Multimodal ethnography – understanding meaning making in practices and across contexts

Multimodal ethnography brings together social semiotics and ethnography. In this perspective, researchers are in particular concerned with: ‘accounts of cultural and social practices through prolonged fieldwork in a particular setting’ (Jewitt, Bezemer, & O'Halloran, 2016, p. 118).

Consequently, two things characterize this approach. First, the research emphasis on everyday practices and contexts, and second, the ethnographer documents these practices by collecting artefacts, writing field notes.

The question about the relationship between multimodality and ethnography has been raised a number of times during the last two decades (Dicks, Flewitt, Lancaster, Pahl, & Kress, 2011; Flewitt, 2011). Gunther Kress claimed that ethnography and social semiotics should be brought together to ‘mutual advantage’ in the article: ‘partnership in research’: multimodality and ethnography (2011). Here, he argued that social semiotics emphasizes ‘the ceaseless social (re) making of a set of cultural resources (Kress, 2011, p. 242 italics in original text). Kress argues that ethnography has the task to provide us with information about the setting that surrounds the social interaction. Also from a multimodal ethnographic perspective, other researchers have paid attention to materiality and multimodality (Pahl & Rowsell, 2010), as well as literacy practices in diverse contexts (Pahl & Rowsell, 2005).

This symposium brings together three papers that discuss and develop multimodal ethnography. Eva Insulander presents and discusses examples of how methods from the field of ethnography were used within the frames of a research project on learning and designs for learning. Øystein Gilje's paper focuses on values of ethnographic fieldwork in relation to analyses of meaning-making practices across sites and contexts by following the individual learner or/and a semiotic artefact. Fredrik Lindstrand uses examples from two projects to suggest how ethnographical approaches can be used to encompass a focus on both functional/social and systemic aspects of semiosis in multimodal research.

Discussant: Professor Anders Björkvall, Örebro Universitet. Anders.Bjorkvall@oru.se

References

Anderson, K. T. (2013). Contrasting Systemic Functional Linguistic and Situated Literacies Approaches to Multimodality in Literacy and Writing Studies. Written Communication, 30(3), 276-299. doi: 10.1177/0741088313488073

Bateman, J., & Schmidt, K.-F. (2012). Multimodal film analysis: how films mean. New York: Routledge.

Boeriis, M. (2009). Multimodal Socialsemiotik & Levende Billeder. (PhD thesis Ph D), Faculty of Humanities, SDU, Syddansk Universitet.

Flewitt, R. (2011) Bringing ethnography to a multimodal investigation of early literacy in a digital age. Qualitative research 11(3), 293-310)

Gilje, Ø. (2010a). Mode, mediation and moving images: an inquiry of digital editing practices in media education. (Ph D collection of articles), University of Oslo, Oslo.

Gilje, Ø. (2010b). Multimodal Redesign in Filmmaking Practices: An Inquiry of Young Filmmakers’ Deployment of Semiotic Tools in Their Filmmaking Practice. Written Communication, 27(4), 494.

Jewitt, C., Bezemer, J., & O'Halloran, K. (2016). Introducing multimodality: Routledge.

Kress, G. (2011). ‘Partnerships in research’: multimodality and ethnography. Qualitative Research, 11(3), 239-260. doi: 10.1177/1468794111399836

Lindstrand, F. (2006). Att göra skillnad: Representation, identitet och lärande i ungdomars arbete och berättande med film [Making difference. Representation, identity and learning in teenagers' work and communication with film] (PhD), Stockholm: HLS Förlag.

Pahl, K., & Rowsell, J. (2005). Literacy and education: understanding the new literacy studies in the classroom. London: Paul Chapman.

Pahl, K., & Rowsell, J. (2010). Artefactual literacies: Every object tells a story: Teachers College Press.