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Multimodality and ethnography: working at the intersection

Bella Dicks, Rosie Flewitt, Lesley Lancaster and Kate Pahl
Qualitative Research 2011 11: 227
DOI: 10.1177/1468794111400682

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Editorial Q
Multimodality and R
ethnography: working Qualitative Research

at the intersection
11(3) 227­–237
© The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1468794111400682
qrj.sagepub.com

Bella Dicks
University of Cardiff, UK

Rosie Flewitt
The Open University, UK

Lesley Lancaster
Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

Kate Pahl
University of Sheffield, UK

This special issue of Qualitative Research was produced in the context of a compara-
tively recent surge in qualitative ‘multimodal’ research. A number of scholars from
diverse disciplinary and theoretical traditions have turned to multimodality in their
endeavours to understand everyday communication and interaction in contemporary
social life, often foregrounding certain tensions with more established research tradi-
tions, such as ethnography. In this issue, we focus on the methodological and theoretical
implications of bringing multimodality and ethnography into dialogue with each other – a
development that, we think, throws up some provocative issues for qualitative research
methodology. These include questions about the ‘epistemological compatibility’ of dif-
ferent approaches, when each carries particular theoretical and methodological histories
and associations, and what might be gained and lost in endeavours to bring together their
respective descriptive and analytic conventions.
In many ways, these issues are not new; they pick up on older debates and controver-
sies in qualitative methodology, in this case, about the status and locus of both ‘meaning’
and ‘the social’ in research. This latter tension can be brought out in questions such as:
what is the provenance of the semiotic resources on which social actors draw in ‘making
meaning’ in social situations? Is ‘social context’ constituted through social interaction or
through language (verbal and non-verbal), or both (and if the latter, how do they work
together)? Do we primarily look to social or semiotic explanations of how ‘meaningfulness’
is accomplished – and, crucially for the articles here, where can the boundaries between

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228 Qualitative Research 11(3)

them be drawn? Part of the answer lies in how we define multimodality itself (as
discussed below), and, indeed, ethnography. Heath and Street (2008) ground ethnogra-
phy in its heritage of social and cultural anthropology, while Green and Bloome (1997),
in their discussion of ethnography in educational contexts, have distinguished between
doing ethnography (framed within an anthropological discipline), adopting an ethno-
graphic perspective (a more focussed and less comprehensive ethnography), and using
ethnographic tools (using methods and techniques associated with ethnographic
fieldwork, but not necessarily guided by social and cultural theory). What is clear is that
both ethnographers and social semioticians are interested in examining the diversity of
resources that people use in their everyday worlds, and both do so from a perspective that
favours social over cognitive explanations. We argue that these issues benefit from fresh
attention now, particularly as we are in an age in which digital recording technologies
have become ubiquitous, greatly enhancing the potential extent of the description and
analysis of communication and representation.
In this special issue we seek to contribute to these debates by bringing together articles
from a group of scholars who have all been working closely with multimodal or multisen-
sory research materials. Two articles are included from well-established leaders in each
field, Gunther Kress and Sarah Pink, who have valiantly stepped up to our challenge of
considering how and whether the two traditions might work together. The remaining four
articles are by scholars who have combined multimodality with ethnography in the con-
text of empirical work. The first of these, by Hurdley and Dicks, along with Flewitt’s
article, identify the tensions and overlaps that arise in the analysis and representation of
social experience in both ethnographic and social semiotic perspectives, and point to the
potential of a syncretic view. The final two articles by Clark and Rowsell illustrate how
the partnership of ethnography and multimodality has enriched their empirical work. We
begin this editorial with an outline of multimodality, since we feel that is the half of our
couplet that needs more in the way of clarification.
Multimodality is now a widely invoked term in social research. It has become a
generic label, often used interchangeably with the terms ‘multimedia’ or ‘multisensory’,
to refer to projects where data generated are not primarily linguistic or numeric. This
might mean anything from research using video recorders, observation of bodily move-
ments or analysis of material objects and environments. For some scholars it is a term
that has accrued a more specific usage in a particular field of qualitative research that has
developed from social semiotics, and it is this latter usage that we focus on here. This
field of enquiry has founded a fairly coherent, if diverse, body of work that has done
much in recent years to raise the profile of multimodality among qualitative researchers,
especially through the field of ‘new literacy studies’, as Flewitt outlines in her article. It
is within this social semiotic tradition that some key works on multimodality have been
located – one might mention Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen’s seminal text,
Multimodal Discourse, the Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis edited by Carey
Jewitt, Theo Van Leeuwen’s Speech, Music, Sound and Jewitt and Kress’ 2003 collection
Multimodal Literacy.
It is perhaps not surprising that literacy studies have been the principal field within
which attempts to conjoin the social semiotic tradition of multimodality and ethnography
have emerged. Work on children’s gradual attainment of literacy involves studying both

