Multimodal Ethnography Research Articles

Female Genealogy and Cultural Memory in Georgia

Three generations of women creators of Georgian cinema belonging to the same family, the Gogoberidze family, will form the basis for this research, which aims to explore the notion of female genealogy through a multimodal ethnography. What type of memories does this female genealogy shape and how is it shaped by them? My research combines bibliographical research, interviews, and film analysis. By doing so, I examine how family memories as story-telling cross different expressive media and bridge generations by postulating the role of affective memory as key factor for the formation this genealogy. In addition to that, I pinpoint to the fact of the creative resignification of genealogy as part of these women’s engagement with cinema but also the social struggles of their times (feminism, anti-Russian politics, etc.).

Exploring the Affordances and Propensities of Multimodality in Narrative Pedagogies through Multimodal Ethnography

This paper seeks to reflect on the propensities and advantages of multimodality in teaching and learning, and its rich exploration through multimodal research. It will also report and reflect upon the findings of a small-scale multimodal ethnographic study that was conducted over one scholastic year. This investigated whether, and how, the use of multimodal creative productions can facilitate adolescents’ search for meaning through the re-configuration and re-imagination of life experiences shared in a classroom context. The pedagogical context of this research consisted of RE (Religious Education), and MLE (Media Literacy Education) classrooms, enabling an exploration into a possible fruitful dialogue between these two curricular subjects. Another related aim of this paper is to investigate how a narrative-hermeneutic approach to learning can facilitate meaning-making when applied to and through multimodal production tasks in RE and MLE. The results indicate that through multimodality, made possible by the advancement of creative digital technologies, narrative pedagogies can become more effective. This transpires from the fact that multimodality expands the range of resources available for students to construct and share their narratives, as it integrates the auditory, visual, gestural, linguistic, and spatial modes, augmenting the overall narrative experience. Moreover, this study shows that multimodality can facilitate meaning-making by promoting and nurturing a pedagogy for creative expression, a pedagogy of empathy and compassion, a pedagogy of agency and authenticity, a pedagogy of vulnerability, and a pedagogy through the use of metaphor. The paper also makes specific recommendations on how a narrative-hermeneutical approach through multimodality can promote the specified pedagogies in the context of the mentioned curricular subjects.

The mess in the middle: Portraying the unrecorded purposeful labors of care that emerge throughout multimodal ethnographic methods and researcher peer support

AbstractIn this “Reflections from the Field,” we describe and interrogate our ongoing engagements with designing, conducting, and documenting multimodal field research as early‐career ethnographic education researchers. Our Multimodal Scholarship Working Group engages with content across media and multimodal methods to promote collaboration and support. This approach helps our community of emerging scholars develop their multimodal ethnographic research practices, allowing simultaneous input from diverse sources and fostering access, play, and experimentation throughout the research process. We argue that a peer support network is necessary for emerging and early‐career researchers as they prepare to enter the field of educational research, especially in an emerging subfield like multimodal ethnography.

Imagined Spaces Through Public Space Typography: Preliminary Studies Using Multimodal Ethnography

Text cannot be separated from its context, nor can the complexity of reality be reduced. The relationship of the text as a visual element between the imagined spaces that follow is what this study tries to explain further. In this article, the authors choose the quote, "Bumi Pasundan Lahir Ketika Tuhan Sedang Tersenyum" / (English: "Bumi Pasundan was created when God was smiling") which is classified as public space typography as the object of research. This discussion uses multimodal ethnography as a data search tool that will be analysed using discourse analysis to answer how quotes, as visual elements, are reproduced and depicted as a "beautiful" space through social media, creating a specific image of the imagined space.

Imaginaries of the Pandemic in Chile: A Conceptual-Empirical Discussion.

This article aims to reconstruct the social imaginaries of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) in Chile. We seek to understand how families interpret their experience confronting the pandemic by identifying four main aspects: (a) the COVID‐19 pandemic, (b) working and learning, (c) health and (d) family life. Following Habermas' distinction between lifeworld and social systems, we consider these issues as constituting the social imaginary of lifeworld, different but related to the imaginaries of social systems. The qualitative empirical data was gathered through a sample of 38 families interviewed online between September 2020 and January 2021 in four Chilean cities: Iquique, Valparaíso, Santiago and Concepción. Other complementary sources of information are multimodal ethnography (digital diaries), press articles and state reports.

