ABSTRACT
Throughout this book, I have called attention to multimodality as an emerging and multidisciplinary field that needs to draw on a wide range of different disciplines both theoretically and methodologically (van Leeuwen, 2011). As a researcher engaged in multimodal research in a range of contexts, countries, and communities, I turn to diverse perspectives such as social semiotics, sociocultural approaches, New Literacy Studies, new literacies, visual methodologies, ethnography, and visual anthropology. Understanding how these different disciplines interact, how they are best combined, and how analysis should proceed are still relatively new enterprises in multimodal research, and there is considerable room for new developments and applications (van Leeuwen, 2011). These new enterprises will require “moments of self-reflection” (van Leeuwen, 2011, p. 679) and an accounting for the diverse ways we make and take meaning through overlapping and multiple modes of representation, including our own performances in them (Byrd Clark & Dervin, 2014). In this chapter, I take up the challenge of self-reflection (reflexivity) in multimodal ethnographic research by drawing on Barthes’s (1980) concept of “advenience” (i.e., an image’s element of disharmony) to situate myself in the analysis of child-created multimodal texts.