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Dicks et al. 229

multiple media (such as writing, books, games, objects, video, art and drawing) within
the experiential and naturalistic settings (home and school) in which the actual use of
these artefacts can be studied. It points, then, both to the study of meaning (semiotics)
and of social context (ethnography). This reflects a conviction that understanding
how children become literate requires research on the processes and contexts of their
everyday practices as social beings, rather than on individual child-artefact relations
(Heath, 1983; Hymes, 1996; Maybin, 2007; Street, 1984).
This emphasis on the social situations in which communication occurs is a long-
standing concern of sociolinguistics, inaugurated by Dell Hymes’ notion of an ‘ethnog-
raphy of communication’ (1972) and Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (1978).
Both Halliday and Hymes developed theoretical systems to account for social param-
eters affecting language use, whereas semiotics, in its traditional Saussurian model,
approached meaning as a system with its own internal logic. Kress and Flewitt both
point out in their articles that this latter approach resulted in a problematic treatment of
‘texts’ as divorced from the social situations in which they are both made and ‘read’.
By contrast, sociolinguistics turned away from the categorical rules of language to
include concerns such as social class, social situation, ethnic group membership and so
forth (Labov, 1972). This led to the study of speakers’ ‘communicational competence’,
in which both linguistic competence and social competence have to be considered.
Social semiotics retains a focus on meaning-making but, as Kress explains in his article,
rejects the idea that speakers merely choose signs constituted ‘elsewhere’ in stable
systems of meaning. Instead, meaning is approached as active processes of sign-
making in the here and now, with speakers constantly remaking meaning and choosing
the most apt signifier to represent the meaning signified.
In sociolinguistics and social semiotics, then, there has been an increasing attention
to social contexts as providing crucially important parameters for the production of mean-
ing. It is this interest that brings a social semiotic perspective on multimodality into align-
ment with the concerns of ethnographers. While ethnography, with its diverse strands and
debates, cannot be ascribed a single coherent identity, its ‘systematic attention to social
action through fieldwork’ (Atkinson et al., 2008: 2) and its non-reductive attention to the
complex organization of naturally-occurring action provides an undeniable focus. Hence,
it is to ethnography that many social semioticians have turned when their research endea-
vour is to understand how signs are made through diverse modes as part of complex social
practice. While researchers working in a social semiotic framework might approach the
relationship between language and the social from a different starting point to researchers
whose primary interest lies in ethnographic understandings of the world in which we live,
in both traditions, there has been (over comparatively recent years) a more widespread
engagement with the diversity of modes used in meaning-making, spurred on perhaps by
the new forms of communication that have emerged in a digitally negotiated world, and
by the ready accessibility of visual methods for documenting social interaction. The work
of Gunther Kress, together with colleagues, has been deeply influential in this move
towards an embracing of the complexity of how a range of communicative resources,
including gestures, gaze, image, sounds and other non-linguistic features are central to the
processes of meaning-making. (see also Dicks et al., 2005)

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230 Qualitative Research 11(3)

