A Reflexive and Multimodal Methodological Strategy for Researching Social Inclusion: Integrating Narrative,Mobile,and Visual Tools

Abstract

Social inclusion unfolds through everyday movement and encounter and is shaped by embodied, affective, and spatial dynamics. Conceptualizing in/exclusion as layered and co-occurring, this article examines how a multimodal methodological assemblage can generate situated knowledge about lived experiences of inclusion in urban environments in the context of autism. Grounded in González Rey’s Theory of Meaning Production and a primarily autoethnographic design, the study shows how embodied walkscapes, social mapping, and reflexive field diary writing operate together to make perceptible affective–spatial configurations that often remain inaccessible to verbocentric qualitative approaches. The article makes a methodological contribution. Using self-generated materials produced through recurrent urban walkscapes and reflexive documentation during research conducted in 2024, it demonstrates how movement, spatial inscription, and reflexive interpretation enable epistemic access to embodied rhythms, affective nodes, spatial interruptions, and atmospheric gradients. Participatory mapping with caregivers is included as contextual methodological work within the broader research setting but is not treated as collaborative autoethnographic data. The article explicates the analytic operations and epistemic boundaries of multimodal integration. By detailing how insights emerge through circulation across embodied, visual–spatial, and reflexive modalities, the study proposes a transferable methodological framework for researching lived experience across diverse contexts.

1. Introduction

Qualitative inquiry has increasingly recognized the limitations of verbally centred approaches for accessing the embodied, affective, and spatial dimensions of lived experience. This challenge is particularly salient in research involving families of autistic children, whose daily trajectories reveal both symbolic barriers—such as stigma, surveillance, and normative expectations—and physical barriers embedded in infrastructures, services, and urban design (Marcotte et al., 2022). These symbolic and physical barriers are treated analytically as interrelated dimensions shaping everyday processes of in/exclusion. In fields concerned with mobility, sensory engagement, and territorial inscription, researchers have advanced methods that move beyond representational accounts toward more-than-textual forms of knowing (Ingold, 2011; Pink, 2015). Within this landscape, mobile, visual, and reflexive methodologies have gained prominence for examining how individuals inhabit and make sense of space, drawing on techniques such as walking-based inquiry, visual and cartographic practices, and autoethnographic writing.

This article contributes to these methodological debates by proposing a multimodal assemblage integrating embodied walkscapes, participatory social mapping, and reflexive autoethnography to investigate lived processes of inclusion in the everyday mobility of a family with an autistic child. Each modality performs a distinct epistemic operation—walking as embodied sensing, mapping as spatial inscription, and autoethnography as reflexive meaning-making—yet their analytical value emerges through their articulation rather than through their isolated use. These modalities are introduced here as an integrated methodological toolkit, whose specific operationalization is detailed in the Methodology section. The epistemological grounding of this design draws on constructivist–relational perspectives on meaning production (González Rey, 2005, 2014; González Rey & Mitjáns Martínez, 2017), which conceptualize subjectivity as a symbolic–emotional configuration shaped through the interplay of embodiment, affect, materiality, and context.

Although mobile and visual qualitative approaches have expanded considerably over the past decade, scholarship has rarely examined the methodological contributions that emerge specifically from the integration of these modalities into a coherent assemblage. Much of the literature treats walking, mapping, and reflexive writing as discrete techniques, paying limited attention to how their articulation produces specific epistemic operations. Recent work in multimodal and affective methodologies has underscored the need for approaches capable of attending to relational, atmospheric, and pre-reflective dimensions of experience, while studies on autistic experience emphasize the importance of spatial, sensory, and affective conditions that shape everyday participation (Billington et al., 2025).

This gap becomes even more relevant in contexts such as Chile, where fragmented service infrastructures, territorial inequities, and uneven urban conditions produce complex mobility patterns for families of autistic children. These spatial and institutional asymmetries cannot be adequately captured through verbally centred methods alone, requiring instead methodological strategies capable of engaging with embodied movements, affective atmospheres, and spatial inscriptions.

