Arts-based Research Research Articles

“Play You is [Me]!”: Third Space Rituals, Memory & the Performance of Self as Pedagogy

ABSTRACT This paper reflects upon an in-progress, exploratory piece of digital theatre adapted from Zeno Constance’s seminal bildungsroman The Ritual. In this work, Black women engage in a process of theorising liberatory practices to (re)cognise embodied technologies. inherent in their bodies. Herein I raise the argument that an arts-based research approach is a decolonising onto-epistemological undertaking with the capacity to make Black women cognisant of, extract, and apply the knowledges held in their bodies. This proposed process also allows for a measured consideration of the possibilities of using ritual theatre and embodied knowledge(s) in digital space as a means of analysing lived experiences, transgenerational communication and the imaging/imagining of futurisms.

Fiction-writing and wonder: documenting a collaborative, creative writing process

PurposeWe articulate cycles of creative storying and data analysis and the wonder that motivated the project by detailing our reading, thinking and writing processes to contribute to the conceptual and practical literature on collaborative writing as method.Design/methodology/approachThis paper documents a process of collaborative writing as method that produced a co-written fictional narrative that evokes questions about schooling.FindingsOur process began with world-building for our fictional future, creating characters to serve as a lens for analysis. From our discussions of the data, we crafted a plotline to present our themes in coherent story. As we explored and shared our readings, interdisciplinarity shaped our project in unique ways.Research limitations/implicationsThroughout, our collaboration and fiction-writing opened spaces for wonder, interdisciplinarity and joy that may inspire other researchers to engage in collaborative and/or creative writing processes.Originality/valueAdding to the rich literature of arts-based research methods, we contribute our reflections on the pragmatics of incorporating reading, writing and thinking for collaboration and creative writing as qualitative research methods for document analysis.

Experimenting with arts-based methods and affective provocations to understand complex lived experience of a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder

This article draws on arts-based psycho-social research to explore embodied and visceral knowing and feeling in the context of people living with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD). It presents a discussion of creative artworks solicited through a nation-wide online survey conducted in Australia in 2021 that generated intimate and affective understanding about living with a diagnosis of BPD. To investigate what lived experiences of distress associated with a BPD diagnosis communicate through sensation, emotion, image and affective capacity, the authors put to work Blackman's (2015) concept of “productive possibilities of negative states of being” and the broader theoretical framework of new materialism. This approach allows a more transformative feeling-with that exceeds the normative affective repertoires and scripts associated with a diagnosis of BPD. The authors recognise the often unspoken and invisible affects of complex mental distress and trauma, and purposefully open the space for affective and symbolic aspects of creative artworks to communicate what is less known or has less presence in dominant biomedical frameworks about living with a BPD diagnosis. The article foregrounds the lived and living experience of participants to generate experiential rather than clinical understandings of the diagnosis.

Healing Inquiry: Collaborative Practice, Artistic Interpretation, and a Decolonial Response to Living in and Through War

This article integrates arts-based research and critical self-reflective questions through embodied questions of having lived in Ukraine and Kazakhstan at the time the war broke out in 2022: What was it like to have left Kiev with a family amid the bombing with family? How has the adjustment unfolded? How can life be meaningful today, if at all? Through a collaborative artistic interpretation of a co-produced work, we highlight the unsaid feelings and thoughts, emphasizing a decolonial response to strife, pain, trauma, and war to allow for a healing inquiry of hope through thoughtful, caring spaces to learn and deeply feel the human experience.

Animating migration journeys from Colombia to Chile: expressing embodied experience through co-produced film

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the process of co-producing an animated film about the migration journeys of Colombian women resident in Antofagasta, Chile. It first establishes the relationship between feminist epistemologies and arts-based methodologies, which hinges on embodiment. It then turns to a detailed discussion of using film co-production as a research method for accessing and expressing embodied experiences of migration. This discussion highlights how moments of discomfort (Gokariksel, Hawkins, Neubert, and Smith, 2021) experienced by the researcher motivated the search for a more collaborative methodological approach that was better attuned to lived experience. This included striving towards more inclusive practices with respect to recruitment, anonymity, and confidentiality. Moments of discomfort also revealed how care and caring responsibilities are entangled with research, and how they gender possibilities of participation and production for community co-producers and artists, as well as for researchers. Finally, through discomfort, lessons were learned about the politics of representing experiences of migration, violence, and endurance, as well as joy. The paper concludes that, whilst by no means a panacea, collaborative arts-based research methods can offer an innovative toolset for exploring embodied experience and for navigating the relational and representational complexities attendant to research.

