Arts-based Research Research Articles

Experiences and Priorities in Youth and Family Mental Health: Protocol for an Arts-Based Priority-Setting Focus Group Study.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, eHealth services enabled providers to reach families despite widespread social distancing restrictions. However, their rapid adoption often occurred without community partners' involvement and without an understanding of how they prioritize aspects of their mental health and associated service provision, both of which promote family and community-centered health care delivery. Establishing priorities in health care is essential for developing meaningful and reliable health services. As such, there is an urgent need to understand how eHealth service users, especially families who may have historically faced oppression and systemic barriers to service access, can best benefit from them. Arts-based approaches can elicit an understanding of priorities by providing an engaging and expressive means of moving beyond readily expressible discursive language and stimulating meaningful dialogue reflective of participants' lived experiences. The purpose of this research is to determine the priorities and preferences of youth; parents or caregivers; newcomers and immigrants; and Indigenous community members regarding the use of eHealth in supporting their mental health using an innovative arts-based priority-setting method. This study uses a mixed-methods approach combining qualitative, quantitative, and arts-based research. It follows a survey used to identify key knowledge partners who are interested in improving eHealth services for mental health support in Manitoba, Canada. Knowledge partners interested in group-based priority setting will be contacted to participate. We will facilitate approximately two focus groups across each subgroup of youth, parents or caregivers, newcomers or immigrants, and Indigenous community members using an integrative, quantitatively anchored arts-based method termed the "Circle of Importance" to understand participants' mental health priorities and how eHealth or technology may support their mental well-being. The Circle of Importance involves placing small objects, whose meaning is determined by participants, on a visual board with concentric circles that correspond to a 5-point Likert scale of importance. Following each focus group, we will evaluate participants' and focus group facilitators' experiences of the Circle of Importance using a survey and follow-up structured in-person interviews to garner how we can improve the arts-based approach used in the focus groups. The PRIME (Partnering for Research Innovation in Mental Health through eHealth Excellence) theme received institutional ethics approval on August 23, 2023. Data collection is projected for August 2023, with follow-up focus groups occurring in early 2024 as required. Data analysis will occur immediately following data collection. Findings will directly inform a multiyear applied research agenda for PRIME aimed at improving mental health services through engaging key knowledge partners. The results may inform how arts-based methods in a priority setting can reflect aspects of experience beyond the capacities of qualitative or quantitative methods alone, and whether this approach aligns well with a positive experience of research participation. PRR1-10.2196/50208.

24 February 2022 - for a Geocinematic Use of Found Images

Underlying the idea of precarity and the moving image, this paper describes the and theorizes about the original artwork 24TH FEBRUARY 2022 as a video-installation interconnected with the concepts of precarity in production, circulation, and participation in media culture today, this art-based research artwork tries to underpin the very nature of found material as a gateway from the public to the private, commenting on the spectacle of mass media images and also the production of “anarchival” gestures through which its possible to research a specific historic event. Included in a research project entitled FrameScapes that the authors are undergoing at this time, this research outcome relates to the war that Russia brought again to the gates of Europe when it invaded the Ukrainian territory, and also to the conflict in real-time - live action we could call it - in a way we haven’t seen since Desert Storm back in 1991. A continuous feed of videos and photographs in an era of multi-screen distraction and tiktokian dystopias, artists and creatives have the upper hand in constructing from scratch, just like the cubists would glue together a piece of old newspaper and a matchbox to paint a still-life. The precarious nature of found material to make art is present since the first vanguard movements, from Picasso to Duchamp. Through the arts, we’ve been always confronted with gestures of appropriation, quotation, found-footage, archival art, collage or the ready-made, all of these related to meager images. From Marcel Duchamp to Kurt Schwitters, from Douglas Gordon to Christian Marclay, artists have always looked into the metaphor of the precarious as a recontextualization and remediation of image and sound. The artwork 24TH FEBRUARY 2022 is an exploratory artwork about the world-as-camera-screen, responding critically and creatively to different structures of the social, economic and political contexts in today’s art research practice that deals with found materials. The phenomenon of a tele-visual structure presupposes different atopic tele-communities, built under the aegis of tele-presence and tele-objectivity – a dissolution of real space, that embraces geocinematics as a strong narrative contemporary structure, constructed with and bound by precarious images – images that are consistent with a tangible structure of the Real.

