Arts-based Research Practices Research Articles

Art, science, and life: where arts-based research and social-ecological transformation can meet

Arts-based research offers an innovative approach to today’s social-ecological challenges. Many authors ascertain the transformative power of arts-based research lies in its ability to generate holistic and collaborative encounters which facilitate change. To advance critical discussions around arts-based research, the following article opens up pockets of success as well as the limitations and failures of the My Mabopane photovoice project. This project intended to support urban transformation in the City of Tshwane, South Africa, by asking participants to photograph and reflect upon a nearby green space afflicted with various social and environmental challenges. Results suggest alternative ways of knowing, which contribute to transformative learning, can link arts-based research to social-ecological transformation. However, despite this promising pathway, analyses also reveal realizing social-ecological transformation with arts-based research is no walk in the park. Rather problematic assumptions around knowledge and knowledge production, emerging in tensions between art and science, often trump the emancipatory intentions of photovoice. And broader structural challenges, that arts-based research situates itself in and against, pose a strong barrier for social-ecological transformation. In response to these barriers, this article argues for a collaborative arts-based research practice centering community realities on multiple scales via a merging of art, science, and life.

Fostering responsible innovation with critical design methods

ABSTRACT In light of increasingly harmful social, psychological, and environmental impacts stemming from the tech industry, this article contributes to ongoing conversations regarding the need for more rigorous ethical deliberation in the engineering design workflow. We present two examples of pedagogical interventions dedicated to injecting critical design methods into the education of future tech developers to help foster responsible innovation: 1) a cross-disciplinary curricular intervention with English and Systems Design Engineering students; 2) a series of Responsible Innovation workshops conducted with students. Critical design, an arts-based research practice that resists unreflective technological progress, is uniquely situated to enhance current approaches in engineering ethics curricula by creating space for reflection about and design-based responses to the impacts of tech innovation. We argue that methods and expertise from the arts and humanities – disciplines that excel in the critical contextualization of technological progress – can help foster an ethos of responsible innovation in engineering education.

Resisting Heteronormative Traditions to Stage the Possible

Concerned with the heteronormative nature of education, we engage with queer theory and pedagogy to destabilize heteronormative constructs. Guided by arts-based educational research (ABER) and ethnodramatic practices, we stage the lived teaching experiences of educators who challenge heteronormativity while preparing their students for an elementary school musical production. We discover that creating opportunities for students to delve into varied costumes, themes, and characters can strengthen or transform their self-perception, and can embolden them to uncover facets of their identity. Moreover, our inquiry demonstrates how queering curriculum and pedagogy can provide more inclusive opportunities for all students as they engage in arts learning experiences.

Tracing Images of Precarity: Sketching, Mourning, and a Relational Making Practice

Abstract This paper explores an arts-based research practice of tracing the image of two Salvadoran migrants, Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 2-year-old daughter Valeria, drowned in the Rio Grande in 2019. This practice came about while writing a manuscript about images of children's and immigrant's precarity. Through an embodied, repetitive, and solitary practice of tracing that engages in a postmodern ethics of difference and distance, I consider the co-constructedness of the human condition and how my practice ultimately became an act of relationality and mourning.

Fleshing Out the Embodied Potentialities of Positionality

Through this pulsating textual exploration, I viscerally uncover the potentialities of positionality and reflexivity in the context of research and pedagogical practice by tending to the emergent tensions of my own lived/living body. I weave in and out of the interstitial intimacies of embodied, performative, and living inquiries in situating myself amid my multi-identities and social locations to unearth how embodied arts-based approaches cultivate sensorial, cultural, and critical consciousness and invite multidimensional representations of human experience that transgress fixed dichotomies of insider/outsider status in qualitative research. This sensorial inquiry dwells in the in-between sites of breath and bone, ambiguity, and paradox, to reveal how embodied arts-integrated inquiries offer transformative possibilities for (re)humanization, healing, and social justice in arts-based and qualitative research and educational practice.

Collage as Epistemology: Construction—Deconstruction—Reconstruction

Abstract This article proposes collage as a cyclical epistemology for art therapy and arts-based research practice. Characteristics of collage and a cycle of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction are presented and intertwined with post-structuralism. Construction, as a stable state of being, focuses on collage's ability to re-purpose materials and hold space. Deconstruction, as an unstable act of fragmenting and juxtaposing, emphasizes collage as a deconstructive event. Reconstruction, as the ongoing process of becoming, focuses on the layers of meaning within collage and its ability to impermanently stabilize. Through this cycle, collage becomes a way of creating, thinking, and being. Furthermore, collage can be considered a fitting epistemology for identity development due to its infinite entanglements, continuous simultaneity, constant instability, and ongoing state of becoming. Together, deconstruction and collage suggest methods for arts-based research, propose a theoretical perspective for art therapy, and provide an ontology and epistemology to guide research, leading to meaning making, potentiality, and a desirable ongoing state of impermanence.

