Carrying my family with me: artifacts as emic perspectives

Artifacts and the stories that they sustain hold promise as a research tool to access information that might not be possible through observation, document analysis, even interviews. In the following article, I present data from an ethnographic study with a focus on valued objects and videotaped interviews about these objects with adolescents who hold them dear. In so doing, I couple ethnography with multimodality to show how material worlds are anchored to contexts and to subjectivities. There is a thread between materialities that tie the things we love with the places we inhabit; ethnography as a lens for multimodal meaning-making allows me to interpret this. The aim and argument put forth is that the traditions of multimodality and ethnography should be braided to lift out how materialities exist within modes. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]