In an effort to challenge the ways in which colonial power relations and Eurocentric knowledges are reproduced in participatory research, this book explores whether and how it is possible to use arts-based methods for creating more horizontal and democratic research practices. In discussing both the transformative potential and limitations of arts-based methods, the book asks: What can arts-based methods contribute to decolonising participatory research and its processes and practices? The book takes part in ongoing debates related to the need to decolonise research, and investigates practical contributions of arts-based methods in the practice-led research domain. Further, it discusses the role of artistic research in depth, locating it in a decolonising context. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, design, fine arts, service design, social sciences and development studies.

Drawn from a decade of refugee studies, this book offers a wealth of insights on arts-based methodologies. It explores exciting new prospects for participatory and culturally safe research, and will be a reference resource for researchers of all levels and community practitioners. The book tackles questions of meaningful research practice: How do people with lived experiences of forced migration—Knowledge Holders—lead the way? Can arts-based methods bring about policy and social change? And what of ethical issues? By reflecting on the strengths and limitations of four research methods (digital storytelling, photography, community music, and participatory video), readers are invited to craft their own approach to arts-based projects.

Legal precarity, mobility, and the criminalization of migrants complicate the study of forced migration and exile. Traditional methodologies can obscure both the agency of displaced people and hierarchies of power between researchers and research participants. This project critically assesses the ways in which knowledge is co-created and reproduced through narratives in spaces of displacement, advancing a creative, collective, and interdisciplinary approach. Documenting Displacement explores the ethics and methods of research in diverse forced migration contexts and proposes new ways of thinking about and documenting displacement. Each chapter delves into specific ethical and methodological challenges, with particular attention to unequal power relations in the co-creation of knowledge, questions about representation and ownership, and the adaptation of methodological approaches to contexts of mobility. Contributors reflect honestly on what has worked and what has not, providing useful points of discussion for future research by both established and emerging researchers. Innovative in its use of arts-based methods, Documenting Displacement invites researchers to explore new avenues guided not only by the procedural ethics imposed by academic institutions, but also by a relational ethics that more fully considers the position of the researcher and the interests of those who have been displaced.

As the arts become an increasingly popular pedagogical tool in writing studies, Arts-Based Research Methods in Writing Studies offers scholars and educators in the field ways to leverage the arts for their own scholarship through the practice of arts-based research (ABR). Tailored to the needs of writing studies scholars, this concise guide presents ways of exploring and addressing unresolved research questions from the past as well as new, pressing questions that are emerging in light of increasingly fraught and complicated current contexts. It explores motives and methods for taking up ABR, sheds light on the processes of representing research and the ethical imperative of methodological disclosure, and looks critically at the complexities of fully realizing ABR in writing studies while offering some pedagogical applications. Connecting theory to practice, this book also performs ABR through a co-created mixed-media text about the everyday and extraordinary stories woven into the fabric of new American artists’ composing processes. Arts-Based Research Methods in Writing Studies lends itself to insight that is at once personal for writing studies researchers, useful for research communities, and a catalyst for social change beyond institutional walls; as such, it will be an important resource for scholars, educators, and graduate students in writing studies and those interested in multimodal, multilingual, and translingual learning; equitable pedagogies and administrative practices; online writing instruction; transnational literacies; research methods; community-based research; and disability studies in composition.

This book offers a practical, methodological guide to conducting arts-based research with children by drawing on five years of the authors’ experience carrying out arts-based research with children in Australia and the UK. Based on the Australian Research Council-funded Interfaith Childhoods project, the authors describe methods of engaging communities and making data with children that foreground children’s experiences and worldviews through making, being with, and viewing art. Framing these methods of doing, seeing, being, and believing through art as modes of understanding children’s strategies for negotiating personal identities and values, this book explores the value of arts-based research as a means of obtaining complex information about children’s life worlds that can be difficult to express verbally.

Awarded QRSIG's Honerable Mention for 2021 2020 AESA Critics' Choice Book Award Winner Arts-Based Educational Research and Qualitative Inquiry introduces novice qualitative researchers, within education and related fields, to arts-based educational research (ABER). Abundant prompts and exercises are provided to help readers apply the concepts and experiment with various applications of the ideas presented. The authors walk the path with novice researchers offering a variety of approaches to the practice of arts-based methods, while providing a guided overview of ABER, and include pedagogical features in each chapter. Exercises are designed to assist educational researchers who wish to expand their repertoire of methodologies. The authors also weave into the discussion the possibilities and limitations of many types of arts-based methods while introducing readers to the growing methodological literature. By offering a tapestry of ways to engage the novice researcher, the book illustrates that it is not always possible to separate cognitive findings from aesthetic knowing. This book will help qualitative researchers to expand their methodologies to include arts-based approaches to their projects and by doing so reshape their identities as qualitative researchers. It also offers some evaluative criteria and tool kits for experimenting with various arts and educational research.

Designed to be used as both a class text and a resource for researchers and practitioners, Arts Based Research provides a framework for those who seek to broaden the domain of qualitative inquiry in the social sciences by incorporating the arts as forms that represent human knowing.