Theory-building in the social, material and postdigital worlds of play: Participatory research and multimodal discourse analysis

Abstract

This article is about using participatory research and multimodal discourse analysis to scaffold theory-building, with a focus on how children draw on their lifeworlds, folkloric imagination, and media experiences to generate meanings in, and through, their play. It draws on a tradition of research which employs a multimodal semiotic lens to analyse interaction and communication between social actors in combination with sociocultural theory to generate hypotheses about a phenomenon. The focus is on how multimodal discourse analysis operates when partnered in research designs with other interpretive constructs, drawn from sociocultural, socio-material and postdigital frames. Examples are featured from two research projects centred on children’s play, and the central argument here is that play, with its reference points in media, popular culture and traditional folkloric forms is a particular location for theory-building on the postdigital nature of contemporary lived experience.