The idea of combining ethnography and semiotics is not new in itself. To a large
extent literacy studies in the 1980s and 90s helped pave the way for an emergent
‘semiotic turn’ in classroom ethnography, which attends to non-linguistic, embodied and
material features in the production of meaning. One could mention here Harste et al.’s
(1984) arguments for studying literacy as the use of sign systems (art, music, drama,
language, movement, and so forth), each one of which is seen as contributing a unique
kind of meaning-potential for children to draw on. Hence, any instance of literacy is in
fact a multimodal ‘event’. Anne Dyson has provided richly detailed ethnographic
accounts of children’s immersion in a mixture of official and unofficial cultural styles,
meaning their approach to learning how to write has to be understood within a ‘land-
scape of voices’ consisting of written language, drawing, music, poetry, songs, video,
radio and animation (2003 :12; see also Dyson 1997). Similarly, Lancaster (2001) has
shown how children’s authoring practices involve the co-ordination of skills of vocal-
ization, gaze, gesture, bodily action and graphic production. Other studies, too, confirm
the multimodality of young children’s text and authoring practices (Dyson, 1986; Kress,
1997, 2005; Rowe, 1994). This research has helped shape the field of multimodality,
which documents children’s flexible interweaving of semiotic systems (Rowe, 2003).
Another emergent field that needs mentioning here is linguistic ethnography, something
of an umbrella term covering a range of work in interactional socio-linguistics, critical
discourse theory, neo-Vygotskyian research, and interpretive applied linguistics, which
focuses both on social and institutional contexts for communication as well as on the
internal organization of multi-semiotic data (Rampton, 2007; Rampton et al., 2007).
This attention to non-linguistic features – materials, objects, images, sounds – has
arguably long occupied ethnographers, and may underline, in some readers’ eyes, the
wider ‘grasp’ of ethnography. It can be argued that ethnography itself already encom-
passes the domains of analysis with which multimodality is concerned. This is Atkinson
et al.’s view, who see ethnography as the analysis of ‘social and cultural life with a
proper regard to the many modalities of action and organization: sensory, discursive,
spatial, temporal, and material’ (2008: 2). They criticize the recent tendency to fragment
ethnography into separate methodologies, such as ‘visual’ or ‘multimodal’, instead
arguing for a ‘complexity that is grounded in the diverse modes of everyday life’ (2008:
3; see also Atkinson, 2005). Nevertheless, they concede that ethnographers have often
been insufficiently rigorous or systematic in their analysis of material objects, places,
spatial features, soundscapes and visual phenomena, often treating these as detail, back-
ground or context rather than investigating more fully how they give meaning to a given
social setting and situation.
It is this detailed attention to the ‘making of meaning’ in all its diverse modes that is
a central concern of semiotically-oriented work. It is also clearly apposite and central to
ethnography’s aim to understand the ‘webs of significance’ in which culture is spun. Yet
one way of posing the differences between multimodal and ethnographic approaches is
to distinguish, as do Atkinson et al., between ethnography’s interest in ‘multiple modes
of social order’ on the one hand and multimodality’s focus on ‘multiple modes of mean-
ing’ on the other (2008: 54; our italics). This suggests two different starting points –
social order or meaning - for ethnography and social semiotics respectively, which might
well invite the question: are these two approaches compatible or not?