Granular Activisms

ABSTRACTIn this article, I reflect on the collaborative multimodal ethnography that I conducted in Badhuli village with Aaji, a lower‐caste storyteller, singer, healer, and rice farmer. In addition to highlighting Aaji's life story and her Bhojpuri singing practice, the research project involved facilitating performative spaces for women to exchange, rehearse, film, and digitally share their vocal repertoires with other community members across gender, caste, religion, and generation. Through an analysis of multimodal ethnographic materials, this article argues that rural north Indian women's vocal traditions and performances are more than “everyday acts of resistance” (Scott 1985). Specifically, I combine Barthe's concept of “grain” of voice (1977) with recent scholarship on political activism and theories of voice and vocality (Eidsheim 2008; Schlichter 2011). I propose the new notion of “granular activism,” that is, grounded in the intermingling and exchange of women's vocal traditions. I conclude by demonstrating Aaji's radically activist role in re‐imagining Bhojpuri inter‐gender and inter‐caste dynamics through vocal traditions.

Mobile Belonging in Digital Exile: Methodological Reflection on Doing Ethnography on (Social) Media Practices

Life in exile presents hardship and brings with it multiple personal and socio-political challenges and grievances. Being forced into separation from family and home society often stimulates the desire to maintain belonging and contact with families and communities. “Co-presence” and “being there” require a lot of personal effort and commitment. Communication and mediation strategies have a special significance as everyday practices in social and digital media technologies. “Mobile belonging” and staying connected across various online and offline spaces and in various social and political environments and communities can be a constant requirement in digital exile. After an introduction to relevant literature about the complexity of media communication, belonging, and migration, the article examines mobile media technologies and the central role they play in everyday exile. Following a discussion about the notion of “digital exile” and “mobile belonging,” the second part of the article will focus on a specific case study of an Iranian artist and activist living in exile in Germany. It will show how (social) media promotes activism and performance in both online and offline public spaces as practices of “mobile belonging here and there” during the Covid-19 pandemic. Thirdly, the article will turn to a methodological reflection about doing ethnographic research on digital exile and practices of mobile belonging. With a systematic description of applied methods, early developments in multi-modal ethnography will be outlined that illustrate how collaboration and co-creation promise innovative directions for doing ethnography on digital exile in the different-yet-shared times of the pandemic crisis.

The Communicative Ecology of Social Media in the Organization of Social Movement for Collective Action in Ghana: The Case of #FixTheCountry


 
 
 This study seeks to unravel the media-oriented practices and media technology applications of the #FixTheCountry protests which seek to demand accountability from successive governments of Ghana. While acts by various governmental agencies supposedly worked to prevent a physical convergence due to the Covid-19 pandemic, their efforts proved futile due to the communicative ecology driving the movement. Using the concept of communicative ecology and a multimodal ethnography through observation, semi-structured interviews and time series analysis of happenings after the emergence of the hashtag, #FixTheCountry, the study found out that the diverse backgrounds of the participants of the movement notwithstanding, the hybridity of the communication technologies, especially the use of social media fueled the success of their interaction, leading to enhanced information and communicative ecology, giving them a formidable front both within and outside Ghana. It recommends that political actors need to embrace protest movements for collective action based on purpose, especially because of the complex intertwining technology that characterizes their formation in the digital era.
 
 

Toddlers as active, competent story weavers: Lexie’s story

Communication and literacy development of young children is shaped by the nature of social and cultural relationships in everyday situations. Few studies, however, have explored early story experiences encountered by infants and toddlers in naturalistic settings. We argue that personal stories about everyday lived experiences are a vital context for considering how toddlers develop communicative competencies as they participate in these stories within their families and communities. The paper presents selected findings from a qualitative study underpinned by a broad theoretical view of story embedded in a sociocultural, participatory framework. We contend that stories are collaborative, social endeavours in which intersubjectivity is accomplished collectively and multimodally. Evidence is offered of the communicative process enacted by 1-year-old Lexie, her parent, teacher and peers, as they shared meaning together in a personal story about eating lunch. Lexie and her family were participants in a wider study of the story experiences of 1-year-old toddlers, within and across their family home and early childhood settings, in a culturally diverse community of Aotearoa New Zealand. Drawing on multimodal ethnography and video data, findings illustrate how Lexie and her family, teacher and peers actively participated together in the weaving of a shared personal story using verbal, visual and kinaesthetic forms of communication. The study contributes to the field of early childhood literacy by providing unique insights into the potential of everyday personal stories as a valuable context for exploring ways children’s communicative competencies are developed through relationships in family and community settings.

