Arts-based Research Methods Research Articles

Affective Facilitation: A Framework for Surfacing Lived Experiences and Harnessing Creativity in Focus Group Research

In this article, we introduce the framework of Affective Facilitation to the practice of focus group research. In this context, Affective Facilitation is defined as a framework that helps researchers (1) surface and deeply understand participants’ lived experiences, bearing in mind their individual differences, (2) make space for exploring common ground across their diverse backgrounds, and (3) connect with participants through empathy and compassion using active and reflective listening skills. Conceptually, the framework draws on the theoretical and philosophical strands of phenomenology, existential dialogue, holism, and Gestalt therapy. In practice, it employs graphic facilitation as a technique for fostering group learning and connection while creating a visual memory of the dialogue. We explain the implementation of this actionable framework through a case study of facilitated conversations with parents who share their lived experiences, providing insight into their perceptions, beliefs, and concerns regarding childhood vaccination. This study contributes to a growing body of work on creative, participatory, and arts-based research methods.

Exploring Embodied Experience via Videoconferencing: A Method for Body Mapping Online.

Faced with a series of COVID-19 related lockdowns in Australia across 2020 and 2021, and anxious about the safety of our research participants, we developed a novel approach to body mapping, an arts-based research method typically undertaken in-person. We produced a facilitated body mapping workshop hosted via an online videoconferencing platform. Workshops brought together 29 participants with disability, mental distress and/or refugee background who used body mapping to represent their embodied experiences of stigma and discrimination. These workshops generated rich data, and participants reported a high level of satisfaction with the process. In this paper we describe our novel approach to body mapping, and share practical tips for others who wish to undertake body mapping remotely. We outline strengths associated with this method: increased accessibility, enhanced connection between participants, the formation of a space to explore challenging subject matter, the production of rich data, and the creation of diverse body maps. We also discuss shortcomings and challenges which those considering the method should be aware of: increased logistical burden, demands related to space, IT difficulties, the danger of over-sharing, and diminished cohort sizes. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to report on body mapping facilitated via web-based workshops. Here, we seek to provide practical advice and useful insights for others hoping to utilise body mapping online.

The Changing Tide: Indigenizing Re-Search with Indigenous Women Living with HIV to Explore, Understand, and Support their Health and Well-Being

The Canadian HIV Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Health Cohort Study – Positive Aboriginal Women (CHIWOS-PAW) actively Indigenizes and honours re-search by, with, and for Indigenous communities. In this study, as Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, we weave our ways of knowing and doing together on the Ancestral, Traditional, and stolen lands of the xwmƏθkwƏýƏm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), sƏĺilwƏtaɁɬ tƏmƏxw (Tsleil-Waututh), S’ólh Téméxw (Stó:lō), and the Kwantlen Territories. We conceptualize ‘re-search’ as a cyclical journey that is not about ‘discovering’ new knowledge but designing a process to search for what is known, existing, and embodied by Mother Earth and our Ancestors. In this paper, we describe our process of using strengths-based approaches grounded in our connections with the Lands and Waters to explore how Indigenous Women living with HIV support their health and well-being by drawing upon Indigenous teachings and healing. Over the course of multiple gatherings conducted over 1 year with the same group of women, we utilized arts-based research methods, Indigenous teachings and ceremony, and Sharing Circles to collect and analyze women’s perspectives and experiences of their health and healthcare. The Wise Women were living in the Coast Salish Territories, yet came from different Communities, including Coast Salish, Cree, Blackfoot, and Navajo Nation. Our Indigenized re-search process was healing for the Wise Women who participated in the study and for us as the re-search team, which promoted re-connection to self, nature, and culture. We share insights on our learnings to support other community-based research teams to engage in re-search by, with, and for Indigenous Women that prioritizes safety, healing, and benefit for those who participate. Such insights include the importance of centering Indigenous Ways of Knowing, Ceremony, and Cultural Practices; changing re-search jargon to more inclusive and honouring language; and reaffirming commitment to Indigenous Communities.