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Dicks et al. 231

Certainly, the authors of articles in this volume differ in the degree to which they
recognize complementarity between them, or indeed, a need for such. Kress is keen to
acknowledge the ‘path of complementarity’ from which both ethnography and multimo-
dality can ‘benefit from the specialized insights of each’, while being clear that each
approach asks and answers quite different questions. For Kress, the ‘reach’ of a theory
needs to be recognized: ‘what does this theory do well, what does it do less well and
where does its ‘reach’ run out?’ Kress proposes that although multimodality both invokes
and relies on the social, it does not itself provide a base of social evidence. Accordingly,
ethnographic work can offer insights into social spheres which multimodality does not in
itself reveal. Nevertheless, it is important to maintain the distinction rather than embrace
too quickly a move to ‘mergers’, since for Kress they accomplish quite different kinds of
objective. Grounding his discussion in a series of studies conducted with colleagues,
Kress points to the need to assemble theoretical and methodological approaches as
contingent on specific research objectives. If the interest is sign-making-which signs are
made in which situations, under which conditions and by whom-then analysis focuses on
the ‘epistemological commitments’ that are revealed by the changing uses of signifiers in
social contexts. He illustrates how such investigation can tell us about how sign-making
practices are changing, how knowledge is constructed now and in the past and how sign-
making might reflect certain principles. For example, he argues that in a classroom, a
teacher’s instruction for children to draw or write about a cell involves producing a
different ‘knowledge about cells’ since this ‘takes on a profoundly different shape with
changes in modal materialization and representation’. This approach enables analysis to
compare how different types of knowledge are produced and to hypothesize about why
certain kinds are predominant in classrooms today.
The interpretation of these signs by others, in a participatory co-present situation, is
not the focus of Kress’ interest here, nor are the particular ways in which the pupils are
responding to teachers’ verbal or non-verbal actions. In other words, the interactional
situation itself is not paramount to this particular analysis, and neither are sensory per-
ceptions elicited. Indeed, the social itself is left unspecified. By contrast, in the ‘Scissors
please!’ paper to which he refers, Kress worked with conversational analysis, symbolic
interactionism and ethnography in order to focus on ‘the core of the ‘goings-on’ [which]
relies on quite other means for communication: slight shifts in posture; gaze; an
outstretched hand; joint looking at the screen … and all in minutely subtle orchestrations
of all these.’ In summary, Kress discusses how ensembles of theories and methods are
contingent on and assembled for specific research tasks, and their contentious union may
be fleeting or offer the potential to be more enduring.
Pink is less convinced. For her, the two traditions of ethnography and multimodality
are ‘based on fundamentally different theoretical premises and methodological
approaches.’ However, it is not social order that is at stake here, or indeed ‘meaning’,
but rather the category of experience. The type of ethnography that she herself prac-
tices – namely sensory ethnography – cannot easily find common ground with multi-
modality as its approach, in her view, is at odds with the close, empathetic methodology
that she constructs following the traditions of phenomenological anthropology
(inspired by Merleau-Ponty, Tim Ingold and others). Pink does see compatibility
between multimodality and a certain type of ethnography, which she categorizes as

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232 Qualitative Research 11(3)

‘classic’ or ‘observational’, and a potential role for ethnography as ‘a self-critical and

reflexive strand within multimodal analysis’. However, such a role would involve chal-
lenging some of multimodality’s key tenets, in particular what she sees as its tendency to
work with separations (e.g. amongst modes; between media and modes; between data
and researcher; between observation and ‘text’), as against sensory ethnography’s more
holistic treatment. Pink suggests the researcher needs to try and get closer to participants
than the ideas of ‘data’ or ‘observation’ suggest, through sharing their experiences,
places, activities, so as to facilitate ‘the production of meaning in participation with them
through a shared activity in a shared place’. This does not involve the collection of data
as such but rather a ‘shared conversation’ in which the researcher empathetically tries to
‘produce knowledge with others’. In order to achieve this empathetic engagement in
participants’ social and sensory environments she recommends walking with them as
well as talking with them, since movement captures something of the processual dimen-
sions of knowledge, apprenticeship and learning. Pink makes a clear-cut distinction
between this approach and a ‘classic’ or ‘observational’ ethnography that for her involves
‘looking at’ participants and collecting data ‘on them’. By contrast, sensory ethnography
is a ‘sharing’ and ‘learning’ practice that uses video in the production of ‘shared knowl-
edge’ not as a field record to analyse.
Pink’s argument here reopens a long-standing debate about the necessity and implica-
tions of distance in relation to understanding everyday life. In some ways, it points to
the distinctive conspectus of phenomenology, with its grounding in empirical sensory
perception rather than more abstract categories of knowledge. Yet, as the phenomenolo-
gist Schutz explains in his famous essay ‘The Stranger’ (1944), people’s ordinary
life-knowledge is not always accessible to them, for the very reason that it is shaped in
accordance with the field of their everyday experience and action. Hence, distance facili-
tates understanding, since it is only the stranger approaching another’s world who has the
necessary objectivity and ‘doubtful loyalty’ to assemble systematic and coherent knowl-
edge of it. Hurdley and Dicks’ article tries to address this by opening up a discussion of
gaps: in particular the gap between the ‘sensorial closeness’ that Pink’s model pro-
motes and the ‘modal distances’ on which multimodal approaches depend. Through a
discussion which seeks to bring forth the value of both emplacement and displacement
strategies, they attempt to open up a ‘third space’ within which both ethnography and
multimodality could enrich the insights of each other. This is not envisaged as a project
of integration, however, so much as one of creative tension. The key issues here are the
need to benefit from both the understanding enabled by emplaced, sensory practices of
‘being with’ the members of a community or setting, as well as bearing in mind what is
displaced or not elicited. The latter has two dimensions: those aspects of meaning-
making that always escape the here-and-now (via the traces of prior signs), and the fact
that they may also escape the conscious knowledge or experience of the members, who
use these signifiers for practical action within a cultural milieu, not as Schutz’s stranger
trying to map an unfamiliar labyrinth. Hence, Hurdley and Dicks take from social semiot-
ics the idea that although the focus is on the processes of meaning-making in the here-and-
now, rather than on abstract, stable systems, there is nevertheless in multimodality a
recognition that what meaning-makers are using as resources – signifiers – carry
with them residual traces or inflections of previous processes of meaning-making. These
traces are a means through which power and ideology can impinge on the sensory