Design, Manufacture and Save. Coronavirus Makers During the COVID-19 Crisis in Spain

This research analyses the Coronavirus Makers in Spain, focusing on three characteristics: the hybrid organisation, the use of technologies, and the cultural impact. To do so, we carried out a multimodal ethnography (Dicks, Bella, Bambo Soyinka, and Amanda Coffey. 2006. “Multimodal Ethnography.” Qualitative Research 6 (1): 77–96) from March to June 2020, during the first wave of the COVID-19. Coronavirus Makers’ activity can be framed as a pandemic movement, enhancing expressions of solidarity, social mobilisation, and resilience. The decentralised collective work and the anti-commercial logic (i.e. promoting open designs and protocols) tackled the immediate shortage of medical materials and structural deficits in health services. This network embraced the Spanish legacy of social mobilisation, as during the 15M, yet it presents actions that are circumscribed to the pandemic context and deserve further attention.

Multimodal Ethnography in/of/as Postcards

Multimodal Ethnography in/of/as Postcards

‘It’s never okay to say no to teachers’: Children’s research consent and dissent in conforming schools contexts

This article examines the limits to children giving research consent in everyday school contexts that emphasises their conformity to comply with adult expectations, and highlights children’s competence and agency in navigating this conformity through different practices of dissent. It draws on research into children’s agency, using a multimodal ethnography of Year 1 classrooms in two English primary schools. The article includes a reflexive methodological focus, exploring the extent to which I counter the schools’ emphasis on conformity. This includes creating visuals for children to practice consent; positioning myself as the researcher in a non‐teacher role, as ‘least adult’ and the one who ‘least knows’; and designing interview spaces markedly different from classrooms. The article examines how children navigate conforming discourses by finding different ways to dissent in the research. Firstly, children demonstrate a sophisticated awareness of the cultural norms of indicating refusals beyond saying the word ‘No’. Secondly, children achieve unnoticeability, by which they absent themselves from the ‘on‐task’ classroom culture, and by extension the research process. Thirdly, they engage in playful dissent, demonstrating their political knowingness of the classroom social order. The article discusses the implications for educational research when the values of consent are in conflict with a schooling focused on conformity. This includes emphasising the limits of consent procedures, paying closer attention to how researchers recognise and respond ethically to children’s multiple practices of dissent, and using research to disrupt problematic power structures in education settings that limit possibilities for children’s consent.

Embodying dreams and emotions in the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area

As part of the interdisciplinary project Atlas of Dreams, I created a series of artistic maps, that both show the places where 400 dreamers recounted their memorable dreams and also depict the emotional impact of these narratives in the grid of cities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Atlas of Dreams aims at uncovering the emotional life of cities. I present, from my perspective as both a visual artist and an ethnographer, how the embodied art practices of dérive and the Surrealist techniques of frottage contributed to recreate the dream process, as well as to the creation of a multimodal ethnography.

Rewilding education? Exploring an imagined and experienced outdoor learning space

ABSTRACTThis paper follows the progress of a small rural primary school in the UK as it goes about cultivating a new vision of the future by transforming its outdoor spaces. Exploring the significance of these outdoor spaces as they are imagined, made and experienced, from the first design stages to the first days of use, the paper considers how feelings about children’s access to and engagement with nature are entangled with cultures of protection and surveillance. Using observations from a multimodal ethnography, including video tours and photography workshops alongside observant participation and interviews, the paper illustrates how, in practical terms, changing an educational landscape can also shift a school culture, giving children greater freedom outdoors to live, learn and grow together.

Marshmallow claps and frozen children: sitting on the carpet in the modern ‘on-task’ primary classroom

ABSTRACT This paper examines how young children experience the moral and bodily discipline of the modern English ‘on-task’ primary classroom, in which they are expected to sit quietly and still for long periods on the classroom carpet, listening to what teachers know. It details the conditions of the classrooms, a performance-focused environment centred on delivering a knowledge-based curriculum, rooted in educational legacies emphasising social order and conformity. Staff employ different strategies to ensure compliance, including controlling the physical and sonic environment, and children’s bodies themselves. The paper details how this leaves children feeling physically uncomfortable and vulnerable to difficult emotional experiences, as well as how they find ways to move and speak their critique of this education model. The study draws on a multimodal ethnography of a Year One classroom, within an ordinary English primary school, and a week-long ‘rapid’ ethnography in a Year One class in an ‘outstanding’ teaching school.