Eco-Capabilities as a Pathway to Wellbeing and Sustainability

Eco-Capabilities is an AHRC funded project situated at the intersection of three issues: a concern with children’s wellbeing; their disconnect with the environment; and a lack of engagement with arts in school curricula. It builds on Amartya Sen’s work on human capabilities as a proxy for wellbeing, developing the term eco-capabilities to describe how children define what they feel they need to live a fully good human life through environmental sustainability, social justice and future economic wellbeing. A total of 101 children aged 7–10 from schools in highly deprived areas participated in eight full days of arts in nature practice. The study drew on arts based research methods, participatory observations, interviews and focus groups with artists, teachers and children. Findings suggest that arts in nature practice contributed towards eight (eco-)capabilities: autonomy; bodily integrity and safety; individuality; mental and emotional wellbeing; relationality: human/nonhuman relations; senses and imagination; and spirituality. This was facilitated through four pedagogical elements: extended and repeated arts in nature sessions; embodiment and engaging children affectively through the senses; ‘slowliness’, which envelops children with time and space to (re)connect; and thoughtful practice, which facilitates emotional expression. We suggest that, through these elements, arts in nature practice supports children’s wellbeing, and guides them towards a more entangled relationship with nature and a clearer understanding of themselves as part of it, thereby motivating them to take better care of it.

Connecting within: Digital collage as art-based research to process a pandemic

This article focuses on the use of digital collage as art-based research (ABR) to process the COVID-19 pandemic by an employed art therapist. The researcher/artist created a series of digital collages over a four-month period that were explored symbolically and metaphorically to comprehend a period of collective grief. The investigation explores digital collage as an applicable ABR method and highlights the importance of expressive therapists creating their own art, especially during times of crises.

Turning intimate spaces into digital classrooms: Public health students’ experiences of learning and doing critical qualitative research in pandemic times

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, burgeoning health researchers have been tasked with learning how to conduct critical qualitative health research from the intimate spaces of their homes. In this presentation, we, three public health students, highlight our experiences as learners and doers of critical qualitative methods to demonstrate the challenges and triumphs that co-exist with pursuing our academic goals during a global pandemic. We employ a critical, reflexive narrative approach to storying our experiences of learning and practicing critical qualitative health research methods from the (dis)comfort of our homes during the pandemic. Using diverse theoretical lenses, including embodiment and poststructuralism, we story our experiences of navigating the blurry boundaries created by our necessary participation in the digital world. We construct and present these stories using arts-based qualitative research methods that were introduced to us in our courses and readings through the Centre for Critical Qualitative Health Research. Stitching together words to create poetry, fabric to construct a quilt, and pictures and writing to articulate experiences, these stories explore how the transformation of our intimate space into an academic and research space impacts the experience of learning to be a critical qualitative health researcher. David uses creative analytic writing practices through memos and journals, paired with photography, to express his experience as a learner. He draws on embodiment, attuning himself to the body to better understand his experiences. Through the medium of poetry, Madison grapples with the reality of being a digital student - letting her anxieties, curiosities, and questions stumble out to make sense of her virtual self. Finally, Kristie uses quilting to construct a material representation of the Zoom experience, exploring the intimacy and alienation of the digital classroom. Through our stories, we hope to create space to deeply consider what it means to be an online learner and an online being. Through these three interwoven stories, we expose our vulnerabilities to carve out space to reflect on our needs and desires to thrive in digital learning environments.

“Conscious compassion”: A co-created poetic representation of social workers’ experiences with compassion

Arts-based research methods have an important place in social work scholarship. Arts-based research methods, such as poetic inquiry, highlight lived experiences through creativity, emotion, and embodiment. This paper shares findings from a qualitative study that investigated social workers’ experiences with compassion in their professional practice through poetic inquiry. Findings are disseminated in a found poem that was collaboratively co-created by the researcher and study participants. The found poem highlights how compassion is a central and guiding force within social work practice. Compassion and connection remain core dimensions of the social work discipline and social work education, scholarship, and practice may benefit from continued exploration of compassion and related constructs.

Achieving Empowerment over Shame through the Arts: A Photovoice Study Exploring Shame and Resistance among Women Sex Workers

ABSTRACT Informed by Brown’s theory of shame resilience and Scheff’s symbolic interactionist theory of social bonds as this relates to the emotion of shame, this article presents an in-depth exploration of the emotional and social experiences of eleven women working in the sex industry and the induced stigma and shame of their life situations. Using photovoice methodology, the photographs and interview data revealed that being engaged in sex work was not in and of itself shame inducing, but the personal, social, and institutional stigma of their work made it difficult to maintain their physical, emotional, and mental health. While the findings highlight the highly social aspect of shame and the oppression it brings upon women engaged in sex work, the act of photographing their experiences and sharing them through the arts-based research method of photovoice served as a form of empowerment and resistance, allowing for a redefinition and reconceptualization of the shame, stereotypes and assumptions associated with their work in the sex industry. Incorporating the arts in strengths-based, feminist therapy with sex workers can help individuals reflect on their abilities, identify their experiences, express emotion, and narratives, while offering insights into alternative possibilities and solutions in their lives.

