Practice-based research: multimodal explorations through poetry and painting

In this article, I investigate the practice-based research project called the poetry-to-painting project that the independent German artist, Andrea Brandt, who has also been a participant in two of my ethnographic studies on identity production, and I are involved in. (Norris and Brandt, 2011) illustrates Andrea’s early to current emotive stages that she links to the lifechanging event, her divorce. Taking this project as my example, I develop some theoretical thoughts and demonstrate how a practicebased project embeds and produces theoretical thought. In order to establish this theoretical thinking, I lean on mediated discourse theory (Scollon, 1998, 2001) and multimodal (inter)action analysis (Norris, 2004, 2011a). Through this project, the notion of is revisited, as is the notion of practice and nexus of practice as these pertain to the practice-based research project. Throughout the article, I show that practice-based research may gain by taking a multimodal mediated approach. This approach fosters a new way of thinking and thereby fosters the development of knowledge through practice-based research.