ABSTRACT
In Indigenous women’s sand stories from Central Australia, speaking, singing and sometimes signing may accompany drawings inscribed on the soft desert sand. No single disciplinary field provides the tools and theoretical frameworks to account for the complexity of these multimodal performances. An interdisciplinary approach, however, can shed light on the ways that these different resources for making meaning are integrated and how they are employed dynamically in the process of storytelling. At the same time, applying methodologies habitually used in one field to complex data from another has the potential to challenge disciplinary boundaries and deepen understandings of how such diverse expressive potentials work together.