To address this gap, the article articulates and examines a multimodal methodological assemblage designed to investigate embodied, affective, and spatial aspects of lived experience. The aim is methodological rather than substantive: the focus lies in clarifying the epistemic operations enabled by the assemblage and the analytical possibilities that emerge through its application. Recent theoretical–methodological work on qualitative assemblages provides a useful anchor for conceptualizing how heterogeneous modalities can be integrated to generate relational, affective, and spatially attuned knowledge.

Aligned with this aim, the study was guided by the following research question: How can a multimodal methodological assemblage generate epistemic access to embodied, affective, and spatial dimensions of lived experiences of in/exclusion? The following section outlines the epistemological foundations and methodological construction of the assemblage, detailing how embodied walking, participatory mapping, and reflexive autoethnography function as interconnected modes of data production. The subsequent section presents the analytical operations and forms of methodological evidence generated through the assemblage. The discussion situates these contributions in relation to contemporary debates in mobile, visual, and autoethnographic methods. Finally, the conclusion synthesizes the methodological implications and boundaries of this multimodal design and considers its relevance for advancing qualitative research on embodied and spatial forms of lived experience.

2. Methodological Approach

2.1. Epistemological Orientation

This study is grounded in a constructivist–relational epistemology, drawing on the theory of meaning production (González Rey, 2005, 2014; González Rey & Mitjáns Martínez, 2017). From this perspective, subjectivity is a dynamic symbolic–emotional process emerging through embodied experience in sociomaterial contexts. Knowledge is not treated as representation of a stable external reality but as a situated production shaped through the researcher’s embodied engagement. This position aligns with relational and performative strands of autoethnography that treat knowledge as embodied and emergent (Adams et al., 2015; Holman Jones, 2005).

Within this orientation, the autoethnographic framework is explicitly individual rather than collaborative: analytical materials are generated through the researcher’s embodied trajectory. Accordingly, the study conceptualizes knowing as emerging through interrelated epistemic operations—embodied, affective, and spatial—that are not fully accessible through verbocentric accounts alone. This provides the rationale for a multimodal methodological assemblage in which walking, mapping, and reflexive writing function as epistemic actions: walking foregrounds embodied and affective cues, mapping materializes these cues as spatial inscriptions, and reflexive writing configures their symbolic–emotional significance. In meaning-production terms, these operations enable configurations of meaning to emerge through their articulation, framing the assemblage as a situated epistemic practice through which meaning is produced at the intersection of body, space, and affect.

2.2. Autoethnographic Positionality

Autoethnography is mobilized here as a situated, relational, and embodied mode of inquiry. Rather than centring on autobiographical narration, the study aligns with relational and performative approaches that treat lived experience as a methodological site—one in which embodied rhythms, hesitations, intensities, and affective responses become analytically consequential (Adams et al., 2015; Holman Jones, 2005).

Positionality is therefore not treated as contaminating “bias” but as an epistemic condition through which affective and spatial dimensions of in/exclusion become available to analysis. The first author’s embodied trajectory constitutes the primary site of material generation and interpretation. While limited procedural and dialogical support was involved at specific stages, this did not entail collaborative autoethnographic co-production or shared analytic authorship; the epistemic centre of gravity remains first-person.

The epistemic boundaries of this approach are explicit. The materials are situated and non-universal and are not intended to support generalizable claims. Instead, they function as methodological evidence of what the multimodal assemblage renders perceptible across embodied movement, spatial inscription, and reflexive interpretation, consistent with a meaning-production orientation in which knowledge is generated through situated subjective configurations (González Rey, 2005, 2014) (Figures 1–3).

Figure 1.

Sequential articulation of the methodological assemblage. Walkscapes, understood as a walking interview along a meaningful route, are followed by social cartography, in which the route is rendered as a graphic map through a second interview, enabling cross-modal correspondences to become methodologically visible. Source: Author’s own elaboration

Figure 2.

