Multisensory discourse resources: decolonizing ethnographic research practices

Abstract

Researchers have attempted to address the intersection of multisensory and multimodal discourse practices from an interactional perspective. This study argues for the value of experiential, non-interactional multisensory discourse resources and proposes a conceptual framework of multisensory discourse resources to bridge visual and family language ideology ethnography. A year-long ethnographic case study of three Nepalese families (immigrant and transmigrant), consisting of 150 h of observational data triangulated with qualitative interviews, posed two questions: (1) How do transnational families, in the homescape, use multisensory discourse resources to provide cultural, national, religious, and ethnic identity framing? (2) How can transnational migrant and multilingual family language researchers ethically collect and analyse multisensory discourse resources as qualitative data? The findings highlight experiential multisensory discourse resources as threads of identity in the home that have yet to be fully recognised as research evidence by family language ideology and visual ethnography researchers.