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Paper short abstract

This paper reflects on collaborative multimodal ethnography in a mental health therapeutic community in Portugal, showing how photography, video, and digital storytelling open sensory, affective, and dialogical spaces that challenge moralising binaries and foster co-produced knowledge.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the potential of collaborative multimodal ethnography as an experimental practice in a mental health therapeutic context marked by institutional tensions, disciplinary regimes, and polarised narratives about addiction. The ethnographic field is traversed by institutional logics that oppose ill and healthy subjects, addicted and recovered, producing moralising binaries structuring care regimes, temporalities of recovery, and normative expectations. This research adopts the notion of "individuals with addictive behaviours and dependencies" as an analytical, ethical, and methodological strategy to unsettle stigmatising categories and reinscribe addiction in lived, relational, and contingent experiences. Based on fieldwork in a therapeutic community in Portugal, I developed collaborative photography, video, and digital storytelling workshops with residents undergoing social reintegration. More than data collection tools, the workshops functioned as experimental devices for co-producing knowledge, in which images, sounds, and narratives activated sensory, affective, and dialogical dimensions of experience. I argue these multimodal practices make visible micro-forms of everyday resistance (Scott, 1985), understood as narrative, aesthetic, and relational gestures challenging clinical categories and therapeutic moralities. The creation of collaborative narratives produced methodological and subjective shifts. Throughout the process, experimental ethnography opened spaces for situated experiences, affects, memories, and forms of existence escaping logics of normalisation and pathologisation. From this perspective, multimodality is not only a research technique but a form of care (Mattingly, 2014) and an ethical practice of attention to the ordinary (Das, 2007). The paper discusses how ethnographic experimentation can foster dialogue, reflexivity, and understanding in deeply polarised worlds.