Epistemic articulation of the multimodal assemblage. The diagram shows how sensory–affective cues circulate iteratively across embodied movement, spatial inscription, and reflexive interpretation, generating methodological evidence through cross-modal correspondences rather than through any single modality in isolation. Source: Author’s own elaboration

Figure 3.

Affective–spatial inscription of a walkscape route. The map visualizes affective nodes (tension, anxiety, safety) and an avoided zone represented as a discontinuous path that functions as a spatial absence in the trajectory. By rendering affective states and avoidance as spatial features, the figure makes thresholds and interruptions methodologically legible beyond what narrative description alone can capture. Source: Author’s own elaboration

2.3. Embodied Walkscapes

Walking was operationalized as an embodied and mobile methodology to engage with lived experiences of inclusion in urban environments. Walkscapes, understood as experiential trajectories through space, allow attention to rhythms, temporalities, sensory encounters and affective resonances that emerge through movement (Ingold, 2011; Pink, 2015). Walking exposes interruptions, tensions, flows and bodily adjustments that reflect how inclusion and exclusion materialize in everyday life.

Walking is conceptualized not simply as movement through space but as an epistemic practice that produces sensory and affective cues inaccessible through static, interview-based methods. Walkscapes generate first-person perceptual data that reveal atmospheric, affective and rhythmical dimensions of experience, thereby contributing to the multimodal assemblage’s analytical yield.

This first-person perceptual engagement enables the identification of micro-cues of inclusion and exclusion—such as infrastructural obstacles, affective discomfort, or spatial affordances—that would remain unnoticed in sedentary methodological designs (Vergunst, 2010). In this sense, walking operates as a mode of situated sensing through which the body encounters and negotiates sociomaterial worlds.

In this study, walkscapes were generated through the researcher’s own embodied movement, aligning with mobile ethnographic approaches that conceptualize walking as a first-person epistemic practice rather than a data-gathering technique applied to participants (Pink, 2007). Methodologically, the walkscape prompt script was drafted by the first author and reviewed by the co-authors. During selected walkscapes, a member of the research team accompanied the walk and verbalized the prompts, while the embodied trajectory, experiential narration, route selection, and reflexive engagement remained those of the first author.

Field notes, diary entries, and sensory–affective annotations were produced immediately after each walkscape following a consistent procedure that captured embodied sensations, affective intensities, and spatial cues in a structured reflexive log. This post-walkscape documentation ensured transparency regarding how embodied experiences were systematically translated into analytical material.

The embodied trajectories generated through walkscapes are later rendered analytically visible through schematic representations of affective thresholds, pauses, and rhythmic transitions, which are examined in the Results section (see Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Embodied walkscape trajectory and affective thresholds. The trajectory traces changes in pace and direction (acceleration, pause, hesitation), alongside an avoidance zone and an anticipatory territory, rendering embodied micro-interruptions analytically visible. Source: Author’s own elaboration

2.4. Social Mapping

Social mapping was employed as a visual–spatial technique that materializes embodied experiences into spatial inscriptions. Through mapping, affective encounters, interruptions, and relational intensities emerging during walkscapes were translated into visual traces. Rather than functioning as descriptive cartography, mapping operated as an analytical device capable of revealing spatial–affective patterns that are difficult to articulate through verbal accounts alone (Pain, 2019).

Maps are treated as analytical artefacts that condense affective and spatial information into a visual grammar, enabling the identification of clusters, thresholds, interruptions, and affective nodes. Their analytical value lies not in representing territory, but in making perceptible patterns that remain inaccessible through embodied movement or narrative in isolation.

This visual grammar supports the identification of spatial affordances and constraints that operate as catalysts of inclusion and exclusion, illuminating how sociomaterial arrangements shape everyday experiences in ways that are not always perceptible in embodied movement alone.

In this study, maps translated first-person embodied experiences into visual inscriptions, drawing on participatory social mapping traditions in which participation can be conceptualized as situated and emplaced engagement rather than as co-production with other research participants (Kwan, 2007; Pain, 2004). The maps were constructed iteratively by the first author by identifying routes, marking salient locations, tracing affective intensities, and coding symbolic–emotional associations.

