Photo Essay as Autoethnographic Multimodal Ensembles: Learning from the Compositional Practices of Two South Asian American University Students

• In Event: Unforgetting Multiple Histories and Imagining Multiple Futures of Asian(American) Im/migrant Literacies

Abstract

Using a comparative case study, I consider how Neha and Aziza, two South Asian American university students enrolled in a university-level course on South Asian American history, leverage the photo essay as a form of autoethnographic multimodal ensemble. Emanating from journalism and adapted as a pedagogical exercise across disciplines (Grimwood et al., 2015; Sensoy, 2011) the photo essay has been undertheorized as a form of multimodal composition. I contend that when anchored in the research on the compositional practices of students in ethnic studies courses (de los Ríos, 2017; 2020) and drawing on visual autoethnographies (Heller, 2024) and critical multimodal composition (Doerr-Stevens, 2016), the photo essay is a medium that enables the interpolation of the personal and familiar in larger histories of race, ethnicity, gender, migration, religion, and sexuality.
Specifically, I inquire into ways Neha and Aziza employ original digital photography, textual hybridity, and compositional tools such as framing and sequencing to examine aspects of identity that reflect larger themes in South Asian American history. As the instructor of a collegiate ethnic studies course on the South Asian diaspora in the United States, I invited students to complete a scaffolded and self-directed final project of their choosing, including the photo essay; 7 out of 45 students opted into this genre. The photo essays produced by Neha, a bilingual (Gujarati/English) 19-year-old Indian American woman, and Aziza, a queer, bilingual (Urdu/English) 22-year-old Pakistani American woman, were chosen for further analysis given their textual and conceptual density. I use Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (Machin & Mayr, 2013) together with retrospective design interviews (Smith & Dalton, 2016; Smith et al., 2021) to uncover the two students’ compositional decision-making. In exploring labor, race and migration in her family’s motel business, Neha weaves together personal anecdotes, academic discourse, and a series of digital photographs that move towards increasing levels of intimacy. In capturing a non-traditional Pakistani American Muslim wedding in her community, Aziza shares her perspectives on rituals, gender, and the recreation of new social norms in what she calls ‘wedding as possibility.’ In learning from Neha and Aziza’s detailed conceptual process in creating their photo essays, we are able to better understand how the multimodal resources embedded in the photo essay form encourage a particular form of autoethnographic exploration. The study aspires to reveal affordances of photo essay as an autoethnographic tool and contribute to the research on critical multimodal composition in and out of ethnic studies settings.

Author

• Mohit P. Mehta, Texas State University