Arts-based Process Research Articles

The participatory installation – Forming the evidence of experience

Abstract This article reports on an enquiry designed to explore the impact of the arts on health though a participatory arts installation during the Evidence in a Different Form Conference. Delegates were invited to contribute to the installation with small, personally meaningful objects related to the arts, health and evidence. The process and content of the installation are discussed, focusing on dynamic interactions, conversations and meaningful associations that evolved. Implications identified relate to the arts, place-making and restorative environments, how personal meanings attached to art can change over time and how the direction of projects using arts-based processes can sometimes develop unpredictably. This installation project demonstrates how being open to the natural evolution of a project can reap meaningful results for communities.

Re-viewing an arts-in-health process: For the Best

This paper focuses on several images and metaphors from an artist residency at the Evelina Children's Hospital and subsequent production at the Unicorn Theatre, For the Best. The intention is to consider how reflecting on an arts-based process with children on dialysis, and their school-mates can provide new ways of viewing performance outcomes. The narrative about a family's struggle to manage with a young boy's long-term chronic illness under the shadow of death is both strange and familiar. The paper, authored by the project's producer and a close collaborator on the project provides insight into Mark Storor's delicate processes as a means of understanding the ways participation, partnerships and learning through the project may be seen as examples of the ‘uncanny’.

Arts-based Research as Social Justice Activism

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.

The Challenges of Implementing Primary Arts Education: What our Teachers Say

QUALITY ARTS EDUCATION CAN produce positive learning outcomes, such as creating positive attitudes to learning, developing a greater sense of personal and cultural identity, and fostering more creative and imaginative ways of thinking in young children (Bamford, 2006; Eisner, 2002; Robinson, 2001). Arts-based processes allow children the opportunity to express their knowledge, ideas and feelings in ways that do not necessarily involve words (Livermore, 2003; Robinson, 2001). Unfortunately, the value of arts-based learning can often be overlooked because of the social and cultural dominance of literal language and written modes of expression (Eisner, 2002; Kress, 2000). Forming models of quality arts education in the early years of primary school can also be a highly problematic task. This has been highlighted in a series of recent national reviews that have investigated the current state of arts education in Australian schools. This national attention has in part focused on the level of preparedness of non–specialist teachers, in teaching the creative arts; music, dance, art and drama.

The Helpfulness of Spiritually Influenced Group Work in Developing Self-Awareness and Self-Esteem: A Preliminary Investigation

This paper discusses an exploratory study that investigated the helpfulness of spiritually influenced group work with eight adult women who shared a history of substance abuse. The overall purpose of the group was to help participants develop their self-awareness and self-esteem. The group, which was contextualized in transpersonal theory, was organized around the following themes and experiential exercises: meditation, mindfulness practice, dream work, stream of consciousness writing, the shadow self, and other arts-based processes. Grounded-theory analysis of group sessions and individual interviews with the participants found that the participants perceived the group to be helpful in developing their self-awareness and self-esteem. While the participants identified different aspects of the group as spiritual, making-meaning was one practice that was consistently described as a spiritually sensitive process. The results of this study in this emergent field are promising and suggestions are provided for future research.

The Role of Artistic Processes in Peace-Building in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Throughout the world, community arts-based processes have become an essential component of peacebuilding work in societies experiencing severe conflicts. Both during a conflict and in post-conflict peacebuilding efforts, community based arts processes can be an especially effective tool to bring together identity groups through sharing common cultural experiences, raising awareness about past suffering, and engaging communities in creative projects. In this research project, the author spent fourteen months in Bosnia-Herzegovina researching the use of community arts-based peacebuilding efforts both during the war and in the post-conflict stage. This paper provides an overview of the research and offers several conclusions on the role of arts in peacebuilding within Bosnia-Herzegovina with the hope that these findings have relevance for other regions and the field in general.