My interest in multimodal communication and digital technologies grew out of my experiences navigating complex multilingual and multimodal environments in Ghana. Growing up, I shuttle between multiple languages, digital and multimodal modes to communicate with people in different social and cultural contexts. From an early age, I was surrounded by different ways of telling stories, sharing knowledge and making meaning through languages, images, sounds, and multiple communicative resources. These experiences taught me that communication is always more than words and it involves multiple modes such as images, sounds, and the relationships we build with our audience. This interest deepened through…
Author: Gideon Kwashie Kwawukumey
Gideon Kwashie Kwawukumey
Gideon Kwawukumey is a broadcast journalist and doctoral candidate of Rhetoric, Writing, and Technical Communication at Virginia Tech. His research examines transnational environmental technical communication, sonic technical communication, multimodal rhetoric, linguistic justice in Technical Communication. Gideon has received multiple honors including 2026 ATTW Amplification Award, CCCC Scholars for the Dream Award, and RSA Gerard Hauser Award.
Before I ever taught first-year writing, I learned an important lesson about communication in a radio studio. As a sports journalist, I was not just reporting news. I was shaping how people would receive it. Right before the sport segment, I often played short sport jingles (sometimes remixed) mixing beats, slogans, with timely bpm (beats per minutes). The jingle wasn’t extra! It was rhetorical! It announced a shift in genre (sport is coming), invited listeners into a new tempo and built anticipation. That early experience in a radio studio shapes my teaching today. In the studio, I learned that meaning…