Clearing the Clouds: Finding Motivation and Clarity in a Non-Traditional Dissertation Using Arts Based Educational Research (ABER)

By crafting a dramatic script about struggling high school readers that I then shared with real students in my Reading classes, I applied Arts-based education research (ABER) methods. Through the writing, presentation, collection, and reflection on student feedback, as well as during the script rewriting process, I was allowed to engage in a unique and motivating research experience. This approach allowed me to attend to three challenges with my Dissertation in Practice (DiP). First, instead of being part of this big, scary, abstract world called ‘research’, it allowed me to demonstrate inquiry though a means that I was more familiar and confident with—writing and theatre. My confidence working in these areas allowed me to initiate and remain engaged throughout the dissertation work. Second, it allowed me to take on a problem in my practice—the skepticism of many high school students in Reading classes about being in those classes. This helped me better understand my students, and thus inform and guide in the identification of best practices. Third, it positioned me to work with colleagues and administrators in my building and across our school district to rethink how we offer reading support to the heterogeneous cross-section of students who currently are being identified as needing such support. This account summarizes my DiP and, I hope, positions other classroom teachers who double as EdD students to imagine new and effective ways forward as they engage with problems of practice.

Truth, justice and bodily accountability: dance movement therapy as an innovative trauma treatment modality

This study surveys contemporary approaches to trauma within dance movement therapy/psychotherapy (DMTP). 17 qualitative English-language studies (2010–2020) were examined using qualitative and embodied arts-based research methods. Trauma was conceptualised as a multi-layered, complex phenomenon for the lived and collective body, isolation, and adaptive survival, reflecting DMTP’s understanding of experiences of individual and systemic harm, the enactive self, dissociation, neurobiology, human rights and wider context. Trauma implicated bodily, intrapsychic, relational, communal, social, economic and structural realms. Goals were safety, freedom, pleasure and agency. Dance was a flexible, multimodal, gestalt container for simple-yet-complex interventions linking inner sensing, creative exploration and enactive movement to meaning-making and cognitive and identity restructuring. Therapeutic competence, ego and relationship to power shaped DMTP’s work with individual and collective trauma. DMTP might consider how to better communicate its approach to treating trauma, relevance of therapist/lived-experience, professional and collective identities and enactive healing-justice approaches to sexual violence.

Birth Mapping: A Visual Arts-Based Participatory Research Method Embedded in Feminist Epistemology

Reproductive and sexual health of women are sensitive areas of enquiry characterized by strong cultural oppression of women. Body mapping, an arts-based participatory research method, has proven useful in research with such sensitive topics. In this paper, I describe my experience of researching women’s experience of childbirth through birth maps, an adaptation of body mapping. Live size maps were co-created along with birthing story and body key with women in Bihar, India. Body mapping is a very cost-effective method that ensures better recall, richer narratives, reduced power-based inequalities that enables to explore reproductive, maternal & sexual health topics respectfully. The birth map and birthing story can generate awareness about how women give birth, as an attempt to improve the quality and respectfulness in care provision during labour and childbirth.

The Digital Sabbath and the Digital Distraction: Arts-Based Research Methods for New Audiences

Despite the known affordances of Arts-Based Research Practice within the international education environment, its use remains relatively uncommon in Western Australia. The reasons for this are likely the contested nature of quality criteria by which Arts-Based Practice is evaluated as well as the challenges as well associated with the dissemination of research findings. Mixed-methods research is increasingly recognised as an appropriate and practical approach for education phenomena, and within this domain, inquiry that combines traditional qualitative and arts-based strategies offers the education researcher advantages that are not readily available through other approaches. As professional artists and researchers we share our experiences in employing our visual arts specialism within a qualitative approach. Our focus for inquiry was a “Digital Sabbath” intervention (a practice of regularly unplugging from all technology/devices with the aim of increasing social connectedness and mitigating stress) with seven early career visual arts teachers whose voices and experience of the digital disruption might otherwise have remained silenced. The importance of the study was both that we trialed a well-being intervention, but also that we innovated our methodological research repertoire by combining traditional and contemporary elements of the Qualitative paradigm.