To ensure methodological transparency, each map was created immediately after the walkscape by retracing the route, marking salient affective events, and annotating spatial interruptions using a structured mapping template. This procedure clarifies how mapping functioned as a systematically generated data source within the autoethnographic design and as a distinct analytical component of the multimodal assemblage.

2.5. Reflexive Field Diary

The reflexive field diary accompanied the research process as a methodological tool for articulating symbolic–emotional configurations and interpretive insights. Diary entries were produced following each walking and mapping session, enabling the systematic examination of affective disturbances, resonances, tensions, and symbolic elaborations emerging from embodied experience.

Each entry was generated through a structured post-walk procedure in which sensory impressions, affective shifts, and salient spatial cues were documented in a reflexive notebook. This procedure ensured transparency regarding how the diary functioned as an autoethnographic data source rather than as a personal record.

The diary is explicitly conceptualized as a methodological device—rather than a narrative account—that integrates embodied data generated through walking with spatial inscriptions produced through mapping. In this sense, it operates as a space of methodological synthesis within the multimodal assemblage, enabling the articulation of experience into symbolic–emotional configurations.

Its analytic value lies in integrating perceptual, affective and spatial cues to identify micro-dynamics of inclusion and exclusion—such as affective discomforts, infrastructural frictions, and relational tensions—that may not be fully visible through walking or mapping alone (Pink, 2015).

This approach aligns with the epistemological principle that subjectivity is relational rather than introspective, and that meaning emerges through the articulation of experience, affect and context.

2.6. Multimodal Assemblage

Crucially, the integration of walking, mapping, and reflexive writing is conceptualized not as an additive combination of discrete methods but as a multimodal methodological assemblage. Its methodological value lies in generating insights that emerge through relational interplay and iterative circulation across modalities: walking foregrounds embodied and affective cues, mapping materializes these cues as spatial inscriptions, and reflexive writing configures their symbolic–emotional and sociocultural significance. This integration is grounded in a situated first-person epistemic position; the assemblage is produced through the autoethnographer’s circulation of embodied movement, spatial inscription, and reflexive interpretation rather than through multiple narrative sources (Adams et al., 2015).

Analytically, the assemblage operates through cross-modal correspondences. Embodied cues identified during walkscapes are examined against spatial inscriptions generated through mapping and then elaborated reflexively to construct multilayered configurations of meaning that exceed the analytic potential of any single modality in isolation. In doing so, the assemblage renders spatial–affective configurations—disruptions, resonances, affordances, and absences—methodologically legible and aligns with a meaning-production orientation in which subjective configurations emerge at the intersection of embodied, affective, and spatial dynamics (González Rey, 2005, 2014). Recent methodological debates likewise emphasize affect, embodiment, multimodality, and absence as epistemically productive dimensions of qualitative inquiry (Billington et al., 2025; O’Keeffe, 2025).

2.7. Data Production

Data were generated through three interrelated processes that form the empirical core of the multimodal assemblage:

1. Embodied walkscapes, which foregrounded sensory cues, affective intensities, and spatial encounters emerging through movement;

2. Contextual participatory social mapping within the broader research setting, which was used to situate and inform the methodological assemblage but was not treated as collaborative autoethnographic data for analysis in this article;

3. Reflexive diary writing, which articulated symbolic–emotional configurations and interpretive insights following the principles of meaning production (González Rey, 2005, 2014).

All analytical materials were generated within an autoethnographic framework as relational and embodied modes of inquiry, rather than as introspective accounts.

Data production followed a sequential yet interdependent workflow in which embodied cues emerging during walking were subsequently examined through spatial inscription in mapping and later elaborated reflexively in the diary, enabling the construction of multilayered meaning configurations across modalities.

The autoethnographic, first-person approach was assisted at specific stages of the research process. First, assistance was provided during the co-design and review of the walkscape interview script by the second and third authors. Second, during the walking stage of the study, the third author accompanied selected walkscapes and verbalized the interview prompts, while the embodied trajectory, experiential narration, route selection, and reflexive engagement remained those of the first author.