Recognizing Greatness in Our Own Time

Recognizing Greatness in Our Own Time

How Do Arts Contribute to Educational Research? A Book Review of Arts-Based Research in Education: Foundations for Practice

I write this review as a recommendation for potential readers: those who are new to and veterans with respect to arts-based research. Arts-Based Research in Education: Foundations for Practice is edited by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor and Richard Siegesmund, with contributions from 22 authors and a cover artist. In addition to providing some information from a usual structure around contents, central themes and concepts, intended audience, genres of writing styles, strengths and weaknesses, and uniquenesses, I primarily focus on the content of the chapter entitled “Four guiding principles for arts-based research practice” which I found extraordinarily significant in the second edition of this book and most meaningful for those planning their arts-based research projects.

Doing arts-based master’s thesis supervision/writing in teacher education: A new materialist approach to supervision

Arts-based research has been proposed to be a new paradigm in teacher education, but research on supervising arts-based educational research in master’s theses in education remains scarce. Recently, researchers have begun re-thinking supervision with relational, more-than-human ontologies, acknowledging that it encompasses doings and relational becomings produced by a multiplicity of human and non-human bodies. However, little attention has been given to the becoming for both student and supervisor, and this research has been limited to doctoral supervision. Originating through a student–supervisor relationship, the study explored the entangled supervision/thesis writing processes to produce an understanding of arts-based educational master’s thesis supervision in teacher education. The analytical questions were: (1) What doings make a difference when supervising and writing an arts-based educational master’s thesis, and (2) what are their opportunities and challenges for teacher education? A diffractive analysis produced doings of thinking-together with/in theory and arts-based educational research practice, be(com)ing-teacher and be(com)ing-supervisor, and be(com)ing-with-the-thesis. The doings focused on the master’s thesis project but extended its boundaries. The doings drew on the past concerning previous experiences and knowledges, were fueled by present mutual interests, and affected future teaching practices. The study holds implications by providing valuable insights into arts-based educational research supervision in teacher education.

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.

Creative Trouble: Making Spaces for Collectivity within Art Education

The Coalition for Racial Equity in the Arts and Education (crea+e) is a collective body whose primary aims and activities concern advocacy, teaching, research, and publishing on issues related to race and intersectional racism in the arts and arts education. The collective engages in critical race arts-based research practices that incorporate strategies and tactics of disruption that operate on multiple registers to undermine the normalization of whiteness and spur much needed conversations on how to abolish systemic racism in the arts and arts education. This article discusses crea+e’s collective orientation, its mission, and how it operates. It also chronicles three interventions the group undertook that illuminate critical, creative, and constructive modes of coalition-building. The article articulates the significance of collectives in resisting co-optation by white normative institutions while insisting on joy in the pursuit of justice.

Emotions from and beyond the classroom. An experiment in teaching and sharing emotional methodologies in a geography course

ABSTRACT This paper is based on an experiment conducted in 2019 at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, as part of a post-graduate research course, that aimed to reflect on the methodologies used by geographers when (re)searching (for) emotions. This methodological question is crucial since it is partly because of the difficulty of finding relevant tools to study emotions that geographers – especially in France – have tended to neglect them, both in their research and their teaching activities. To address this, a series of workshops were organized in which geographers and artists were invited to present, test and discuss with participants a methodology they had conceived to apprehend, explore or transcribe emotions. Various artistic media (film, poetry, literature, dance, theatre) were used to explore participants’ emotional relations to space. These arts-based research practice workshops were therefore not only a means of teaching about emotions but also a place and a time during which the participants collectively developed spatial practices and knowledge about emotions. By critically analysing this experiment, we will question both its potentialities and its limits in building shared geographical understanding on emotions. In so doing, we seek to show that emotions are a legitimate source of knowledge and teaching in geography.

