategy-as-practice (SAP) and decision-making.
Drawing on the Communication as Constitutive of Organization (CCO) perspective – often in dialogue with SAP and social psychological theories – Daniel views organizing as an ongoing communicative and performative achievement. Methodologically, he predominantly employs qualitative approaches, including interviews, (video) ethnography, and qualitative analysis of professional documents.
Deeply committed to bridging the gap between scholarship and practice, Daniel launched “The CommUnity Lab” podcast in early 2025. This knowledge transfer platform aims to break down insights from professional communication research for fellow researchers, students, practitioners, and all people interested in the magic of communication. Through his work, Daniel seeks to advance our understanding of how communication, in all its complexity, actively constructs our personal and professional “realities.”
See Daniel’s publications and other research activities
Flemming Smedegaard is an Associate Professor and Program Director for the International Business Communication programs at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. He also has many years of experience as a communication and management consultant for public organizations, private companies, and NGOs. He leads the research network Team Research in Innovation, Leadership, and Organization (TRILO), which includes researchers, students, and practitioners from various companies.
In terms of research, Flemming has published extensively in the fields of business communication, the Danish language, organizational culture, and management. In recent years, he has focused on developing a situational dialectical paradigm within business communication in collaboration with colleagues in TRILO. The term "situational" implies that every situation requires contextually appropriate decisions based on the people involved, the purpose, timing, location, and overall context. "Dialectical" means that there is no single necessary choice; rather, decisions are made among several possible solutions, and in specific situations, alternative choices could always be made. This work has resulted in publications on topics such as Situational Dialectical Leadership, Situational Dialectical Discourse Analysis, Situational Dialectical Communication Planning, Situational Dialectical Cultural Analysis, and Situational Dialectical Philosophy of Science.
Flemming has also been active in university pedagogical research and has published on topics such as student research, the challenges faced by first-generation university students, online teaching, interdisciplinary practice-oriented education, and is currently working on a project focused on developing students’ collaboration competencies.
Heidi Hansen (Ph.D.) is an Associate Professor of Organizational Communication at the Department of Culture and Language, SDU, specializing in branding and strategic communication. Her research focuses on the communicative constitution of brands, organizations, and sustainability. She takes a particular interest in actors, voices, sensemaking and sensegiving, negotiation of meaning, discourses and narratives.
In her research, Heidi seeks to articulate a new theoretical approach to branding, labelled the Communication as Constitutive of Brands (CCB) approach. This approach combines understandings from the CCO (Communication as Constitutive of Organization) perspective with the branding literature. In the CCB approach, a brand is conceptualized as a discursive brand space, grounded in a performative and interactional ontology. Brand discourses are produced in a number of conversational spaces inhabited by both human and non-human actors (Hansen, 2021).
As a member of Multimodality, Language and Organisation, Heidi’s research revolves around branding, sustainability communication, and management. Her recent work includes studies of the fluid boundaries of an organization and its members in relation to CSR communication (Hansen, H.; Jensen, A. & Maagaard, C. 2023), and the brand manager as a practical author (Hansen, H.; Jensen, A. & Maagaard, C. 2022).
Heidi is also a dedicated educator, committed to fostering the next generation of scholars and practitioners in the field of communication and branding. Her dedication to education and mentorship has been recognized through SDU’s Teaching Award (2012) for Excellence in Teaching. Heidi has also published several textbooks for instance Hansen (2024) and Hansen ed. (2025).
Sasja Krogh is a PhD student conducting research on menopause communication in Denmark from a multimodal perspective.
Her work focuses on how menopause is represented in self-help books, medical materials, and through AI and image banks. This includes researching how health organisations and medical companies communicate about menopause.
The Ph.D. project is part of the VELUX-funded research project Ignorance and Inequality in Sexual Health – Addressed from a Multimodal Communicative Perspective (2023-2027).
Sasja has an educational background in international business communication and teaches various topics related to visual communication, multimodal social semiotics, and business communication at the University of Southern Denmark.
Solveig Ilhéa Pees is a Ph.D. candidate researching multimodal communication of sexual consent in Denmark.
Her research examines how sexual consent is communicatively constructed on social media, in film and in educational materials. This includes researching how various organisations communicate about the topic.
The Ph.D. project is part of the VELUX-funded research project Ignorance and Inequality in Sexual Health – Addressed from a Multimodal Communicative Perspective (2023-2027).
