Conference Agenda

In this session we want to work together to engage in multimodal analysis of digital stories created by people with learning disabilities, and family carers. The stories were told as part of a research “Tired of spinning plates": an exploration of mental health experiences of adult/older carers of adults with learning disabilities [NIHR ID 135080]. The overarching aim of the project was to generate new knowledge and understanding of the mental health experiences of carers of adults with learning disabilities (September, 2023-November, 2025). Drawing on participatory approaches, we worked with 17 parent carers, sibling carers and people with learning disabilities who created digital stories about their experiences of care and of mental health.

Thinking with disability

Digital storytelling is a multimedia approach to telling stories which is typically used to generate 3-to-5-minute short films (Oppel, 2025). These films bring together a mixture of images, video, voice recording, music, sound, and text to narrate the storytellers' experiences of their everyday lives (Gubrium et al., 2014). Multimodality is typically valued as a way of enhancing meaning, increasing clarity and enriching storytelling (Walters, 2018).

And yet, digital storytelling approaches and multimodal analysis have not always embraced the diverse ways in which people experience the world (Pink, 2011; Douglas et al., 2021; Walters 2018). The literacy theorist Gunther Kress describes ‘multimodality’ as "the normal state of human communication” and this appeal to “normal” has invited critique (Kress, 2010:1 cited in Walters, 2018). Writing from an anthropological perspective, Pink (2018) has criticised Kress’s failure to recognise the dominance of Western thinking in the development of multimodal analysis, and argues for an approach to multimodality which embraces culture, meaning and experience, and Walters (2018) has questioned both the accessibility of digital storytelling to disabled people, and a wider failure to consider diverse storytellers and audiences (Walters, 2015).

Spinning analysis

In this session, we plan to screen 3 short films created as part of the Spinning Plates project. We invite audience members to engage with us in a multimodal analysis from a critical disability studies perspective (Walters, 2018). First, this means that we want to explore the moments in which the stories disrupt dominant ableist narratives which (re)produce beliefs and practices which are based on the unquestioned assumption that the ‘able’ body-mind is the ideal type (Woolbring, 2008). Second, we want to pay attention to the moments in which stories frustrate dominant (Western) narrative forms and generate new ways of thinking about “coherence” in storytelling (Walters, 2015:5).

Session Plan

In this session we will invite the audience to engage with three digital stories created by three storytellers (a person with a learning disability; a parent carer and a sibling carer).

In the session, we will:

1. Introductions and overview of the session

2. Contextualise the stories: introduce the project and explain where the digital stories come from.

3. Invite audience members to analyse the digital stories using the multimodal analysis framework grounded in a critical disability studies perspective.

4. We will show 3 x 5 minute films and ask audience members to use the framework to analyse at least one film of their choice. .

5. Discussion: we will reflect on the responses to the films and the approach to analysis during the session.

Following the session we will:

1. Contact audience members who sign up to be co-authors on the paper to ask them to sense check our thematic analysis of the collated responses to the films using the framework analysis.

2. We will share the final author copy of the co-authored paper for comment before submission.

3. We will submit the multiple co-authored paper to Societies journal.

References

Gubrium, A. C., Hill, A. L., & Flicker, S. (2014). A situated practice of ethics for participatory visual and digital methods in public health research and practice: A focus on digital storytelling. American Journal of Public Health, 104(9), 1606–1614. https://

doi.org/10.2105/ajph.2013.301310

Kress, G. (2009). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. Routledge.

Oppel, A. (2025) Digital storytelling as an act of academic courage https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2025/04/20/digital-storytelling-as-an-act-of-academic-courage/

Pink, S. (2011). Multimodality, multisensoriality and ethnographic knowing: Social semiotics and the phenomenology of perception. Qualitative research, 11(3), 261-276.

Walters, S. (2018). A Different Kind of Wholeness: Disability Dis-Closure and Ruptured Rhetorics of Multimodal Collaboration and Revision in" The Ride Together". In Composition Forum (Vol. 39). Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition.

Wolbring, G. (2008). The Politics of Ableism, in “Development”, 51.