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Sharing photographs and photo-chatting are common practices in doing family at a distance. This study looks at the processes of the production and circulation of photographs within the family network, analysing participants’ narratives about their image-based communication in WhatsApp. The data was collected as an ethnographic enquiry into the digitally mediated (transnational) family communication of five Polish women and their children living in Finland. It consists of five auto-driven visual elicitation interviews with an interactive collage, three elicitation interviews, with the participant’s smartphone used for fast reference to their in-app chats, and one semi-structured interview. The in-app photographs are explored as ‘imagetext’, that is, visual and verbal representations that create the WhatsApp ‘iconology’ of family visual communication. In participants’ narratives, photographs are regarded as an obligation (always to be sent to somebody), evidence (of being somewhere or achieving something), or a form of visual co-presence with living-apart relatives. Photo-chatting entertains (images of pets), provides expertise (snaps of medication), or is used to show off (photos taken at competitions). Photo-chatting helps to maintain family relationships by showing affection, comforting, and caring over a distance. peerReviewed

This chapter discusses participant-induced elicitation interview (PIE) in the light of two fieldwork cases focusing on Finnish lifestyle blogging and older adults as ICT users. By definition, elicitation refers to a process where something, such as a response, meaning, or answer, is evoked in or drawn out from an interviewee. PIE is based on photo-elicitation, where the interviewee is asked to take photographs dealing with the topics of the research. The central idea of PIE as participant-induced elicitation is based on the active agency of the person collaborating with the researcher. Under the premises of the research, the interviewee creates something subjective and personal that can be further examined and developed together with the researcher. PIE can serve as an icebreaker in situations where getting into the field has proved difficult through focusing on the personal life of the interviewee. It also serves a very specific sensitizing function in interviews. peerReviewed

In ethnographically oriented linguistic landscape studies, social spaces are studied in co-operation with research participants, many times through mobile encounters such as walking. Talking, walking, photographing and video recording as well as writing the fieldwork diary are activities that result in the accumulation of heterogeneous, multimodal corpora. We analyze data from a Hungarian school ethnography project to reconstruct fieldwork encounters and analyze embodiment, the handling of devices (e.g. the photo camera) and verbal interaction in exploratory, participant-led walking tours. Our analysis shows that situated practices of embodied conduct and verbal interaction blur the boundaries between observation and observers, and thus LL research is not only about space- and place-making and sense-making routines, but the fieldwork encounters are also transformative and contribute to space- and place-making themselves. Our findings provide insight for ethnographic researchers and enrich the already robust qualitative and quantitative strategies employed in the field.

This article reports a study on an encounter between preschoolers and contemporary photography. The article has two aims: first, it elucidates preschoolers’ meaningmaking when viewing photographs, and second, it investigates the possible benefits of using contemporary photography as a forum for prompting children’s aesthetic agency in early childhood education. This article is based on a qualitative case study that draws on childhood studies, research in art education and visual cultural studies. The data was produced in a photography workshop in a Finnish daycare center in autumn 2014 during which children both viewed contemporary photographic art and took photographs themselves. The article reports on preschoolers’ accounts of contemporary photography studied by applying discourse analytic thinking. In contrast to earlier research findings, the article elucidates diversity and flexibility in the preschoolers’ accounts and their aesthetic agency expressed in both individual and collective meaning-making. peerReviewed