Crafting arts-based stories of exile, resistance and trauma among Chileans in the UK

ABSTRACT In 2017 an exhibition of over 100 craft pieces created by Chilean political prisoners held in concentration camps during the military dictatorship, was launched in the UK along with an accompanying short film, ‘Crafting Resistance: the Art of Chilean Political Prisoners’. Drawing on these arts-based interventions, the paper reflects on the use of craft objects both as a symbol of political resistance and a means of initiating difficult conversations around forced political exile, trauma and mental health while creating space for people to ‘tell their stories’. Indeed, the paper contends that projects such as Crafting Resistance can ‘care for knowledge’ through the curation of craftwork while simultaneously creating space for counter memories. The analysis also highlights the changing relationship between the craft makers and the craftwork, argueing that placing the craft objects within the exhibition assigns a new role to the objects as they became part of a display of collective memories and potentially contribute towards collective healing. Finally, the paper advocates for greater recognition of the historical use of craft as a political expression, which to date has been relatively neglected in debates around the use of arts-based research and methods.

Introduction: towards migration-violence creative pathways

ABSTRACT This introduction to the special issue on ‘Arts-based approaches, migration and violence: intersectional and creative perspectives’ highlights the complexities and paradoxes in relation to existing debates in the field. Drawing on the emerging body of rich work that has recognised the importance of arts-based approaches within research on migration and violence, the introduction provides a critical assessment of the nature of the connections between the two in methodological, empirical and conceptual ways. It explores these intersections across multiple geographical scales, temporalities and imaginations through innovative creative research. In contributing to these debates, the introduction and the papers included in this special issue examine the potential for new insights, understanding and transformations to emerge through engaging with visual, performative, visceral, embodied and collaborative arts-based research. Yet, it also addresses some epistemological and ethical concerns including tensions around participation, positionality, co-production and the decolonisation of research. The introduction also aims to move beyond evaluating the benefits and drawbacks of arts-based approaches and provides a conceptual frame delineated as ‘migration-violence creative pathways’ that emphasise feminist and embodied perspectives. The frame does not prescribe how to engage with the creative arts, but rather encapsulates the variety of ways to do so. Finally, we set out an agenda for future creative research on migration-violence connections that highlights some practical, epistemological and conceptual suggestions for critically and productively engaging with arts-based approaches.

Reflections from the field: Exploration of differences between art-based and academic research by a practitioner-researcher on Henrik Ibsen and beyond

As an experienced actor and artistic director from Norway, I argue that autoethnography can be a valuable method for conducting academic research on a performer’s own practice. The art is enabling the latter, and the latter is fueling the former. I also explore the difference between academic research and art-based research, particularly since the Bologna Declaration of June 19, 1999, which intensified the work of art academies and higher education to find a place for art-based research within the university system. While dialog and cooperation between the two fields are already resulting in new perspectives, I observe that the exchange remains somewhat limited. Drawing from my experiences at the Centre for Ibsen studies at the University of Oslo, Norway, along with my academic research on Henrik Ibsen and my practice and experience as a performer, I compare these two approaches to research. A main difference is that academic research involves “thinking in print,” whereas art-based research involves “thinking in and through art.” The article argues that there are more aspects that unite than divide the two approaches.

Using multiple languages within an improvised fairytale during online arts-based collaborations

This article presents an illustration from an online creative arts project in which different languages were used by participants of a small group within fairytale-movement-music improvisation. The participants, consisting of creative arts therapists and students from different regions of the world, including Canada, New Zealand, and China, represented various world cultures and spoke different primary languages. A session was selected by the authors as it represented an example of a natural experiment that emerged from the global arts-based response to the COVID-19 pandemic, offering a unique case study of how art expression can contribute to communities during crisis events. The purpose of the article is to provide suggestions to guide future groups in the use of arts-based improvisation that might improve communication among participants who do not share a common primary language but have shared complex emotional experiences. In addition, the article includes a review of related education, dance, and drama projects that involve different languages and cultures as well as a drama therapy project that addresses the improvised dramatic communication of complex emotional experiences. Furthermore, the article offers a detailed review of one session from the project using an arts-based inquiry and suggests ways to apply multilingual imaginative storytelling within the communication of groups in community and educational cross-cultural settings.

Embracing hybridity: the affordances of arts-based research for the professional doctorate in education

ABSTRACT Despite the growth of the professional doctorate in education (EdD), its potential for capturing practice is restricted by academic tradition. In this hybrid paper, we argue that arts-based research (ABR) can help rectify this. We bookend the paper with creative non-fiction of our own EdD experiences, where ABR is restricted and afforded. We develop our argument through a position paper mapping the theoretical similarities of the EdD and ABR. We then undertake a scoping review identifying existing research into ABR on EdD programmes. We analyse six articles using the 5A’s theory of creativity [Glăveanu 2013. Rewriting the language of creativity: The Five A's framework. Review of General Psychology 17, no. 1: 69–81] to see how these theoretical similarities are afforded. Using ABR on the EdD promotes reflexivity and co-creation, impacting upon diverse audiences. We conclude with a challenge for further research into ABR on EdD programmes through hybrid research.

