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

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.