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Practice-based research: Multimodal explorations through poetry and painting
Abstract
In this article, I investigate the practice-based research project called the poetry-to-painting project that the independent German artist, Andrea Brandt, who has also been a participant in two of my ethnographic studies on identity production, and I are involved in.
‘Divorce: A visual essay’ (Norris and Brandt, 2011) illustrates Andrea’s early to current emotive stages that she links to the life-changing event, her divorce. Taking this project as my example, I develop some theoretical thoughts and demonstrate how a practice-based project embeds and produces theoretical thought. I lean on mediated discourse theory (Scollon, 1998, 2001) and multimodal (inter)action analysis (Norris, 2004, 2011a).
Through this project, the notion of ‘modes’ is revisited, as are the notions of ‘practice’ and ‘nexus of practice’ as these pertain to the practice-based research project. Throughout the article, I show how practice-based research may gain by taking a multimodal mediated approach. This approach fosters a new way of thinking and thereby fosters the development of knowledge through practice-based research.
Book of Abstracts of the 6th Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines Conference (CADAAD 2016)
This article develops a new methodological tool, called scales of action, which allows the empirical investigation of ubiquitous actions such as driving on the one hand, and the highly complex relationships between (for example) drives and other actions in everyday life on the other hand. Through empirical analysis of ethnographic data of drives performed by a German artist and an American IT specialist, the article illustrates how talk and driving are embedded differently in different cultural contexts. Examining the actions of the two drivers before, during, and after a drive further demonstrates that chronologically performed actions are not necessarily sequential in nature. Using a mediated discourse theoretical approach and building upon multimodal (inter)action analysis, the article provides analysts with a tool that captures the inherent complexities of everyday actions. Through the notion of scales of action and their composition, this article sheds new light upon the complexity and cultural differences of drives and car talk in middle class Germany and North America.
In this article, we take a multimodal (inter)action analytical approach, showing how objects in everyday life are identity telling. As social actors surround themselves with objects, multiple actions from producing the objects to acquiring and placing them in the environment are embedded within. Here, we investigate examples from two different ethnographic studies, using the notion of frozen actions. One of our examples comes from a five-month long ethnographic study on identity production of three vegetarians in Thailand (Makboon, forthcoming); and the other example comes from a four-month long ethnographic study of three working parents on the East coast of North America (Norris, 2006, 2008). We illustrate the frozen actions embedded in particular objects and argue that the analysis of frozen actions allows us to partially understand how identity is produced and experienced by social actors in everyday life.
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