The influence of music on black, Asian and minority ethnic women working in the field of domestic violence and abuse: critical reflection on music as method

Background: Arts-based research practices draw upon music, visual art, poetry and other media as methodological tools throughout the research process. There is also growing recognition of the contribution of arts-based practices, including music as method, to interdisciplinary fields of health, social sciences, humanities and education. Research into: i) the role of music as a therapeutic intervention; and ii) the use of creative approaches to practice development are clearly evident in the literature. What is less evident is the role of music as method. This article is a critical reflection on the novel use of music recordings during qualitative interviews in a small-scale study exploring the role of music in the work and lives of black, Asian and minority ethnic women working in a UK domestic violence and abuse charity. Aim: To describe a critical reflection on music as method in a small-scale qualitative research study. Implications for practice: Music has potential as a model and method in qualitative health and social care research practice, particularly with sensitive topics such as drug misuse or homelessness Music is a means of developing compassion and critically reflective practice development in the field of domestic violence and abuse and other areas of practice

Rethinking arts-based research methods in education: enhanced participant engagement processes to increase research credibility and knowledge translation

ABSTRACT Arts-based research is a participatory research practice that is well established in the qualitative field. However, while arts-based research has been defined as the creation of art to generate, interpret or communicate research knowledge, there is exiguous literature on the creation of art to establish trustworthiness in qualitative inquiry. This pilot case study specifically addresses this gap in the exploration of arts-based research practices to determine credibility and dependability. The context of the research was the impact of a Digital Sabbath practice on early career teachers, as teachers within their first five years of teaching are among the most vulnerable in the teaching profession. A Digital Sabbath is the practice of unplugging from all technology for one day per week, with the aim of increasing social connectedness and mitigating stress and burnout by decreasing our overuse of technology. The integration of arts-based research within this case study resulted in more active participation of the early career teachers throughout the research process. Consequently, participants’ voices resonated more strongly in the research output, as the iterative and participatory nature of the arts-based design supported a longitudinal dialogue between researcher and participant.

In Between Familiar-Unfamiliar: Research Travel as Arts-Based Research

Artists, researchers and teachers often find their work positioned in-between the familiar and the unfamiliar. The arts linger in-between such familiar-unfamiliar events, objects and places, unfolding new understandings and potentialities by making the familiar strange and the unknown familiar. Through a collaborative arts-based educational research project conducted in Japan, we address the following question: How can artistic practices lend to pedagogical possibilities when we attend to new things in familiar ways, and when we situate familiar things in new ways? Through a combination of a/r/tography and walking method, we engage in a series of walks, conversations and creative practices that explore layers of relationality through research travel. Walking as an arts-based research practice emphasizes the physicality of our nature as an embodied being grounded in movement; “walking is not just what a body does; it is what a body is” (Ingold & Vergunst, 2008, p. 1). Working together from different perspectives troubles a binary understanding of the insider-outsider relationship, focusing instead on the “-“ as a site of a hyphenated positionality. The walking sessions form a relational correspondence with each other that reveal rhythms of our walks, relationships and experiences while we attune ourselves to ways of lingering in-between familiar and unfamiliar places. Through the embodied and metaphorical walking in-between the familiar-unfamiliar, we consider the pedagogical implications of research travel as site of collaborative arts-based inquiry and what further questions they may raise.

The Magic of Theater: Photographing a Performative Academic Career

I discuss my efforts as a “good enough” photographer and describe the role photographs play communicating important moments from a series of ethnodramas I built about the Chicago Public Schools. I discuss my early efforts to use photography to legitimize my arts-based research practice, describe how my goals changed, and explain how I created images to communicate the energy of live theater. Building on Eisner’s theoretical work, I discuss three tensions of my photographic practice: intention versus improvisation, action versus artifice, and safety versus possibility. These tensions emphasize my limits as a photographer and the possibilities of arts-based research.

Overcoming “You Can Ask My Mom”: Clinical Arts-Based Perspectives to Include Children Under 12 in Mental Health Research

As research with children (rather than research on children) gains popularity and researchers adapt methods to include children’s voices, continual reflection on the research methods themselves is needed. In this article, we explore the relevance of playing and drawing in qualitative research interviews to include and represent the voice of children under 12 years of age, particularly in the field of mental health research. We reflect on the conception of children’s voice in research and argue for an understanding of voice that goes beyond verbal language. We suggest a combination of perspectives from arts-based research and clinical interview practice to support our understanding of children’s voice in research. As an illustration, we draw on an example taken from a large research project in Youth Mental Health Collaborative Care during which 23 children under the age of 12 were interviewed using a talk-play-draw model. We discuss the multidimensional aspect of children’s voices and the ethical value of arts and play in research interviews. We highlight the importance of researchers’ ethical reflexivity and creative participation in their quest to understand children’s voices. While doing so, we emphasize the responsibility of researchers to interpret, translate and represent as justly as possible a multi-layered, complex and often disorganized voice into a form that is accessible to the linear world of academic research. Given that it is perhaps inevitable that researchers use their own voice in this process, we argue that in conducting research with children, we need to engage both the children as participants and the researchers as advocates for children’s perspectives.