Children’s Agency in the Modern Primary Classroom

This paper examines where and how children achieve agency in the primary classroom, drawing on a multimodal ethnography of the Year One classroom. It utilises a relational conceptualisation of agency, where children act purposively to achieve outcomes of educational relevance. It demonstrates that children achieve agency performing ‘good’ and ‘clever’ child subject positions, helping to make classroom life more liveable, although this form of agency is limited when dealing with unexpected challenges. Children also deviate, finding moments to pursue desires and ways of knowing not provided for within the classroom, insinuating a political critique of the current education system.

Metaphors we experiment with in multimodal ethnography

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we argue for a view of analysis as an embodied practice and review others’ testimonies of carrying out multimodal ethnography. This review suggests that metaphors are key for communicating what happens to us in the course of the research and our subsequent sense-making practices. We identify four metaphors for communicating data collection and analytic practices: composing, meandering, plundering and time travel. We then turn to our own multimodal fieldwork with children in middle childhood, to think about the experiences and emergent metaphors that shaped our practice on an international study looking at the relationship between childhood and public life. Children’s play was instructive in our own formation as multimodal ethnographers. We provide examples of the ways in which children recruited us into their play, the ways in which play taught us about what matters to children, and finally, how we took play into our own analytical practices.

Fashioning ethical subjectivity: The embodied ethics of entrepreneurial self-formation

Organizational ethics has attracted increasing attention, but how individuals make sense of themselves as ethical subjects is a yet to be explored domain. The few empirical articles on ethical subjectivity have focused on how people within organizations seek to find a balance between a sense of ethical selfhood and dominant organizational discourse. We are interested in the role of the body and embodied experiences in constructing the entrepreneurial self and how this process unfolds over time. Viewing entrepreneuring as an ethical practice, we rely on a larger study of 58 entrepreneurs and a smaller multi-modal ethnography of three entrepreneurs in the ethical fashion industry. Drawing on the Deleuzian four folds of subjectivity that we employ as an analytical device, the data analysis reveals how our protagonists use the body as sensor, source, and processor in constructing themselves as ethical subjects. Our study complements rational perspectives on ethical decision making in entrepreneurship and establishes the body as a primary mechanism for one’s formation as an ethical subject. Through connecting the body with ethics, we aim to disclose the continuous subtle interaction between morality and materiality in the process of entrepreneuring. Our abductive framework discloses how one’s body prompts and informs the development of moral actions and material artifacts.

The margins ‘in-between’

The paper presents a case of engaged ethnography developed by a group of geographers from the University of Cagliari focusing on the everyday experience of urban marginality by the residents of Sant’Elia, a low-income district in Cagliari, Italy. Stigmatised for being ‘at the margins’ of the city, the district reveals on the one hand, degraded socio-economic conditions and, on the other hand, a strong sense of identity and belonging among its inhabitants. The main aim of the study is to discuss and contrast the stigma affecting Sant’Elia through the direct involvement of a group of women living in the district in participative fieldwork utilising a mixed set of both quantitative and qualitative tools and aimed at collecting a multilayered reality of ideas, emotions, perceptions, experiences and images of the district as perceived by its own inhabitants. By presenting the different phases, methodologies and results of the study, the paper operates at two different, albeit interconnected, theoretical and methodological levels. From a theoretical standpoint, it deconstructs the concept of marginality, showing what it means to live in a ‘difficult’ district on a daily basis. From a methodological point of view, it proposes a wider reflection on the politics of multimodal ethnography, by focusing on how the different positionalities of researchers and residents have been challenged by the fieldwork activities.

Multimodal Mapmaking: Working Toward an Entangled Methodology of Place

This article addresses mapmaking as a multimodal method and lens for place‐based ethnographic inquiry. I describe three contexts drawn from my research on and teaching of mapmaking. Drawing from my own sense‐making of mapping as an embodied phenomenon, I discuss how the fields of sensory and materialist studies might expand the interpretive possibilities of multimodal ethnography as an epistemological and ontological lens involving the entanglement of place, body, and experience with knowing and becoming.[mapmaking, multimodality, senses, place, materiality]