Third, as part of the data integration process, the second author provided support in organizing already analysed materials. This support did not involve the denomination of codes, the construction of analytical categories, or the operational definition of symbolic–emotional configurations, all of which were conducted exclusively by the first author. Finally, assistance was provided during the organization and review of preliminary and final manuscript drafts.

The robustness of the design derives from the triangulation among embodied experience, spatial inscription, and reflexive interpretation, which allows the multimodal assemblage to produce forms of methodological evidence that would be difficult to obtain through any single modality alone.

Because the analytic claims in this article are based exclusively on self-generated autoethnographic materials, third-party contributions were not treated as data for analysis; therefore, no additional informed consent procedures were required for the materials presented here.

2.8. Analytical Strategy

The analytical strategy followed an iterative multimodal process in which each modality contributed a distinct analytic layer. Embodied cues perceived during walkscapes were recorded and coded in the diary; spatial patterns were then identified through mapping (e.g., affective nodes, interruptions, clusters); and reflexive interpretation connected embodied and spatial traces with symbolic–emotional configurations. Configurations of meaning were generated using the analytical orientation of meaning production (González Rey, 2005, 2014).

Consistent with the paper’s methodological contribution, the analysis is presented as a procedure for generating methodological evidence rather than substantive sociopolitical findings. Analytically, embodied cues identified during walking were examined against spatial inscriptions produced through mapping and subsequently elaborated through reflexive writing, enabling cross-modal correspondences and consolidating multilayered configurations of meaning. Within this workflow, the Theory of Meaning Production served as the integrative lens through which subjective configurations were identified by articulating embodied, affective, and spatial dimensions into coherent units grounded in symbolic–emotional meaning (González Rey, 2005, 2014).

3. Results as Methodological Evidence

The findings presented in this section are reported as methodological evidence rather than substantive sociopolitical results. They demonstrate what the multimodal assemblage makes epistemically visible through the first author’s embodied movement, spatial inscription, and reflexive interpretation. Across the analytical moments, walking foregrounds embodied and rhythmic cues, mapping renders these cues as spatial–visual inscriptions, and reflexive writing articulates their symbolic–emotional significance, enabling configurations of meaning to emerge through their articulation (González Rey, 2005, 2014).

3.1. Analytical Moment 1: Embodied Interruptions as Epistemic Events

Walking foregrounded micro-interruptions—pauses, hesitations, shifts in pace—that index affective intensities emerging in situ (Ingold, 2011). Within the assemblage, mapping materialized these interruptions as spatial clusters, and reflexive writing configured their symbolic–emotional significance.

For example, a recurrent hesitation emerged when approaching a busy intersection, marked by brief deceleration and bodily tension. Although barely noticeable at the level of conscious reflection, its recurrence across walkscapes registered as an affective cue signalling spatial discomfort and anticipatory strain. Mapping condensed these interruptions into a localized cluster, which reflexive writing configured not as a thematic finding but as methodological evidence of how embodied micro-events become analytically legible through cross-modal articulation, consistent with a meaning-production orientation (González Rey, 2005, 2014).

3.2. Analytical Moment 2: Spatial–Affective Nodes

Mapping rendered visible nodes of affective convergence—points where emotional intensities accumulated spatially—features that were not recoverable through diary-based reflection alone. Within the assemblage, walking registered these moments as diffuse bodily unease, mapping crystallized their recurrence as a spatial–affective node, and reflexive writing configured its symbolic–emotional resonance as methodological evidence.

For example, a recurrent convergence emerged around a spatial threshold where pauses and route adjustments accumulated across walkscapes. Once spatially inscribed, this convergence became analytically legible as a node, illustrating how visual–spatial inscription enables affective patterning to be recognized and interpreted through cross-modal articulation within the multimodal assemblage.

3.3. Analytical Moment 3: Rhythmic Configurations of Movement

Walking revealed kinaesthetic rhythms—accelerations, slowdowns, and flow disruptions (Pink, 2015). Mapping transformed these variations into spatialised sequences, and reflexive writing connected them to symbolic–emotional configurations.