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Dicks et al. 233

moment. In this way, signifiers cannot be understood only by reference to the immediate
ad-hoc improvizations or accounts of members.1
In Flewitt’s study of young children’s multimodal literacy learning with new and
traditional technologies, ethnography and multimodality offer different, equally neces-
sary lens of enquiry on the social phenomena being studied. From a larger research
project, Flewitt draws on one case-study of Edward to show how researchers accessed
‘the situated complexity of his social worlds’, through being with him both at home and
in a preschool nursery, making video recordings, conducting interviews, making obser-
vational fieldnotes and collecting survey data. The rich insights this ethnographic data
offered were needed in order to inform the detailed analysis of his multimodal interac-
tions with literacy artefacts. For Flewitt, bringing ethnography to multimodality showed
how the children’s literacy learning with diverse technologies were situated within a
wider context of ambivalence on the part of adults to the role of ICT versus printed
books in pre-school children’s learning. Her article sees ethnography as permitting
consideration of ‘broader social and cultural framings’ and ‘layers of social complexity’,
through bringing in ‘distal’ dimensions of significance to the more micro-focused
lens of multimodality. This enables her to understand children’s literacy practices as a
thoroughly social affair: ‘revealing how micro-moments of multimodal meaning making
unfold in a complex network of socially-situated norms and practices’, and contributing
‘a rich backstory of how networks of cultural and social values permeated the educa-
tional practices and physical arrangement of the nursery’. In this study, then, both
meaning-making (Edward’s) and social order (that of the classroom and Edward’s home)
are brought into conjunction with each other.
Clark’s analysis makes a compelling case for the use of ethnographic and participatory
multiple methods in an emic-focused approach designed to allow maximum flexibility
and responsiveness in facilitating children’s self-expression. The value of multimodality
to such an approach lies less in the analysis of mode-use as an object of study in itself, as
in Kress’ approach; rather, it is a means of aiding the ethnographic analysis by ‘slowing
it down’ so as to attend to the diversity of means through which children construct
knowledge. The ‘how’ of meaning-making in specific contexts is of interest to both
authors, but for Kress, this is primarily a means of understanding changing epistemologies
and semiotic processes in general, while for Clark it is a means both of eliciting children’s
knowledge but also of enabling others to understand this better. These are quite different
aims: in one, meaning-making itself is the central interest whereas in the other, knowledge
production (and its brokerage) is the focus of analysis. The latter calls for an approach that
is necessarily ethnographic, and only secondarily multimodal, whereas the former tends
to invert this order of priorities.
Rowsell’s is perhaps the most clearly ‘sensorial’ of the articles. For her, ethnographic
research, the methodology she used in the study reported in this article, is necessarily
attuned to the senses. In this study, focusing on artefacts as significant objects valued by
their owners, was a means of coming to recognize these sensory meanings: ‘Conducting
an ethnography, even a short one, demands existing within a space with certain kinds of
smells, with a color palette, with a repertoire of sounds - and these sensory experiences
are lived and should be made explicit to the reader as part of the experience’. Further,
‘artefacts signal dimensions of participant histories that might otherwise be hidden or at
least veiled in observations and interview dialogues’. Artefacts are seen as expressive