Leadership development and the politics of intentionality: A case study of organisational theatre

In this article, we report an ethnographic, arts-based research inquiry into a leadership development initiative designed using principles of Organisational Theatre. We explore dynamics of relevance and intentionality that have been over-assumed and under-researched in leadership development to tease out implications for research and practice. Our empirical material is drawn from interviews, focus group workshops, an ethnodrama process, sustained observation and questionnaires. We offer two interconnected contributions: 1) the significance of ‘the politics of intentionality’ in a theoretical framing of leadership development and 2) the role of aesthetic reflexivity in navigating such politics. These contributions are accessed through a performance ontology anchored in the dramaturgical analysis of social life most famously applied by Goffman. Our overall framing of intentionality as a nuanced, fluid, plural and political alternative to purpose offers novel insight into the field of leadership development.

Reflections on arts-based research methods in refugee mental health: The role of creative exercises in nurturing positive coping with trauma and exile

Abstract In the field of refugee mental health research, scholars have emphasized the ethical obligation for research practices to benefit participants. They have proposed that research participation itself can promote positive coping in the aftermath of migration. In this article, we aim to advance the understanding of the benefits of arts-based research methods (ABRM) in how they may nurture participants’ positive coping during their experiences as research participants. To do so, we depart from the findings from three drama-based mental health interventions conducted with refugee and migrant young people resettled in Europe on the role creative processes might play in fostering coping. We develop a reflection on how ABRM may tap into these processes to strengthen refugees’ coping and well-being, ultimately supporting ethical research practices. In the final section, we discuss the value of integrating ABRM in refugee mental health research that embeds similar creative processes in their methodological repertoire.

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.

Is This the Truth? Examining Student Critical Media Literacy Through Arts-Based Inquiry

Critical media literacy is vital for citizenship in a democracy and visually saturated world. Online media is almost indispensable to contemporary life, exerting increasing influence over real-world events. Therefore, future citizens must be able to evaluate the reliability of online media. I initiated a mixed-method arts-based study examining how my undergraduate students, learning online during the COVID-19 pandemic, related to possibly manipulative and misleading online media imagery. I invited students to make artwork, answer survey questions, and complete an assessment. My findings revealed that my students are highly susceptible to misleading media online while exhibiting unwarranted overconfidence in their media literacy, which may compound their vulnerability. Meanwhile, their art, representing their relationships with online media, generally depicted negative emotions and suggested impacts on their mental health. But artmaking also seemed to inspire realizations and increased self-awareness. As a result, art educators are called on to address critical media literacy.

Conducting collage elicitation research online: what happens when we remove the scissors and glue?

PurposeThis autoethnographic article presents the adaptation of collage—an arts-based method traditionally used in face-to-face settings—into an online research tool. It emphasizes the increased relevance of such a transition in the wake of the digital shift and the Covid-19 pandemic. The work aims to reveal how digital collages can facilitate in-depth participant responses in a time when conventional research settings are inaccessible.Design/methodology/approachThe article incorporates autoethnographic vignettes, which are identified in italics, that offer insights into my personal reflections on the transition and adaptation to an online mode. Firstly, I review how collage can be a valuable tool to include in focus groups and for elicitation during semi-structured interviews. Secondly, I review the challenges I experienced when conducting focus groups online to create the collages. Thirdly, I explore, in more detail, three examples of collages that reflect the diverse ranges that were produced and the insightful discussions that emerged from the participants describing the visual elements of their collages. Finally, the reflective nature of my autoethnographic vignettes provides an insight into the world of the researcher during this turbulent time.FindingsFindings show that collage, whether physical or digital, remains an effective tool for eliciting nuanced understandings from participants. The research contributes to the arts-based research narrative by showcasing how the digital adaptation of collage methods can yield profound insights into participants' perspectives, therefore enriching the data beyond what traditional interviews could unveil.Originality/valueThese observations can provide support for other researchers who are contemplating the adoption of online arts-based research methods. Understanding how traditionally face-to-face arts-based research methods can be adapted for the digitally evolving landscape is important for shaping the future of online research.

Learning to Teach about Climate Justice and Social Justice in Science Methods

In November, the Editors of NWJTE sat down for a conversation with Dr. Mindy J. Chappell, a Science Teacher Educator in the College of Education at Portland State University. Dr. Chappell’s passions include developing teachers who are prepared to disrupt normative science ideologies and provide young people with science instruction that encourages and empowers them to be leaders in their communities. She engages in arts-based educational science research through the methodology of Ethnodance (a term she coined). She places young people and their lived experiences at the heart of her work.

