Arts-informed Approaches Research Articles

Seeing voices of health disparity: Evaluating arts projects as influence processes

Arts-informed approaches are increasingly popular as vehicles for research, knowledge translation and for engaging key stakeholders on topics of health and health care. This paper describes an evaluation of a multimedia art installation intended to promote awareness of health disparities as experienced by homeless persons living in Toronto (Canada). The objective of the evaluation was to determine whether the installation had an impact on audience members, and if so, to understand its influence on viewers’ perspectives on homelessness and the health concerns of homeless persons. Key themes were identified through the analysis of direct observational data of viewer interactions with the exhibit and qualitative interviews with different audience members after the exhibit. The four key themes were: (1) Promoting recognition of common humanity between viewers and viewed (challenging previously held assumptions and stereotypes, narrowing perceived social distance); (2) functions fulfilled (or potentially fulfilled) by the exhibit: raising awareness, educational applications, and potential pathways by which the exhibit could serve as a call to social action; (3) stories that prompt more stories: the stories within the exhibit (coupled with the interview questions) prompted further sharing of stories amongst the evaluation respondents, highlighting the iterative nature of such approaches. Respondents told of recognizing similarities in the experiences recounted in the exhibit with their own interactions with homeless persons; (4) strengths and weaknesses identified: including aesthetic features, issues of audience ‘reach’ and the importance of suitable venues for exhibition. Theoretically informed by narrative analysis and visual anthropology, this evaluation demonstrates that arts-informed ‘interventions’ are highly complex and work in subtle ways on viewers, allowing them to re-imagine the lives of others and identify points of common interest. It also problematizes our assumptions about which outcomes matter and why.

Resist this! Embodying the contradictory positions and collective possibilities of transformative resistance

Youth participatory action research (YPAR) and arts-informed approaches reflect a source of critical resistance at the intersection of theory and practice (praxis). Our discussion draws upon Mestizo Arts & Activism (MAA), a participatory action research collective made up of young people who focused their research on the educational rights of undocumented students (http//educatexcambio.blogspot.com/); coupled with the emotional and economic impacts of stereotypes of immigrant communities (http//www.myspace.com/dreamingofnojudgement). Informed by participatory action research and critical youth studies, art opens up space for youth researchers to collectively process and question social issues they confront in their community while embodying forms of resistance that inspire and create collective participation and action toward social justice. This reflective account narrates our multiple and contradictory experience with resistance and YPAR. By blending personal opinion, theory, and practice we discuss “Caution,” a youth generated photograph, as a thickly layered complex site of transformative resistance.

Research Fictions: Arts-Informed Narratives That Disrupt the Authority of the Text

In this paper I examine the dilemma faced by reflexive narrative inquirers who write in the first-person “I” while advocating for a postmodern reading of the “self.” This paper asks the question: How can the reflexive educational researcher craft a research narrative that, on the one hand, strives for self-presence, while on the other hand, denies the transparency of language? I discuss current post-structuralist critiques of educational research rhetoric, and extend the critique to narrative research, suggesting that an arts-informed approach to narrative allows researchers to disrupt the authority of their text. I explore the use of a specific fictionalizing technique – the unreliable narrator – to assist readers in critically deciphering reflexive research narratives.