With a background in international business communication, Solveig teaches courses on sustainability communication, multimodal social semiotics and language learning at the University of Southern Denmark.
Søren Vigild Poulsen is an Associate Professor in organizational web communication. His research explores several questions about multimodal semiosis, semiotic technology (i.e. technology for making meaning) and multimodal semiotic practice (i.e. socially regulated making-making activity): How do semiotic and social practices change through technology? In what ways are specific technologies designed and utilized to create meaning? How do semiotic and social practices influence the development of these technologies? Who are the designers behind these technologies, and what motivates their creations? How do semiotic practices transform with the introduction of new technologies? What are the histories and genealogies of particular technologies, especially software, and how can we archive and study software effectively? What discourses and narratives surround specific technologies? Finally, how does the study of technology intersect with broader cultural and social processes and structures.
Søren’s publications include journal articles and book chapters on topics such as semiotic technologies and practices for making deepfakes, the history of social media, website design, prompting as semiotic practice, social semiotic and cognitive approaches to multimodal analysis, multimodal semiosis, and the transduction or translation across communication modes. Additionally, he is a co-editor of the journal Visual Communication. His teaching includes courses on digital communication, marketing, web design, culture communication, and human-computer interaction.
Theo van Leeuwen is Professor of Multimodal Communication at the University of Southern Denmark, Emeritus Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, and Honorary Professor at the University of New South Wales, the Australian Catholic University and the University of Lancaster. Much of his research has focused on developing detailed methodological frameworks for analysing multimodal texts and performances, such as in his book Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual design (3rd ed. 2021, w. G. Kress).
While continuing this work, more recently Theo has focused especially on three main areas. Firstly, the analysis of semiotic technologies as resources for text production and social interaction, resulting in funded research projects on PowerPoint and on Online and Offline Shopping (with Morten Boeriis, Søren Poulsen and Gitte Rasmussen). Secondly, the use of multimodal communication in organizations, working together with colleagues from the Business University in Vienna and the Business School of the University of New South Wales. This work has resulted in several co-authored publications, such as Visual and Multimodal Research in Organization and Management Studies (2019) and Organizational Semiotics (2023). Thirdly, Theo is involved in researching the use of visual communication in sexual and reproductive health promotion in Danish and global contexts (with Nina Nørgaard, Cindie Maagaard, Sasja Krogh and Solveig Ilhéa Pees). One output of this work is a global special issue on Visuals in Sexual Health Promotion (2023).
In addition, Theo has begun to publish monographs on key social issues looked at through the lens of multimodal communication, including, so far, Multimodality and Identity (2022) and Multimodality and Time (forthcoming in 2025).
Thomas Wiben Jensen is Associate Professor in language and communication at the University of Southern Denmark and Head of Danish Studies. He was co-PI on the research project The Ecology of Psychotherapy – Integrating Cognition, Language and Emotion (funded by the VELUX foundation) from 2016-2019 and is now co-chair of the international research network MetNet Scandinavia and a member of the supervisory board of the Danish Language Council. His interdisciplinary research explores the intersections of language, cognition, culture, and social processes, with a particular emphasis on how meaning is constructed through metaphor, metonymy, gesture, images, and narratives in both social interactions and multimodal texts.
Thomas is especially interested in metaphor and metonymy as both linguistic, cognitive, social, and multimodal phenomena. While his work is grounded in the cognitive tradition, focusing on embodiment in relation to metaphor, he seeks to expand this perspective by incorporating ecological dimensions that examine the interplay between individuals and their environments. This approach facilitates a more dialectical understanding of embodied experiences within social and cultural contexts. His theoretical and methodological frameworks include dynamic approaches to metaphor, conceptual metaphor theory, ecological and enactive cognition, and affordance theory. Exploring these research agendas, he has published in a variety of international journals such Metaphor and Symbol, Metaphor and the Social World, Frontiers in Psychology, Psychology of Language and Communication, and Cognitive Semiotics.
A key focus of Thomas’ work is health communication and therapy, including the potential for metaphors to serve as markers of therapeutic progress and as tools for fostering deeper patient-therapist connection. Recently, Thomas has become engaged in the question of the transformation of modern-day fatherhood and how new experiences of fatherhood are expressed and manifested in metaphorical ways in cultural products as well as in everyday narratives.