Exploring the cultural repertoires of adult third culture kids through multimodal autobiographies

Adult Third Culture Kids’ (ATCKs) transcultural identities exist in a ‘third space’, however little is known about ATCKs’ meaning-making of their cultural repertoires. Through the lens of a multimodal autobiographical approach, this project explored how ATCKs experience and represent their cultural repertoires, and how they make sense of their transcultural identities and transnational childhood experiences. An online-facilitated portrait paradigm (Busch, 2010) was used which is a multimodal creative biographic method to incorporate embodied visual and verbal representations of ATCKs’ cultural experiences. Participants were asked to think about their transcultural experiences, languages, attitudes, and sense of belonging, and were asked to map these out with multi-coloured felt pens on a paper with a body-shape drawing. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to explore participants’ representations and reflections of their cultural portraits. By drawing on concrete examples, this presentation will show re-occurring patterns of colour choices and placements on their portraits.