Thinking Through Painting: ARTiculating What it Means to Write Qualitatively

Abstract

This article is an exploration of writing qualitatively, a think-do with doctoral seminar guest scholars with/through words and painting as pre-verbal thought movement. After engaging with the perspectives and experiences of several qualitative researchers who work from relational and emergent onto-epistemologies, I began to regard writing qualitatively as a bodymind’s thinking-doing using neurodiverse modes of expression. Through a cross-modal approach to exploring my writing process, I take readers through my journey of thinking about writing through painting and with paint, color, brushes, canvas, line, shape, and movement. Neurodiverse thought, communication, sensing, and perception, as well as verbal, non-verbal, and pre-verbal expression connect to movement between pre-articulation and articulation and to seminar discussions about relations, spirit, and flow when writing qualitatively. I conclude with an invitation for readers to engage with encounters that cross modes in thinking-doing as writing-and, where ARTiculation is foregrounded as embodied thinking, neurodiverse concept creating, and pre-verbal articulation for the communication of ideas and is experienced as being as adequate (and inadequate) for conveying meanings or findings as written language.