For example, repeated fluctuations in walking pace—brief accelerations followed by abrupt slowdowns—emerged along a route segment. While initially experienced as bodily adjustments without explicit reflection, mapping rendered these variations as spatialised rhythmic sequences. Reflexive writing then configured these sequences as methodological evidence of how kinaesthetic rhythms become analytically legible through cross-modal articulation within the multimodal assemblage.

3.4. Analytical Moment 4: Territories of Anticipation

Reflexive entries described anticipatory atmospheres—vigilance, readiness, hesitation—preceding entry into particular areas. Within the assemblage, mapping delineated these sensations as contour-like affective boundaries, rendering “territories of anticipation” spatially legible.

For example, a diffuse sense of vigilance emerged when approaching a specific urban area, expressed through subtle bodily adjustments such as reduced pace, heightened attention to surroundings, and momentary hesitation. While walking registered these sensations as pre-reflective anticipatory cues, mapping spatialised them into contour-like boundaries that delineated an anticipatory territory. Reflexive writing then configured this territory as methodological evidence of how anticipatory atmospheres become analytically visible and can be approached as subjective configurations within a meaning-production orientation (González Rey, 2005, 2014; Ingold, 2011).

3.5. Analytical Moment 5: Affective Boundaries

Walking registered bodily transitions when crossing particular thresholds (streets, entrances, crowded zones). Mapping delineated these transitions as recurrent affective boundaries, and reflexive writing contextualised their symbolic–emotional significance.

For example, a marked bodily shift occurred when entering a more crowded zone, expressed through sudden tightening of posture, reduced stride length, and heightened sensory alertness. While walking registered this transition as an embodied threshold, mapping traced its recurrence as an affective boundary across walkscapes. Reflexive writing then configured this boundary as methodological evidence of how liminal affective structures become analytically legible through cross-modal articulation within the assemblage.

3.6. Analytical Moment 6: Inscribed Absences

Mapping rendered visible absent zones—areas consistently avoided or rapidly traversed—patterns that were not apparent through walking alone and were not initially foregrounded in reflexive entries. Here, absence becomes positive methodological evidence.

For example, zones that were repeatedly bypassed or crossed at accelerated pace across multiple walkscapes appeared, at the level of movement, as directional deviation or increased speed. Once spatially inscribed, these patterns became legible as recurrent gaps. Reflexive writing then configured such gaps as methodological evidence of how avoidance, omission, and rapid passage can be approached analytically as absence within the multimodal assemblage.

3.7. Analytical Moment 7: Relational Fields

Walking documented intercorporeal alignments and avoidances during encounters with others. Mapping rendered these dynamics as patterned relational fields, and reflexive writing elaborated their symbolic–emotional significance.

For example, repeated adjustments in bodily orientation and interpersonal distance emerged during encounters along the walkscape. While walking registered these moments as subtle shifts—lateral repositioning, pauses, or changes in pace—mapping rendered them visible as relational fields structured by proximity, alignment, and avoidance. Reflexive writing then configured these fields as methodological evidence of how relational spatialities become analytically legible through cross-modal articulation, consistent with a meaning-production orientation (González Rey, 2005, 2014).

3.8. Analytical Moment 8: Affective Cartographies of Safety and Risk

Mapping rendered visible affective gradients—comfort, tension, safety, threat—distributed across urban space and examined alongside sensory–affective cues registered during walkscapes and elaborated through reflexive writing.

For example, contiguous urban zones showed gradual shifts from comfort into tension and perceived risk. While walking registered these transitions through subtle cues—bodily tightening, altered pace, heightened alertness—mapping spatialised them as cartographic gradients rather than discrete points. Reflexive writing then configured these gradients as methodological evidence of how safety and risk can be approached as atmospheric affective fields made analytically legible through cross-modal articulation within the assemblage.

