Seeing, Hearing, Feeling the World: Why We Need Multimodal Ethnography

To be honest: the world is too complex, too messy, and too beautifully chaotic to be captured by words alone. Think about how you really understand something — a city, a person, a protest, a smell that reminds you of home. It’s not just facts or text that bring meaning. It’s the sights, sounds, textures, and emotions. It’s fragments and feelings. It’s what you can’t quite explain — but still deeply know.

That’s why we need multimodal ethnography.

Ethnography — the art and science of understanding how people live, think, and feel — has long relied on notebooks and interviews. But life today plays out on many stages: in Instagram feeds and WhatsApp chats, in street performances and soundscapes, in bodies and buildings, in art and activism. Our methods need to catch up.

Multimodal ethnography embraces this reality. It uses film, sound, drawing, digital tools, and performance alongside — or instead of — traditional writing. It’s not about adding some fancy visuals to a paper. It’s about reimagining how we know what we know.

It allows researchers to:

• Co-create meaning with the people they study, rather than speaking about them from a distance.

• Capture experiences that aren’t easily put into words — like grief, joy, or the smell of mushrooms in a forest.

• Break down academic walls and reach broader audiences — through comics, exhibitions, podcasts, or immersive storytelling.

Most importantly, it makes space for different ways of knowing and sharing knowledge — not just the polished, linear, word-heavy ways that dominate universities and journals. Because let’s face it: the world isn’t linear. And it doesn’t come with subtitles.

Multimodal ethnography is as much about feeling as it is about thinking. It is collaborative, creative, and deeply political. It asks: Whose stories are told? How are they told? Who gets to tell them? In uncertain times, when our world is being reshaped by climate change, technology, and global inequalities, we need methods that help us stay open — to difference, to complexity, to possibility. Multimodal ethnography doesn’t promise easy answers. But it offers new ways to listen, to connect, and to imagine — together.

Want to read more? Sandro Simon and I captured some of these ideas in our German-speaking contribution on Multimodal Ethnography here.

Picture by Gerardo Manzano (Pexels).