Imagination and Arts-Based Practices for Integration in Research explores the philosophical assumptions, defining concepts, and methodological issues related to the introduction of intentional imaginative mental processes and arts-based practices into some or all phases of investigation, and data integration of particular research approaches. Although typically central to mixed, multi-method, and arts-based research, the practice of integrating diverse forms of data might be applied to other research traditions. The integration of data diversity represents a deviation from traditional scientific thinking demanding a dramatic paradigm shift inclusive of multi-dimensional, nondiscursive, aesthetic, rhizomatic, and imaginative mental processes. In this book, imaginative mental processes and arts-based practices are described and illustrated as approaches to investigating, revealing, and understanding the elusive yet essential meanings hidden in the crevices, shadows, and liminal spaces in between diverse data sets leading to integration, illumination, and synthesis. The book will appeal to arts-based, mixed methods, and adventurous researchers. It walks the reader through the revisionist philosophical assumptions and offers aligned methodological suggestions to the induction of imaginative mental processes and arts-based practices into research.

Art therapy and all of the other creative arts therapies have promoted themselves as ways of expressing what cannot be conveyed in conventional language. Why is it that creative arts therapists fail to apply this line of thinking to research? In this exciting and innovative book, Shaun McNiff, one of the field's pioneering educators and authors, breaks new ground in defining and inspiring art-based research. He illustrates how practitioner-researchers can become involved in art-based inquiries during their educational studies and throughout their careers, and shows how new types of research can be created that resonate with the artistic process. Clearly and cogently expressed, the theoretical arguments are illustrated by numerous case examples, and the final part of the book provides a wealth of ideas and thought provoking questions for research. This challenging book will prove invaluable to creative art therapy educators, students, and clinicians who wish to approach artistic inquiry as a way of conducting research. It will also find a receptive audience within the larger research community where there is a rising commitment to expanding the theory and practice of research. Integrating artistic and scientific procedures in many novel ways, this book offers fresh and productive visions of what research can be.

This volume presents a scholarly investigation of the ways educators engage in artistic and contemplative practices – and why this matters in education. Arts-based learning and inquiry can function as a powerful catalyst for change by allowing spiritual practices to be present within educational settings, but too often the relationship between art, education and spirituality is ignored. Exploring artistic disciplines such as dance, drama, visual art, music, and writing, and forms such as writing-witnessing, freestyle rap, queer performative autoethnograph, and poetic imagination, this book develops a transformational educational paradigm. Its unique integration of spirituality in and through the arts addresses the contemplative needs of learners and educators in diverse educational and community settings.

Creative research methods for data generation have expanded over recent decades and researchers are eager to take a creative approach to data analysis. It is challenging to bring creativity into data analysis while retaining a systematic, rigorous and ethical approach. Written by experts in the field, this handbook addresses these challenges. The chapters adapt analytical techniques in creative ways for novice and expert researchers. Existing and novel methods from analysis of quantitative data to embodied, performative, visual, written, arts-based and collaborative analysis are featured with transferable case examples across disciplines. This collection offers a definitive practical guide to creative data analysis.

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.

This edited volume explores the singularity of embodiment and somatic approaches in the healing of trauma from a dramatherapy, theatre and performance perspective. Collating voices from across the fields of dramatherapy, theatre and performance, this book examines how different interdisciplinary and intercultural approaches offer unique and unexplored perspectives on the body as a medium for the exploration, expression and resolution of chronic, acute and complex trauma as well as collective and intergenerational trauma. The diverse chapters highlight how the intersection between dramatherapy and body-based approaches in theatre and performance offers additional opportunities to explore and understand the creative, expressive and imaginative capacity of the body, and its application to the healing of trauma. The book will be of particular interest to dramatherapists and other creative and expressive arts therapists. It will also appeal to counsellors, psychotherapists, psychologists and theatre scholars.

This text introduces readers to definitions and examples of arts-based educational research, presents tensions and questions in the field, and provides exercises for practice. It weaves together critical essays about arts-based research in the literary, visual, and performing arts with examples of artistic products of arts-based research (arts for scholarship’s sake) that illuminate by example. Each artistic example is accompanied by a scholARTist’s statement that includes reflection on how the work of art relates to the scholar’s research interests and practices. Arts-Based Research in Education: Foundations for Practice: helps the reader understand what arts-based research is – tracing the history of the field and providing examples; includes end-of-chapter questions to engage students in practicing arts-based inquiry and to generate class discussion about the material; features a diverse range of contributors -- very established scholars in educational and social science research as well those new to the field; represents a variety of voices – scholars of color, queer and straight orientations, different ages, experience, and nationalities; and presents beautiful illustrations of visual art, data-based poems, plays, short stories, and musical scores. First-of its kind, this volume is intended as a text for arts-based inquiry, qualitative research methods in education, and related courses, and as a resource for faculty, doctoral students, and scholars across the field of social science research methods.