The Body-Camera Approach: Teacher Identity through Video Elicitation and Video Essay to Create Shared Heritages

This paper presents an approach to teacher identity heritage as a result of the implementation of a research device created through Arts-Based Research (ABR) methods, specifically with video elicitation and video essays used as research tools. Two main objectives were addressed. The first one was to establish the real relevance of focusing performance on teacher identity. The second one involved testing a new methodological proposal specifically designed for this purpose, but still useful in other contexts where heritage identity is as present as in teaching. The device, a body camera, involves a process that allows new ways to understand the creation of identities using video to encourage the production of new meanings through visual and oral data. The participants were teachers in training during their internship period. Some notions about teachers’ identity heritage were revealed, and also preserved, firstly through personal perspectives by video elicitations, and secondly through collective perspectives by video essays. Both are video structures used in ABR which mix creative experience, memories, life experiences, relationships, and links that shape the teachers’ professional identity.

The 60 Years of Queer and Trans Activism and Care Project: Learning to Conduct Archival Research and Write Dramatic Verbatim Monologues

This reflective essay describes a research course which provided undergraduate students with an opportunity to conduct archival research on six decades of queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (QTBIPOC) activism and care that have challenged heteronormativity, cis-normativity, and racism in Canada. While there are many ways to share the findings of archival research, we chose to teach our students how to create dramatic verbatim monologues as the arts-based research method of verbatim theatre required students to use the words of activists themselves to explain why a particular moment of activism and care was needed. Students attended three different workshops during the full-year course from September 2022 to March 2023: a workshop in conducting archival research, a workshop about centring themselves and their communities in their research, and a workshop in verbatim monologue writing. Here, we reflect upon what these workshops taught us about archival research, working with Indigenous archival material, and rupturing systems of oppression in our own bodies. At the end of the course, students reported their take-aways from the course. This included a new understanding that it was possible to conduct research on topics they felt passionate about and that theatre-based research provided them with a way to express the findings of their research in forms other than writing essays. This new-found freedom was life-changing.

Dreamscapes of Belonging

This paper presents a personal journey through the application of Jungian Art-Based Research (JABR), initiated by attending a course by Susan Rowlands. It delves into the transformative experience of exploring the multiverse of dreams and their impact on the author's professional and personal development. The exploration began with the author’s repetitive dreams, characterized by detailed urban landscapes, serving as the primary material for research. By physically mapping these dreamscapes and integrating various symbolic materials, the author engaged in a deep, introspective process, highlighting the non-linear and spiraling nature of JABR. This journey further intertwined with reflections on identity, homelessness, and the longing for a sense of belonging, amplified by historical and cultural dislocations. Through spontaneous dance and subsequent reflections, the author confronts the disillusionment with idealized spaces and faces the reality of changing perspectives and attachments. The paper concludes by pondering the broader implications of our attachment to the Earth, suggesting that our efforts to save it might be hindered by our need to name and possess, rather than embrace its intrinsic, unnamed existence. Through a Jungian lens, the author proposes a reevaluation of our relationship with the planet, advocating for a detachment from specific names to foster a more universal and sustainable connection.

Arts-based methods as a critical and decolonising process in global mental health: Reflections on popular discourse, artistic rigour and limitations.

Due to masculine expectations and cultural perceptions, Luo and Busoga men, in their respective countries of Kenya and Uganda, can experience a range of mental health conditions which can lead to violent and problematic behaviours. Over an 18 month period in 2022/23, Masculinities and Mental Health used bottom-up, culturally responsive, arts and health workshops to seek to understand the cultural causes of stress and depression reported by men in Luo and Busoga cultures. The project included a two month arts-based residency in Osiri village, Kisumu County (Kenya) and a four week residency in Walukuba, Jinja (Uganda) working with groups of men to explore definitions of mental health via arts-based research methodologies. This article will present examples from the research whilst critically interrogating the possibilities of arts-based research contributing to an ongoing process of decolonising mental health practices in East Africa. The paper is focused on three dilemmas and learnings that occurred during the project; balancing the relationship between popular and progressive ideas in health care research, the complications of developing the 'art' in arts-based research and the inherent limitations of arts-based research in developing impact. I argue that arts-based research can effectively contribute to wider efforts of decolonising mental health by enabling participatory spaces to explore indigenous knowledge and lived experience. However, such efforts could be advanced if arts-based research engaged with systemic structures which enforce Global North practices and ignore culturally specific understandings of mental health.