Contribution short abstract:

The paper is grounded in a creative walking project with young male asylum seekers. Participants used digital media tools to explore their local environment. The aim is to explore how an ethnographic ‘field’ emerges as multimodally constituted, where knowledge is generated through co-creation.

Contribution long abstract:

As the programme of this panel suggests multimodal interventions may be key to moving beyond the textual as the single most powerful medium of representation. This paper will engage with this idea and seek to draw out potentials of multimodality which include, yet also move beyond issues of representation. These revolve around generating experimental modes of fieldwork and unexpected conversations, encounters, and stories.

The paper is grounded in the author’s involvement with a ‘walking project’ in which visual and digital media were used as practical, sensory and collaborative tools of sense making. It involved collaborating with artists, community partners and a group of young forced migrants who used digital tools to explore a national park in southern England. Filming and audio recording equipment was instrumental to collaboration and to forms of multisensorial perception and creativity.

The paper will draw on some of the visual creations (e.g. video, collage) that were produced in this project, to reflect on multimodality as a form of ‘reading’ an environment and its tangible materiality, as well as a form of edited representation that tells a story. The overall aim is to explore how an ethnographic ‘field’ emerges as a multimodally constituted field which generates pluralist voices and perspectives and in which a mode of ‘participant observation’ makes way for a mode of co-creation and the endeavour to create knowledge ‘with’ rather than ‘about’ others.