The collaborative project builds on strong methodological synergies between two NCRM Nodes – MODE and NOVELLA. The project aims are 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. Blogs are a contemporary digital platform widely kept and read across different social and cultural groups for a wide range of different purposes. There are significant practical and methodological challenges in empirical research of ephemeral digital material, of which blogs are an excellent example. Despite their importance in contemporary communication such materials remain under-researched. To our knowledge there is no previous research on the ways in which discourses about mothering, fathering and food emerge in blog narratives. Further, food blogs are a potential source of information for policy making in public health, but there are no apt frameworks of analysis to harness this potential.

Project Investigators:

Gunther Kress (PI) (MODE)
Carey Jewitt (MODE)
Myrrh Domingo (MODE)
Elisabetta Adami (MODE)
Rebecca O’Connell (NOVELLA).
Corinne Squire (NOVELLA)
Heather Elliott (NOVELLA).