Containing HIV and AIDS: Creating a readers’ theatre script for professional learning in higher education

We worked together to create a readers’ theatre script as a vehicle for learning about using everyday objects to open up conversations in a workshop on HIV and AIDS curriculum integration research in higher education. Through creating the script and a series of interconnected dialogue pieces we uncovered experiences and understandings of productive containment and connections in professional learning in higher education, especially in relation to sensitive areas such as HIV and AIDS. We demonstrate how we composed the readers’ theatre script as a creative analytical practice to gain insights into our learning, while also discovering more about how this arts-based research practice can enhance individual and collaborative meaning making. Through arts-based collaborative self-study research we were able to deepen and extend our learning in a supportive and inventive manner, which fuelled hopefulness and a renewed sense of purpose.

Extending Photography: the Meta-Medial/Conversational Layers of Dematerialized Photographs

This article contemplates a collection of digital photographs gathered in Burj al-Shamali, a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, between 2001 and 2011. It uses an arts-based research practice in which photographs are treated as multi-layered substances, composed of a stratified physical object with different meta-medial layers, in order to consider the ethical, theoretical and practical challenges of capturing the emotions, subjectivities, experiences and politics that exceed the material image within the collection itself. These diverse narratives and active layers, which overlay a photograph’s embodied material layers, are called meta-medial layers. Considering photographs in this way is to recognize a certain fragility, and opens up the possibility of emancipating these same photographs from dominant readings. By looking at how photographs were gathered in Burj al-Shamali camp on the one hand, and distributed in their dematerialized form through performative interventions on the other, this article considers how the meta-medial dimension – and particularly the conversational aspect – of these photographs constitutes a practice of collective self-determination.

Getting in tune through arts-based narrative inquiry

This article provides a glimpse into the use of arts-based methods within a narrative inquiry into learning in an early years degree. Drawing on writing as inquiry [Richardson, L., and E. A. St. Pierre. 2005. “Writing: A Method of Inquiry.” In The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by N. K. Denzin, and Y. K. Lincoln, 959–978. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage], arts-based research [Estrella, K., and M. Forinash. 2007. “Narrative Inquiry and Arts-Based Inquiry: Multinarrative Perspectives.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 47 (3): 376–383; Barone, T., and E. W. Eisner. 2012. Arts Based Research. Los Angeles, CA: Sage; Leavy, P. 2015. Method Meets Art: Second Edition: Arts-Based Research Practice. New York: Guilford Press], narrative inquiry [Kim, Jeong-Hee. 2016. Understanding Narrative Inquiry: The Crafting and Analysis of Stories as Research. Los Angeles, CA: Sage], autoethnography [Ellis, C., T. Adams, and A. Bochner. 2010. Autoethnography: An Overview. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/ Forum Qualitative Social Research 12 (1). http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1589/3095] [Holman Jones, S. 2005. “Autoethnography – Making the Personal Political.” In The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by N. K. Denzin, and Y. S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage; Wyatt, J. 2008. “No Longer Loss: Autoethnographic Stammering.” Qualitative Inquiry 14 (6): 955–967; Trahar, S. 2009. “Beyond the Story Itself: Narrative Inquiry and Autoethnography in Intercultural Research in Higher Education.” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research 10 (1)] and the philosophical notion of the rhizome [Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by B. Massumi. Vol. 2, Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota. Original edition, Mille Plateaux, volume 2 of Capitlisme et Schizophrenie, 1980, Les Editions de Minuit, Paris; Jackson, A. Y. 2003. “Rhizovocality.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 16 (5): 693–710; Honan, E. 2007. “Writing a Rhizome: an (im)Plausible Methodology.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 20 (5): 531–546; Sermijn, J., P. Devlieger, and G. Loots. 2008. “The Narrative Construction of the Self: Selfhood as a Rhizomatic Story.” Qualitative Inquiry 14 (4): 632–650; Clarke, B., and J. Parsons. 2009. “Becoming Rhizome Researchers.” Reconceptualising Educational Research Methodology 4 (1): 205–215; Sellers, M. 2015. “‘Working with (a) Rhizoanalysis’ and Working (with) a Rhizoanalysis.” Complicity 12 (1)], the author, a timid ‘I’, seeks to disrupt commonly accepted modes of representing knowledge through a performative text that enacts rather than fixates meaning. The purpose is to attempt to shift the ‘discursively established, sedimented strata of educational theory and practice that continue to be highly influential in a great many institutional and policy driven contexts … ’ (Sikes and Gale, 2006, final paragraph). The hope is to effect some change in research methodologies that marginalise and to highlight the political within the three dimensional inquiry space [Clandinin, D. J., and F. M. Connelly. 2000. Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass; Clandinin, D. J. 2006. “Narrative Inquiry: A Methodology for Studying Lived Experience.” Research Studies in Education 27 (1): 44–54] of Early Childhood education and practice.