Arts-based Research as Social Justice Activism

Abstract

A social justice approach to arts-based research, as presented in this article through examples from five different perspectives on what constitutes arts-based research, involves continual critical reflexivity in response to injustice. At the First International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, I identified five distinctly different perspectives on what constitutes arts-based research. The variations seemed to emphasize contiguous relationships such as: arts-insight, arts-inquiry, arts-imagination, arts-embodiment, and arts-relationality. Starting from a study of arts-based research, I construct historical and theoretical traces to and from these five facets of a social justice approach to arts-based inquiry. My analysis offers potentialities for an intermingling of these five faces of arts-based research in the interest of social justice. The examples of arts-based research as social justice activism presented here are intended to inspire transdisciplinary researchers to imagine ways to conjoin arts-based processes, subjects, and forms with social justice enactments of research.