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234 Qualitative Research 11(3)

and enable participants to reveal aspects of self that would otherwise remain hidden.
She emphasizes the inseparability of modes and senses in proposing ‘a conflation of
multimodality and embodied, sensory work’. Rowsell does not see multimodality and
ethnography as in conflict with each other, supporting the move to studies that bring
them together with the expectation that ‘a more textured, perhaps even emic way to
account for multimodality’ could emerge by ‘complementing multimodal analyses with
ethnographic accounts of identities and identities in situ’.

Conclusion
Although a number of scholarly traditions have concerned themselves with the study of
non-verbal and material forms of sensory data, it is only over the last ten years or so that
multimodality has become an established way of examining and analysing communica-
tion and interaction in contemporary everyday life. Ethnography, on the other hand,
is, as Kress suggests, ‘the old kid on the block’, with a rich history and an extensive
repertoire of theoretical strands and tried and tested methodologies. This is both a
strength, but also perhaps a potential weakness in the sense that the word ‘ethnography’
is frequently used loosely and ubiquitously to mean any kind of reference to the social
context of research subjects. How this context is defined is what is at issue. We might
ask two kinds of questions here (and again, these are ones of longstanding concern to
qualitative researchers): first, a question about what kind of data it is necessary and
permissible to assemble in order to grasp context fully (one way of conceiving of which
is the relationship between unfolding, ‘endogenous’ and situated action and more endur-
ing, exogenous and symbolic frames of reference). One implication that can be taken
from the first four articles is that sensory ethnography and multimodality naturally ‘tilt’
in one of these directions rather than the other, and hence – it could be argued - might
benefit from each other’s insights.
The other kind of question pertains to the methods that are best suited to understanding
social context, which are, of course, in turn connected with how that context is defined.
We return briefly here to Pink’s distinction between ethnography as ‘sharing’ and as
‘observation’. As one of the editors is amongst Pink’s alleged practitioners of a ‘classic’
ethnography, said to involve ‘observing’ people rather than ‘being with’ them, we would
draw attention here to the other half of ‘classic’ ethnography’s method: participant
observation. This, in many respects, points to the very same efforts at ‘sharing’ that a
multisensory ethnography espouses (though not addressed in Pink’s article). In Schutz’s
(1944) analysis of stranger/member relationships already mentioned, he draws attention
both to members’ inability to perceive their own cultural patterns as well as, on the
stranger’s part, the conventional (often stereotyped) cultural assumptions through which
the unfamiliar life-worlds of others are commonly judged. Schutz’s analysis suggests
that it is only the journey from distance to familiarization that enables the stranger both
to identify these assumptions in his or her own thinking and, potentially, to revise them.
If the journey is completed and the stranger assimilates the members’ cultural patterns as
his or her own, adopting their ‘usual thinking’, they become a matter of routine and
course, and s/he is no longer a stranger but a member.