The aesthetics of language, body and distancing in dramatherapeutic trauma work

This theoretical article identifies the intentional aesthetic use of embodied language as one of the unique contributions of dramatherapy to trauma treatment. Despite the centrality of narrative, fictional and dramatic language to dramatherapy practice, there has been little written about the aesthetics of language and their application in trauma work, nor about the relationship between embodiment and language use in dramatherapy. The article proceeds from the assumption that aesthetics are at the core of dramatherapy process, and therefore, that it is crucial to the understanding of therapeutic change in dramatherapy to explore the aesthetic aspects of practice. Reviewing the literature on language in trauma work and aesthetics in dramatherapy, the article provides a preliminary typology of the aesthetic elements of language as used in dramatherapy, with illustrative examples from the literature and from the author’s arts-based research. The core process of aesthetic distancing is applied as the dramatherapist’s primary tool for moment-to-moment assessment and decision-making regarding interventions, particularly with regard to titrating exposure to traumatic content; this is necessary to sustain a robust dramatic reality capable of containing the potentially affectively and physiologically intense work of trauma resolution. The article concludes with recommendations for future research into language use in dramatherapy trauma work.

Pre-service teachers’ understanding of sacrificial listening as a pedagogical framework

ABSTRACT Listening is necessary for effective learning. Unfortunately, outside of comprehension tasks, listening is rarely emphasized as a key component of classroom instruction. This study considers a specific type of listening, sacrificial listening, theorized to help to bridge cultural, political, and religious divides by emphasizing understanding and unfamiliar voices. In this qualitative, arts-based research study, found poetry is used to investigate preservice teachers (PST) understandings of sacrificial listening as a pedagogical tool, including their consideration of its key components and applications to practice in the elementary classroom. While PST do appear to understand the power of sacrificial listening in reducing misunderstandings between unfamiliar voices, findings from this study also confirm what is already known about teacher education: there is an explicit need for teacher educators to intentionally work with PST on how to take an abstract theory and apply it to practice in concrete ways.

Surreal Encounters: Playing With the More-Than-Human at a Community Farm

This article explores synergies between surrealism and posthumanism, including ways of knowing the world in ways that simultaneously value and decenter the human, and inspire much-needed creative thinking about reworlding the planet. These are playful ways of knowing that embrace chance, accept paradox, and question conventional understandings of time. Such ideas are explored through the example of an arts-based research project at a community farm in Lancashire, United Kingdom. The project’s “surrealist sensibility” resulted not only in encouraging participants’ creativity but also in opening them up to encounters with the more-than-human and providing acknowledgment of how connected we really are.

The Exploration of the Experience of Expressive Therapies in a Pediatric Medical Setting in the COVID-19 Pandemic through Arts-Based Research

The COVID-19 pandemic presented a host of issues for hospitalized patients including increased anxiety, fear, isolation, and depression [1]. Expressive Therapies have been used in the pediatric medical setting for decades to support patients and families with coping, expression, processing, and rehabilitation [2-5]. Additionally, some studies suggest that Expressive Therapies were effective in helping ease the increase in mental health symptoms that occurred during the pandemic. During the pandemic the expressive therapies team at Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah had to drastically shift their care to meet the increased safety requirements needed to prevent infection. This brought significant barriers and opportunities for learning [6]. There is a lack of research to understand the experience of expressive therapists during the pandemic. The authors aimed to understand this experience through an arts-based research lens using art to reflect on a patient relationship during the COVID-19 pandemic [7]. The authors then engaged in a witnessing process that was recorded and transcribed by the authors to search for themes [8-10] that described the authors’ experience of being an expressive therapist during that time. The six themes derived from the transcriptions were Extremes, Space, Back and Forth, Together, Exploration, and Unknown.

