‘Partnerships in research’: multimodality and ethnography

Argued from the perspective of a Social Semiotic Multimodal theory the article asks whether and in what ways ‘Ethnography’ and ‘Social Semiotics’ can or should be brought together to mutual advantage. It suggests that such an enterprise is ‘of its time’: the world as mirrored in existing disciplines has changed and the disciplines that co-constituted and co-evolved with that world can no longer do the job they once did in a now differently constituted world, which poses problems that may need the complementary capacities of related theories and methodologies. This is not an argument for ‘triangulation of data’. Drawing on examples from empirical research, the article points to the gaps which may emerge between research aims and the capacities of specific theories and methodologies to provide, or not, adequate and full answers to aims and questions. Through exemplifications the article raises questions about ‘epistemological compatibility’ of theories and methodologies that are brought into conjunction and asks to what extent we can expect descriptive and analytic complementarity in outcomes if two approaches are epistemologically incompatible? In this, the article opens the new issue of the ‘reach of a theory’.