3.9. Analytical Moment 9: Temporal–Spatial Intensities

Walking foregrounded temporally specific intensities (rush-hour flow, quiet intervals). Mapping positioned these temporal dynamics spatially, and reflexive writing interpreted their symbolic–emotional significance.

For example, distinct temporal intensities emerged along the same route segment at different moments of the day. Walking registered these variations through changes in pace, sensory load, and affective tone—accelerated movement during peak flow and eased rhythm during quieter intervals—while mapping rendered these shifts spatially, showing how the same route condensed different temporal–affective qualities. Reflexive writing then configured these variations as methodological evidence of how temporal rhythms become analytically legible through spatial inscription and reflexive interpretation within the assemblage.

3.10. Analytical Moment 10: Multimodal Configurations of Meaning

Integrating walking, mapping, and reflexive writing generated configurations of meaning—layered syntheses not reducible to any single modality (González Rey, 2005, 2014).

For example, when embodied interruptions identified during walking converged with affective boundaries delineated through mapping and were subsequently elaborated through reflexive writing, a multimodal configuration of meaning emerged. This configuration did not reside in any single datum but in the relational articulation of bodily sensation, spatial pattern, and symbolic–emotional interpretation. Reflexive analysis configured this convergence as methodological evidence of how subjective meaning is produced through cross-modal circulation within the assemblage.

4. Discussion

Recent contributions in the International Journal of Qualitative Methods have advanced diverse qualitative approaches for researching autism, particularly through participatory, voice-centered, and co-constructed methodological designs. Within this body of work, studies have explored thematic qualitative inquiry with caregivers (Lamba et al., 2022), participatory and community-engaged phenomenological approaches (Heselton et al., 2021), child-centered narrative methodologies (O’Leary & Moloney, 2020), and digitally mediated co-constructed storytelling practices that foreground autistic children’s voices and transitions (Parsons et al., 2023; Parsons & Kovshoff, 2025). Other contributions have emphasized mobile and multimodal methodologies as vehicles for participation and epistemic justice in autism research (Billington et al., 2025; Marcotte et al., 2022).

While these approaches foreground participation, co-construction, and the amplification of autistic voices as central epistemic commitments, the present study occupies a complementary methodological position. Rather than advancing participatory or voice-centered designs, it contributes by explicating how a first-person multimodal methodological assemblage—integrating embodied walkscapes, social mapping, and reflexive autoethnography—operates as an epistemic device for accessing embodied, affective, and spatial dimensions of lived experience. In this sense, the study extends IJQM scholarship on autism by articulating the methodological affordances of multimodal integration beyond participatory frameworks, without contesting their epistemic value, and by making explicit the analytic operations through which multimodal data become methodologically generative.

This study contributes to current debates on multimodal qualitative inquiry by demonstrating how the integration of embodied walkscapes, social mapping and reflexive autoethnography functions as an epistemic assemblage capable of generating forms of knowledge that remain largely inaccessible to verbally centred approaches (Pink, 2015).

Building on recent contributions that have advanced multimodality, sensory inquiry and embodied forms of data production (Billington et al., 2025; Marcotte et al., 2022), this study extends these debates an articulated framework for how embodied, affective and spatial modalities operate relationally within a unified epistemic assemblage. The multimodal procedures examined here are grounded in the researcher’s own embodied trajectory.

4.1. Embodied Mobility as a Site of Pre-Reflective Knowledge

The findings show that embodied mobility foregrounds pre-reflective cues—micro-interruptions, hesitations, and rhythmic modulations—that emerge prior to conscious interpretation. These affective signals align with what Ingold (2011) conceptualizes as kinaesthetic attunements: experiential registers that exceed verbal description. Recent methodological work likewise highlights the analytic potential of embodied techniques for attending to atmospheric and affective dimensions of fieldwork. The present study extends this literature by specifying how such cues become epistemically productive when examined in circulation with spatial inscription and reflexive interpretation within the multimodal assemblage.

