This special issue of Qualitative Research was produced in the context of a comparatively 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 traditions, 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 different 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 controversies 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
This article argues that young children are capable of complex abstract reasoning which is rooted in their physical and emotional engagement with the world. It suggests that even apparently commonplace representative objects are not transparent, and children are faced with a major interpretative problem when becoming familiar with symbolic images and objects. It also suggests that young children are motivated by an expectation of significance about the symbolic systems they encounter, including systems of low modality like writing. Their interpretative activity is mediated through physical and bodily resources, of which gaze is of major significance to sighted children when reasoning about visual, spatial modes of symbolic representation. The article presents a micro-semiotic, multimodal analysis of a small section of video film in which a two year old child is engaged, with her father, in drawing and marking: representing and interpreting graphic signs. Three functions of gaze are identified during this activity: analytic, interpersonal and expressive. The systematic and motivated coordination of these types of gaze with other bodily modes, including language, is shown. The article concludes that the boundaries between young children's bodily and cognitive activity can be seen to be flexible, making many of their processes of reasoning and interpretation about systems of symbolic representation accessible to description.
This article reports on some of the findings of an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded project that looks at the mark-making of children under three years old. The data were all collected in the children's homes, and multimodal transcription and analyses were used. The project focused on an investigation of the principles that children use when they first start to construct signs that associate the making of marks with the representation of personal meanings, including those that relate to systems of writing. The article is set in the wider context of discussion of related educational practice. Two findings are discussed in detail, with a presentation of exemplar evidence from analyses of the mark-making of two of the children. In the first, the relationship between marks made by young children, and systems and notations of drawing, writing and number is considered; evidence from this research suggests that while they draw on these systems, young children produce graphic signs that have an independent status, and that have relational structures that refer to other signs within the text, as well as to external objects and experiences. The second finding looks at how children use everyday social and bodily experiences to evolve predictable mark-making structures, and examines this process of grammaticization in a child's construction of an inventory.
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