Resisting and disrupting HIV-related stigma: a photovoice study

BackgroundThe stigma associated with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a significant global public health concern. Health care providers and policy makers continue to struggle with understanding and implementing strategies to reduce HIV-related stigma in particular contexts and at the intersections of additional oppressions. Perspectives and direction from people living with HIV are imperative.MethodsIn this project we amplified the voices of people living with HIV about their experiences of HIV-related stigma in Manitoba, Canada. We used an arts-based qualitative case study research design using photovoice and narrative interviews. Adults living with HIV participated by taking pictures that represented their stigma experiences. The photos were a catalyst for conversations about HIV and stigma during follow-up individual narrative interviews. Journaling provided opportunities for participants to reflect on their experiences of, and resistance to, stigma. Interviews were audio recorded and transcribed. Photos, journals, and transcribed interviews were analyzed using inductive qualitative methodsResultsThrough pictures and dialogue, participants (N = 11; 64% women) expressed the emotional and social impacts of stigmas that were created and supported by oppressive structures and interpersonal attitudes and behaviours. These experiences were compounded by intersecting forms of oppression including racism, sexism, and homophobia. Participants also relayed stories of their personal strategies and transitions toward confronting stigma. Strategies were themed as caring for oneself, caring for children and pets, reconstituting social support networks, and resisting and disrupting stigma. Participants made important recommendations for system and policy change.ConclusionsThese stories of oppression and resistance can inspire action to reduce HIV-related stigma. People living with HIV can consider the strategies to confront stigma that were shared in these stories. Health care providers and policy makers can take concerted actions to support peoples’ transitions to resisting stigmas. They can facilitate supportive and anti-oppressive health and social service systems that address medical care as well as basic needs for food, shelter, income, and positive social and community connections.

Fragments of reaching home: Curriculum as embodied lived experiences in a transnational Indigenous educational journey

To reclaim Indigenous epistemologies and Indigenous ways of producing knowledge (e.g., Shahjahan, 2005b; Smith, 2013), I use a series of vignettes, short biographical reflections, photographic narratives, poetry, journal entries, and memoir to explore what curriculum as embodied lived experiences (e.g., Au et al., 2016; Gonzales, 2015; He, 2003) might look like for transnational Indigenous peoples. Specifically, I use multimedia storytelling to share my lived experiences as an Uyghur woman as well as my process of healing my wounds through story medicines (K. Anderson, 2011). While my lived experiences are the sources of my theorizing in this article, these stories are not mine alone. I suspect my feelings will resonate with others who share similar political challenges to mine, and join the conversation of what it means to be an Uyghur in the current global landscape. This article constitutes a reflection on an emerging transnational curriculum of Uyghurness through an arts-based inquiry. The practices of curating the fragments of multimedia life-writing activities that shape this transnational curriculum have helped me better understand what education can be for the local Uyghur people and Uyghurs in the diaspora who have been, who are, and who have yet to (be)come.

‘An Gorta Mor (The Great Hunger): Passage to India’ – Exploring genealogy and roots tourism through documentary filmmaking

This article presents a documentary film produced and enacted by one of the authors as a way of knowing, constructing and representing a specific form of tourist consumption, namely genealogy tourism. The documentary ( https://vimeo.com/825001015?share=copy ), entitled ‘An Gorta Mor’ (Gaelic words that translate to ‘The Great Hunger’, the Irish famine that occurred from 1845 to 1852), functions as both a vehicle to produce and present the ethnographic fieldwork conducted by one of the authors to trace back his ancestral roots and the empirical material to be analysed. The documentary unveils two emergent themes. The first is that genealogy tourism involves multiple fluid places and transnational identities that question ‘fixed’ notions of ‘motherland’, ‘home’ and ‘family’. The second refers to roots tourism as a vehicle to propel bonding and bridging social capital. Methodologically, as a form of arts-based research, this work promotes embodied alternative ways of knowing tourist realities and selves.

STEAM Matters for Sustainability

Students of art-based higher educational programs use artistic practices and academic methods to explore complex societal topics and produce artistic outcomes that embody new knowledge and insights. Universities have an essential role in helping to shape sustainable futures, and art-based research frequently explores complex and abstract topics, such as sustainability. In this paper, we provide reflections on 33 of the 127 undergraduate student projects we surveyed that concern sustainability over a period of 10 years at a problem-based learning (PBL) university as part of an Art and Technology degree program. Art and Technology is a STEAM education, where STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) subjects are taught alongside artistic methods. Specifically, we investigate how students formulate sustainability problems within an art-based research framework by identifying the (1) themes within sustainability and art that were of most concern, (2) research aims of these projects within a PBL context, and (3) artistic and academic methods employed as part of the research process. Additionally, we provide select examples of the artistic outcomes of these student projects as evidence for how artistic methods and practices – by virtue of necessarily experiential work – can concretize the often abstract notion of sustainability, making it accessible to diverse student populations and the public.

