Narrative Visual Methodologies: Mapping heteroglossia through family photos

The paper has a methodological focus, discussed in relation to examples from an auto-ethnographic study with the working title Family Anecdotes. The main methodological question is how to map storytelling practice as a process for unfolding multiple cultural and social contexts of meaning using a memory work approach. The multiplicity regards the dialogic concept of heteroglossia introduced by Bakhtin (1981) and the multiple variations of languages and perspectives within languages and ways of ordering the linguistic interplay, for instance, of the comic novel. Heteroglossia has accompanying concerns about how multi-voiced dialogue as discourse or language exists as a sort of dynamic energy that links, ties or connects heterogeneous cultural contexts. Multi-voiced “relatedness” can be seen as a web of cultural resources that connect us empathically with one another – across personal identities, families, language and historical epochs.
My aim is to build a methodological framework for contemplating the links (multi-voiced relations) in and among units and layers of discursive complexities. Focus is on how the cultural, linguistic links are entangled with global changes, as well as family stories and embodied experience of particular persons. Theoretically and methodologically, I draw on dialogic, relational approaches to storytelling and multimodal narrative that grapple with conveying the complexities of cultural, linguistic and historical contexts of memory.