ABSTRACT
The three pictures that begin this chapter appear in digital stories about an odyssey of self. Caspian, 1 a student featured in the research reported here, launches his story by looking at the viewer as he leans out of a train window; Esme presents a map of Australia with a gradual encircling of her childhood home in Cairns, Australia; and Brian starts his film with a digital clock set at 6 a.m., the time he awoke every day in Israel, before he and his family relocated to the United States. Where one film captures a moment in time as an enduring memory, the other depicts a movement from one part of the world to another; and the final one, relives a past moment quite different from the present. These images express agencies and lived histories. The visual triptych embodies an argument put forth in the chapter that multimodality affords more complete expression of habitus (see Bourdieu, 1990a/1980: 55ff.) than mono-modality. Each image gives a viewer a slice of someone's life, what I call in this chapter fractal habitus – that is ‘pieces’ of habitus. Throughout Bourdieu's work, there is a constant dialogue about the ways in which habitus shifts during improvisation and cultural production. This chapter is an attempt to develop a language for the subtle shifts in habitus revealed during individual creative expression. Through gestures and movement in drama; through medium and colour saturation or desaturation in painting; and through visuals accompanied with music in film these modal choices embody parts of self in artistic and creative work. In an attempt to use Bourdieu's notion of habitus as a means of viewing how meaning-makers represent their everyday in representation and production, the chapter documents a High School ethnography and the ways in which teenagers ‘sediment’ fractiles of habitus in their production of digital stories. The study combines ethnography with multimodality by looking at a community and a group of students who use multimodality to represent their lived histories, families, and dispositions in order to foster a greater understanding of a canonical text. These ‘multimodal’ readings of lived histories illustrate arguments put forth in the chapter: that inspiration for self-expression grows from transacting with the everyday; and, that modal choice offers more creativity and expression. In the research reported in the chapter, ‘fractal habitus’ is interpreted through choices made during the production of digital stories.