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Dicks et al. 235

Participant observation, we would suggest, involves a delicate balancing of both

perspectives – departing on a journey but not arriving completely. Following from this,
as many have argued (from both ‘classic’ and more postmodern perspectives), achieving
understanding through thinking oneself into the experiences of others, as Pink proposes,
is not a straightforward matter. While Pink’s commitment to reflexivity acknowledges
this difficulty, it is still unclear how confining attention to the sensory realm alone
might allow us to know what cultural values are at work, how they impinge on experi-
ence, what their provenance is and how they might change over time. In many ways,
these concerns resonate with the question of social ordering, rather than experience
alone, pointed to by Atkinson et al. (2008). Nevertheless, it should be recognized that
neither is it straightforward, in multimodality’s case, to identify precisely how signifiers
are used by members to make new signs and what effect those prior uses might have. The
emphasis on people ‘choosing’ and ‘using’ signifiers (as Kress puts it) in social situations
invites us to analyse that which escapes experience through the processes of semiosis –
hence his challenge to specify the ‘epistemological commitments’ at play. These would
seem to require study of the reverberations of prior instances of semiosis that might
possibly ensnare us in infinite webs of meaning (as Derrida observed).
Our analysis here has sought to tease out some of the ‘epistemological commit-
ments’ of both approaches, though we recognize that in doing so we risk overstating
both the differences between them as well as underplaying those within them. Indeed,
there are numerous instances where both perspectives have been fruitfully brought
together, as in the study of children’s literacy and indeed, as the last two articles in this
special issue attest. Yet it is the intersection itself that is arguably of greatest interest to
qualitative methodologists. Any significant evolution in approaches adopted in social
research is likely to cause a shift in the stances of existing scholars in relevant fields of
study, and a shaking down of current theoretical and methodological positions. We
hope that the articles in this special issue will convince even those who are not com-
fortable with the theories and methods of social semiotics and multimodality that the
evolution of thinking they represent demands some kind of positional review, both
ontologically and epistemologically. We feel that this is the beginning of a discussion
that we hope will be continued by readers of this issue and scholars in both these fields.

Note
1. There is an important body of work implicitly referred to here, namely ethnomethodology,
which we do not directly discuss due to lack of space, but which has some relevance for the
discussion of the locus of meaning in relation to the social. Many of its practitioners have
carried out extensive multimodal studies of gesture, gaze, bodily action, and so forth, which,
as they show, serve just as significantly as talk in accomplishing the ongoing interactions of
the social order (see Goodwin, 2000; Heath, 1986; Heath and Hindmarsh, 2002; Heath et al.,
2002). For ethnomethodologists, meaning is always internal to the social situation, necessitat-
ing a restricted analytic focus on unfolding action and ‘emic’ perspectives, and a refusal to
countenance the influence of ‘culture’, ideology, professional frameworks or other dimensions
of explanation enlisted by the researcher rather than revealed by members themselves. Its
points of similarity with and difference to sensory ethnography offer an interesting topic for
further discussion.

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236 Qualitative Research 11(3)

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Biographical notes
Bella Dicks is Reader in Sociology in Cardiff School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University. Her
interest in qualitative methodology stems from many years’ work into the uses and potential of new
digital technologies for social research, including the study of hypermedia and multimedia. Her
2005 book (co-authored with Mason, Coffey and Atkinson), Qualitative Research and Hypermedia,
is published by Sage, who will also publish the forthcoming four-volume Major Work edited by
her entitled Digital Qualitative Research Methods.
Rosie Flewitt is an Academic Fellow in the Educational Dialogue Research Unit, The Open
University, UK. Her main research interests include video ethnographies of young children’s mul-
timodal communication and literacy learning in home and education settings, particularly in early
years education.
Lesley Lancaster is Reader in Education at the Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester
Metropolitan University. Her research interests include the early understanding of symbolic refer-
ence, its development in home and natural settings, and the application of multimodal, analytic
approaches as tools in exploring the cognition of very young children.
Kate Pahl is a Senior Lecturer in Education at the Department of Educational Studies, University
of Sheffield. She has conducted a number of ethnographic studies of home and community literacy
practices. Her most recent study, ‘Writing in the home and in the street’ is funded through the
AHRC’s Connected Communities Research programme. She is the author, with Jennifer Rowsell,
of Artifactual Literacies: Every Object Tells a Story (New York: Teachers College Press, 2010).

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