Reflections on multimodality: Making the most of Kairotic moments

Abstract

It is generally accepted in extant literature that friends drift away after a person receives a diagnosis of dementia. In turn, we set out to explore friendships that continued to flourish following a diagnosis by interviewing people living with dementia, their friends, and family members. Along the way, we shaped and adopted a multimodal approach, incorporating artistically rendered, fictionalised vignettes based on our participants’ stories, thus incorporating visual and auditory components that encourage people living with dementia and their friends to reflect on how best to continue to nurture their relationships. In this article, we describe our process of adopting multimodality through an intertwined set of five kairotic moments, whereby we pushed ourselves out of our comfort zones to move beyond the format of the conventional peer-reviewed journal article, recognising the need to write differently to reach a broader audience. In another moment, we moved past an academic emphasis on writing to adopt multimodality. Subsequently, we connected with artists and knowledge mobilisation specialists to bring our collective vision to life. Finally, we aimed to make our study findings more accessible by sharing them through our website and engaging with various types of media. We conclude by offering a methodology for multimodality that includes relationality, axiology, passivity and action and temporality in embracing opportunities to write differently.