A Mile in Their Shoes: Poetic Inquiry for Qualitative Caregiver Research

Poetic inquiry as a form of arts-based research can penetrate the complexity, ambiguity, and multidimensional nature of representing participant emotions. This methodological approach allows researchers to explore the sensitive intersection of competing emotions without flattening the layered and often conflicting experience of participants’ embodied experiences. In this article, we share participant-voiced poems generated from interviews with family caregivers of Alzheimer’s patients and invite readers to sit with how these poems transcend mere descriptions and instead offer an emotive experience that defies words alone.

Ecological art pedagogy: co-creation for ecological transformation

ABSTRACT This research aims to investigate the pedagogical outcomes derived from the implementation of an environmental and art-based project within an after-school art programme. The study involved 18 participants between the ages of 9 and 13. Employing an art-based research approach integrated with phenomenology, the investigation sought to elucidate the participants’ emotional connections to the environment while evaluating the development of their environmentally conscious behaviours. The data were garnered through various means, including artistic works utilised in the learning process, reflective journals, worksheets, a researcher’s journal, and focus group interviews, and analyzed using an inductive approach. The research findings highlighted that ecological art inquiries exerted a significant impact on enhancing the students’ knowledge pertaining to the environment and notably fostering heightened environmental awareness. Additionally, the extracurricular activities undertaken by the students in non-classroom settings played a pivotal role in creating collective environmental consciousness, fostering a desire to participate in creative actions, questioning the nature-human relationship, developing empathy for other living beings, and making them realise that remedies for the planet’s future well-being reside intrinsically within themselves.

Beyond research as a dirty word? Searching for ethical and reflexive ways of doing research with and for migrant communities

Abstract What do “white” migration researchers, such as myself, need to learn from over-researched (undocumented) migrant youth and indigenous communities that consider research a dirty word? And how do such assertions not lead to an impasse, but can actually enable scholars to conduct ethical and reflexive research that directly engages and benefits migrant communities throughout the research process? These are the central questions I seek to take up in this article by critically reflecting on my engaged research with undocumented migrant youth (activists) in Los Angeles and the Netherlands. Building on epistemological and ethical considerations and practices from participatory action research, co-creative research, and arts-based research, this article argues for four essential shifts in our modes of knowledge production, which are then empirically illustrated through a critical examination of my own research. These four shifts are: (1) a move from epistemic violence and injustice to epistemic justice, (2) a move from damage-centred to desire-based research, (3) a move from singular to comprehensive narratives, and (4) a move from extractavist to engaged research.

Teaching Art through Engaging Anti-racist Viewpoints: Privileging an Indigenous Lens

Art teacher educators have obligations to prepare preservice art teachers and researchers to be culturally competent, to understand how to respectfully and knowledgeably include silenced voices into the classroom. Through this paper, we share a collaborative project we engaged with two arts-based researcher student groups toward approaching art learning from an anti-racist perspective using the lens of an Indigenous Pedagogy We demonstrate an Anti-Racist teaching cycle we applied that begins with cultural competency and leads to cultural relevancy. The project culminated with the development of anti-racist lesson plans toward a museum exhibition that utilized recommendations shared by four contemporary Native American Artists. Our purpose was to explore a method for changing the narrative by inserting multiple Indigenous artists’ voices into the classroom conversation.

Flying in the slipstream with Shaun McNiff: Using art-based research as eyes of the heart

Shaun McNiff and his work is the subject of this article with particular review of his integrative and collaborative ideology. Leading a global commitment to art-based research, the article traces McNiff’s approach and contribution to the field of applied arts and health with beginnings in expressive therapies from the 1970s. His work in developing a practice-based research methodology called ‘art-based research’ is internationally renowned. Art-based research is distinguished by the inclusion of the artistic objects in addition to the practitioners themselves. He explicitly values the interplay between the creator and the created in providing greatest potential to the practitioner researcher. McNiff’s writing and practice reinforces his personal commitment to creating with others to supplement the value of working alone. His personal philosophy of the ‘creative slipstream effect’ manifests as multiple forces of the group augmenting creative energy and participants can merge together into common flow that carries everyone in it.