4.2. Mapping as Analytical Spatialization of Embodied Experience

Social mapping translated embodied sensations into spatial–affective inscriptions. Rather than functioning as descriptive representation, mapping operates here as an analytic modality capable of rendering patterns difficult to apprehend through narrative or movement alone. In this study, maps made visible affective nodes, gradients, threshold zones, and avoided spaces—features that were not always recognized during walking or through diary-based reflection.

A key contribution of the assemblage is that mapping rendered analytically legible spaces that were consistently bypassed or rapidly traversed. These absences became identifiable as patterned affective features once spatially inscribed, resonating with methodological debates that treat blankness, silence, and non-linearity as epistemically productive signals in affective and visual inquiry.

4.3. Reflexive Autoethnography as Symbolic–Emotional Synthesis

Reflexive autoethnography functioned as symbolic–emotional articulation rather than introspective narration. Diary entries connected embodied cues and spatial inscriptions, enabling configurations of meaning consistent with González Rey’s (2005, 2014) framework. In this assemblage, reflexive writing is not supplementary but constitutive of the methodological operation, and its epistemic robustness depends on explicitly acknowledging the situated, partial, and affective character of self-generated materials.

4.4. The Assemblage as a Generative Epistemic Configuration

The epistemic value of the assemblage lies in relational operation across modalities rather than in any single method in isolation. By specifying how walking, mapping, and reflexive writing work in iterative circulation—foregrounding embodied cues, materializing them as spatial inscriptions, and configuring their symbolic–emotional significance—the study advances multimodal and more-than-representational debates (Pink, 2015) through an explicit account of how cross-modal correspondences become analytically generative.

4.5. Situated Boundaries and Epistemic Limitations

The findings derive from a situated autoethnographic trajectory and are not intended to represent broader populations. This situatedness does not weaken the methodological contribution; rather, it is consistent with constructivist–relational epistemologies in which knowledge is produced as contextual, partial, and affectively mediated. Methodological scholarship similarly emphasizes transparency regarding the contingent and relational character of qualitative evidence. In this sense, the contribution of the present study lies not in generalizability but in specifying the epistemic affordances of multimodal assemblages—namely, the conditions under which they render embodied and spatial dimensions analytically legible. Future research may examine how these affordances operate across diverse sociocultural contexts, bodily histories, and institutional environments.

5. Conclusions

This study advances methodological innovation in qualitative inquiry by demonstrating how a multimodal assemblage integrating embodied walkscapes, social mapping, and reflexive autoethnography can generate epistemic access to affective–spatial dimensions of lived experience. In response to recent calls to strengthen methodological transparency and multimodal reasoning (Billington et al., 2025; Marcotte et al., 2022), the article specifies how embodied, affective, and spatial modalities circulate epistemically within a unified analytic configuration.

First, embodied mobility functions as a source of kinaesthetic and pre-reflective knowledge. Walking exposed micro-interruptions, hesitations, and rhythmic modulations that operated as indicators of affective resonance and experiential density, reinforcing accounts that conceptualize movement as perceptual and epistemic engagement (Ingold, 2011; Pink, 2015). Second, social mapping operates as an analytic device that translates embodied sensations into spatial–affective inscriptions—intensities, absences, boundaries, and gradients—rendering patterns that often remain implicit in narrative accounts. Third, reflexive autoethnography provides symbolic–emotional synthesis by connecting embodied and spatial traces within broader interpretive configurations, consistent with a constructivist–relational orientation in which reflexivity functions as analytic practice rather than autobiographical self-disclosure (González Rey, 2005, 2014).

Across these contributions, the epistemic power of the approach emerges from interaction between modalities rather than their isolated use: walking foregrounds affective cues, mapping materializes them spatially, and reflexive writing configures them symbolically. Because the materials are self-generated and grounded in a specific embodied trajectory, the analysis is situated and not intended to represent broader populations. Future research may examine how multimodal assemblages operate across diverse sociocultural contexts, bodily histories, and institutional environments, extending methodological debates on embodied and spatial dimensions of qualitative knowledge production.

In sum, the study offers a transparent and operational methodological pathway for attending to multisensory, affective, and spatial dimensions of social life through a coherent multimodal assemblage.