Introduction

The Unspoken Voices Project is concerned with understanding the experiences of people who rely on augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), also known as communication aids, because they cannot speak clearly. People who use AAC are frequently excluded from being involved, or they are misrepresented, in research because they cannot provide the ‘rich narrative’ often demanded by qualitative analytic methods. The project was inspired by clinical practice as I am a speech and language therapist with experience of working with people who use AAC. I have frequently had cause to wonder at interactions between people who use AAC and their familiar communication partners and have marvelled at the nature of the mutuality that exists beyond words. These observations led me to search for, but not find, analytic methods that would enable me to explore and authentically represent people who use AAC and their experience of communication.

A dialogic theoretical lens provided the conceptual tools to extend my understanding of communication and voice, and to develop a creative data analysis method incorporating my embodied experience as a speech and language therapist and researcher. I will draw on data from the Unspoken Voices Project, a research project concerned with understanding more about the experiences of communicating using AAC, to elucidate and illuminate my application of this method and the impact that it had on my research. This method synthesises multimodal data sources through attending to the complexity and nuance of dialogue with this population.

AAC and speech and language therapy

Speech and language therapy (SLT) is a profession that supports people who have speech, language, or communication needs. Clinical practice is influenced by the International Classification Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) (WHO, 2001), within which the impact of disability is categorised into areas of impairments of function, activity or execution of a task, and participation in a life situation. SLTs identify the nature of the communication disability and the impact it has on activity and participation. They might suggest or provide strategies to augment communication if people cannot speak clearly because of conditions acquired either in birth or early childhood, such as cerebral palsy, or in adulthood, such as a stroke, motor neurone disease, or cancer.