Discovery of art-based distillation: Doctoral inquiry of the one-canvas method

The one-canvas method is heavily oriented to the interplay of images that transform over a sustained period. Art-based inquiry that explored how compositions were created and transformed was led by two core assumptions of Shaun McNiff’s vision: art-making communicates differently from linear and logical comprehension and language, and an aesthetic focus generates unique ways of understanding and creating knowledge. This article reflects on the distillation of artistic evidence, an ongoing refining and discovery process through which outcomes emerge, that required a continual return to the one-canvas art and art-making as centres of discovery. Illuminating McNiff’s commitment to art as evidence, the primacy of the artist-self fostered empirical exploration that felt honest, alive and generative. McNiff’s curiosities about multiple perspectives with attention to whole-body multi-sensory observation, engagement as researcher-participant and reflection using digital media were integral to a research design that culminated in artistic essence as discovery.

Shaun McNiff: Trailblazer, innovator, visionary

This article explores the visionary nature in the five decades work of Shaun McNiff. Starting in law school and leaving to become a painter, McNiff brought his acumen to academia establishing the first integrated arts and psychology master’s programme in the world. His trailblazing nature gained notoriety in those who had influence in depth psychology and mental health. He was not only interested in the interdisciplinarity of all art forms but the integration of ideas from many facets of social and political landscapes focusing his efforts on training those similarly interested in utilizing the arts towards addressing the human condition. He wrote the first book on art-based research. He has authored more than fifteen books and numerous articles, as well as delivering keynote addresses all over the world. He was a dean at Lesley University and provost at Endicott College where he continued his legacy of establishing integrated arts programmes.

Trust the Pianofish: Shaun McNiff and the magically realistic expressive arts

In resonance with lived art-based research, this article aims to let the art speak through image and poetry and to reflect the phenomenon of imagination and reality within expressive arts in an interdisciplinary mode. The article focuses specifically on Shaun McNiff’s cover image Pianofish of his book Integrating the Arts in Therapy: History, Theory, and Practice through poetic response, dialogue and expressive arts theory of practice. The notion of different realities and imagination as we know it from the literary genre ‘magic realism’ have been central components since the inception of the field of expressive arts at Lesley University. This article reflects ‘magic realism’ in its play with different realities and Shaun McNiff’s appeal to stay with the image. The author refers to Salman Rushdie’s notion of ‘magic realism’ in the context of the phenomenologically based expressive arts.

The language of inner experience is art: Participation mystique – Art-based research approaches

This article describes Shaun McNiff’s perspective on people as artists, in the form of a practical application, an artistic achievement and a contextualization of McNiff with contemporary quantum philosophy by Karen Barad. McNiff recognizes people as active participants in the healing and learning process. The inner images experienced are expressed through art-based methods. The so-called intra-actions by Barad can be transferred to the dialogue between creator and the object, McNiff transforms them in the work of art. Here, art contributes to an essential sense of well-being, conveys connectedness by representing an entanglement of the creating person, feeling and material. Conversation can also be understood as inner contemplation, and in any case, always at the centre is trust in the process that unexpectedly allows things to speak and relate. McNiff anticipates contemporary quantum-physical ideas of philosophy, which describes for example the Agentic Realism, as ‘existence is not an individual affair’.

Editorial

This editorial introduces the Special Issue of the Journal of Applied Arts & Health (JAAH) focused solely on the life contribution of University Professor Emeritus Shaun McNiff. Spanning the 1970s to now, his contribution to the understanding of art-based research is outlined as prolific and instrumental in the development of the field. The editorial team acknowledges that the philosophical foundation of JAAH stems directly from McNiff’s premise that art is the evidence and communicates in a way that is unique, distinctive and primary. The contributors to this Special Issue are introduced and their individual articles foreshadowed. The editorial concludes with a light-hearted ode to McNiff.