The mess in the middle: Portraying the unrecorded purposeful labors of care that emerge throughout multimodal ethnographic methods and researcher peer support

In this “Reflections from the Field,” we describe and interrogate our ongoing engagements with designing, conducting, and documenting multimodal field research as early-career ethnographic education researchers. Our Multimodal Scholarship Working Group engages with content across media and multimodal methods to promote collaboration and support. This approach helps our community of emerging scholars develop their multimodal ethnographic research practices, allowing simultaneous input from diverse sources and fostering access, play, and experimentation throughout the research process. We argue that a peer support network is necessary for emerging and early-career researchers as they prepare to enter the field of educational research, especially in an emerging subfield like multimodal ethnography.