Gracious space: developing community, taking risks, and expanding socio-emotional awareness in the classroom

ABSTRACT In this paper, I examine an implementation of gracious space and its influence on student learning. Gracious space is a facilitation model for group meaning-making that promotes vulnerability and connectedness, “a spirit and a setting where we invite the ‘stranger’ and embrace ‘learning in public’”. The course in which gracious space was implemented was an undergraduate writing-intensive sociology seminar on arts-based research methods offered through the university’s honours college. Drawing from students’ reflections at the end of the semester, I examine how the students’ impressions of gracious space speak to community development, vulnerability, taking learning risks, and socio-emotional awareness. The final discussion bridges the analysis to critical conversations about the importance of creating learning environments that increase dialogue and connection among diverse bodies, promote community-building, inclusion, and equitable learning opportunities.

Embodied Reflection of Images as an Arts-Based Research Method: Teaching Experiment in Higher Education

This paper discusses a teaching experiment in which 20 university students in Finland participated in the course Critical and Novel Approaches to Management and Organisational Studies, which familiarized them with the method of embodied reflection of images. First, the paper presents the method and the teaching experiment. Then, it presents and discusses the students’ experiences while experimenting with the method. The students’ written reflections form the data of the study, which were analyzed qualitatively using content analysis. The findings of this small-scale study show that the method of embodied reflection of images provided students with a novel perspective into management and organization, fostered collaboration, and promoted critical thinking. In addition, rational knowledge was furnished with experiential and affective modes of knowledge. Based on students’ positive feedback, the experiment succeeded in elucidating the method and its applicability in research on management and organization. This study promotes teaching arts-based research methods in higher education.

What happened to the subject? Mediated anticipation in neural painting

This article presents a phenomenology of artistic painting as an anticipatory process. I propose that the artist seeks to establish a state of equilibrium in a model of self-awareness expressed and represented in a self-constituted physical artefact intended to communicate to others, not representationally but affectively. ‘Neural painting’ is an arts-based research method employing a simple computational model of human aesthetic discrimination to study the creative realization of the artistic image. I use this method to explore the relationship of self and ‘other’ in computationally mediated self-portraiture. I develop an image in an exchange with a neural network by reflecting on its output and inputting autographic modifications to those images, blending visceral gesture with the ‘black box’ of artificial intelligence. Through this deeply personalized and perhaps agonistic interchange between organic self and algorithmic reflection, I seek to expose the tacit mediation implicit in the technical artefact, opening an understanding of the existential relations between natural systems (the artist) and technical entities positioned as collaborators in an anticipatory aesthetics.

The Transformative Role of Music in Visual Arts Education: Rediscovering Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Possibilities through A/r/tographic Inquiry

A/r/tographic inquiry is an art-based research method widely used abroad; this method has not yet become widespread in our country's undergraduate and graduate arts education. To reinvent the results of my a/r/tographic work, which I conducted by visualising the electroacoustic work “Symbolic Gestures” by Malaysian composer and academician Valerie Ross in 2017, with this study I invite my students to an a/r/tographic investigation (understanding/interpretation with artist identity). I aim to reveal intercultural and interdisciplinary creative learning experiences for my students with the methods and techniques (theorising/theory with researcher identity) that I discovered while questioning the transformative role of music in my creative process, and re-question my teaching and learning identities (practice with a teacher identity) through artistic practices. This study reveals a 6-week intercultural and interdisciplinary a/r/tographic inquiry in 2018-2019 with 12 undergraduate and 4 graduate students studying research and art. The research data consists of video and audio recordings, photographs, artistic products, student views, observation notes, diaries, and the work named Symbolic Gestures. The data were interpreted with an a/r/tographic inquiry approach. At the end of the research, the transformative role of music in visual arts education has produced significant results in the experiences of knowing, creating, metaphorical thinking, intuitive listening, and seeing in depth in undergraduate and graduate art students. The provocative, transformative, and convertible role of music can be used in learning, creating, and teaching experiences in visual arts education.

Arts-based methods for hallucination research

ABSTRACT Introduction Neurocognitive models of hallucinations posit theories of misattribution and deficits in the monitoring of mental or perceptual phenomena but cannot yet account for the subjective experience of hallucinations across individuals and diagnostic categories. Arts-based research methods (ABRM) have potential for advancing research, as art depicts experiences which cognitive neuropsychiatry seeks to explain. Methods To examine how incorporating ABRM may advance hallucination research and theories, we explore data on the lived experiences of hallucinations in psychiatric and neurological populations. We present a multiple case study of two empirical ABRM studies, which used participant-generated artwork and artist collaborations alongside interviews. Results ABRM combined with interviews illustrated that hallucinations were infused with sensory features, characterised by embodiment, and situated within lived circumstances. These findings advance neurocognitive models of hallucinations by nuancing their multimodal nature, illustrating their embodied feelings, and exploring their content and themes. The process of generating artworks aided in disclosing difficult to discuss hallucinations, promoted participant self-reflection, and clarified multimodal details that may have been misconstrued through interview alone. ABRM were relevant and acceptable for participants and researchers. Conclusion ABRM may contribute to the development of neurocognitive models of hallucinations by making hallucination experiences more visible, tangible, and accessible.

