Recipes for Mothering
Multimodal analysis of food blogs
This collaborative project built on strong methodological synergies between two NCRM Nodes – NOVELLA and MODE. The project aims were methodological – to compare and combine multimodal and narrative frameworks for analyzing blogs – and substantive – to examine the role of food and the construction of mothering and fathering in online visual and textual narratives about feeding families.
The expanding reach of the Internet has opened new sites for conducting social science research. The prominence of blogs in combination with their varied areas of focus makes them a rich source of qualitative 'user-generated data'. However, there are significant practical challenges in empirical research on digital material online. Despite their importance in contemporary communication blogs remain under-researched.
This project uniquely focused on the ways in which discourses about mothering, fathering and food emerged in blog narratives. The study combined multimodal social semiotic, ethnographic and narrative methods to examine food blogs created on Wordpress platforms and 'considered the ethical, archival and methodological issues involved.
Publications can be found here