Storytelling in Female Veterans Survivors of Traumatic Brain Injury: A Phenomenological Analysis

<h3>Research Objectives</h3> To improve understanding of the unique experience of female veterans' post-traumatic brain injury (TBI) utilizing the power of storytelling. <h3>Design</h3> Qualitative phenomenological design. <h3>Setting</h3> TBI/Polytrauma Rehabilitation System of Care of the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System (VAPAHCS). <h3>Participants</h3> 10 female veterans participating in a storytelling workshop. <h3>Interventions</h3> No known interventions. <h3>Main Outcome Measures</h3> Retrospective chart review of each participant's demographic and injury information. Using storytelling an arts-based research method approach, participants' shared stories related to their injury, and their recovery experiences related to their TBI. Qualitative analysis for main themes and associated subthemes was completed using a constructivist grounded theory approach <h3>Results</h3> Ten powerful visual stories focused on life pre and post TBI; detailing how their injuries occurred, describing the challenges of their recovery, and sharing thoughts on their life and future. Three content themes emerged from the thematic analysis: (1) psychological and emotional impacts of TBI, (2) acceptance and healing process associated with recovery, and (3) distinct individual mindsets. Negative psychological and emotional impacts identified included suicidal ideation, grief, sadness, anxiety, relationships problems, memory loss, loss of independence, and headaches Notably, all the stories acknowledged a healing process, characterized by a sense of living meaningfully with TBI . Lastly, each story contained a distinct mindset which captured a strong sense of overcoming hardships while emphasizing determination, motivation, optimism for continued recovery, and coping with their new self. <h3>Conclusions</h3> A phenomenological examination adds powerfully to evidence-based research highlighting the distinct impact of TBI among female veterans. Each story uncovered nuanced and multifaceted issues that women uniquely experience in their TBI recovery. Our findings can guide future intervention on the care, support, and TBI recovery for the female population. <h3>Author(s) Disclosures</h3> No conflict of interest from the authors.

The Inner Louis Vuitton Circle: Arts-Based Research into Russian Luxury

Studying luxury and conspicuous consumption in international settings presents unique challenges. Many aspects of luxury and conspicuous consumption cannot easily be put into words because they involve desires, aesthetics, and emotions, as well as taken-for-granted assumptions about social distinction and inequality. Drawing on Nicolai Eliseev’s artistic inquiry into luxury consumption in Russia, this article proposes arts-based inquiry as a suitable method for examining embodied and aesthetic knowing about luxury and conspicuous consumption, in particular in intercultural settings. The article illustrates these ideas through a series of sketches and a final artwork, by which Eliseev inquired into his experiences and tacit knowledge. The artwork incorporates a cut-up Louis Vuitton bag and references to luxury brands such as Cartier, Vertu, and Dom Perignon. The artistic form expresses the dividing effects and emotions of luxury consumption in Russian social and economic life. The article contributes to an understanding of aesthetic creation as both a method of inquiry and also a practice of resistance and innovation in relation to fashion discourses. Thus, it illustrates the potential of arts-based research methods in intercultural studies of luxury, and the social sciences more broadly.

“Institutionalized States of Information Abstinence”

In this study, I provide applied examples of using cut-up poetic inquiry as an arts-based research method for analyzing erasure poetry. The erasure poetry was composed by five poet-participants and me during a sensory ethnography that explored embodied experiences of a sexual educator training program. I first overview erasure poetics in the context of sexuality education. I explain how erasure poetry as method can interrupt authoritative proclamations of truth, while also providing a technique to grapple with complex, corporeal data – central topics in sex education research. I then theorize cut-up poetic inquiry as an additional form of erasure, asking and illustrating how the processes of cut-up can distill information to enable emergent analytic insights in the context of my research. Throughout, I meditate on how erasure poetry as an arts- based research method can contribute to discussions of language, discourse, and embodiment in sex education research.