GWEN: In the Inuit worldview, knowledge and understanding come from many sources. It comes via our relationships with the animal, human, and spirit worlds, and from the environment around us. Knowledge and understanding can be derived through dance, music, or the creation or making of something—from using our voices or making things with our hands. Although arts-based approach doesn’t feel like what I am describing, I believe the theoretical underpinnings are the same—that there are a diversity of ways in which we can come to know and understand a phenomena including through art- and music-making. When I pause and reflect, I believe that growing up in an Inuit community and being immersed in Inuit epistemology have influenced my natural inclination toward arts-based methods.
MARCUS: I grew up in the Southern United States, a region very different from Gwen’s Inuit community in climate and culture. The South is not revered for its artistic sensibilities, though it does have a literary tradition (Faulkner, Welty, O’Connor) that, as a teenager, I discovered accidentally in searching my parents books locked away in the attic. Rather than nudie magazines, my parents hid away literature! I did, though, come of age in a family with artistic sensibilities. My aunt was a artist, my mother a voracious reader, and my father a gregarious storyteller in the way only a local politician and businessman can be. My brother and I were fed a steady diet of comic books and science fiction movies. I missed all of these things as a young high school teacher and then graduate student, so arts-based research was a revelation to me, something that called to me before I even knew it existed. It was a means of reconnecting with parts of myself and my brain that I had let atrophy so that I could become a serious scholar. Once I began to read more about the research applications of poetry, comics, drama, and especially autoethnographic writing, there was no way I could stop.
EVONNE: My background and experience is very different from the two of you. I grew up on a farm, in rural New Zealand, with no exposure to the creative arts, expressive, or arts-based analysis. My PhD was in experimental social psychology, at a very traditional university with a focus on quantitative analysis, randomized control trials, and hard data. In fact, I vividly remember sharing this dismissive view of qualitative research in an undergraduate consumer behavior class. Later, we designed and implemented a small qualitative interview study. This first-hand experience of doing qualitative research was transformative. All of a sudden, I realized that my positivist psychology professors (who privileged quantitative research, experimental designs, and the scientific method over other forms of enquiry, epistemologies, methodologies, and methods) were wrong: there was significant value in qualitative research, which amplified the voice and lived experience of participants. I have been an advocate for qualitative research ever since, moving away from hard-core experimental psychology towards arts-based qualitative approaches. Yet, I only stumbled across research poetry five years ago, when I was reading an issue of Qualitative Inquiry. It immediately intrigued me. The honest emotion and portrayal of the lived experience was so heartfelt and engaging, truly enabling a reader to feel the research findings. I wondered if I could do that with my research data, and started experimenting with creating poems (or poem-like prose) from my interview transcripts. I loved this immersive creative process, and took great joy in crafting an emotive and engaging poem from interview data. As well as greatly enjoying the poem creation process, I realized that research poetry is a wonderfully creative, novel, and impactful way to engage the broader community with research findings.
GWEN: I believe that it has enhanced the findings. Different research approaches can be more or less appropriate for different communities, cultural groups, and linguistic groups. Inuktitut, for example, is a language that is inherently action-oriented. Philosophical and theoretical concepts are presented in a tense of doing. Therefore, a research method that involves doing, crafting, or making things aligns well with how concepts and ideas would be conveyed by research participants who communicate in that language. Those ideas don’t translate the same way in English if one doesn’t understand the nature of the interpretation that is required. Therefore, I think the use of diverse methodologies can help us, as researchers, collect better, more accurate information, which help us to understand the phenomena under study.
MARCUS: Gwen, your way of putting it is perfect. Once you have been a maker, you think like a maker, in languages (even if the words are in English) that only a maker can understand. It gives me voices for conveying ideas that I can’t say in words. I don’t think I would use arts-based approaches if I thought they hindered my analysis; indeed, I still go back to academic prose frequently when that’s the best approach. I save arts-based methods for when they have something to contribute; those methods are not appropriate for every situation, just as academic prose isn’t appropriate for every situation.
EVONNE: Engaging with research poetry has really enriched my analysis, as the poem creation process forces me to consciously think deeply and slowly about each word, each sentence, the structure, and the overall core narrative. In poetry, less is more. Each word is chosen deliberately, with thought. It is a different and slower way of approaching data and the world. Of course, as both of you remind us, arts-based approaches are not always appropriate for every research project. Yet, having arts-based methods, ways of thinking and approaching a problem in our research toolkit has made me a better, more reflective, and thoughtful researcher.
GWEN: My greatest challenge has been to explain this approach in mainstream academia. Researchers who don’t work in this paradigm or don’t understand it, don’t approve of it. This makes publishing and peer review a difficult process. I just keep trying, keep writing, keep talking—that is all we can do. Never give up.
MARCUS: Gwen, your experience seems very familiar, perhaps to all of us. I always feel sheepish, almost silly, when I tell people that I work with comics or that my articles are about my own experiences. Thankfully, an ever increasing number of people tell me they think it sounds cool. Perhaps they are just being kind, but I find an ever-expanding number of people actually doing this work now, as well. The family of arts-based researchers, particularly in my field of education, has grown by leaps and bounds over the past 20 years. You’re right, too, that publishing and peer review continue to be problematic. The venues for arts-based research, though more numerous than years past, are still pretty limited. Good editors seek out reviewers with the appropriate expertise, but it’s still common to run into reviewers that have no idea what to make of arts-based research. For my work in comics, too, the peer review process has been challenging because it’s difficult to make revisions to art without significant time investments; you can’t just add or delete a panel here or there without screwing up the entire layout. And academic journals don’t know fundamental things that a comic artist must be told, like how big the artwork should be to fit the page. But at least my comics work is printed on the page; I feel for those artist-researchers whose work is ephemeral, like drama or music, for academia still doesn’t know how to assess or credit performative work.
EVONNE: Like both of you, I think that the most challenging part of doing non-traditional arts-based research is fear about what others might think and say. This is particularly true for me, coming from a quantitative psychology background. Thus, I think it is really important to believe in the value and impact of your work. Right from the beginning, I was concerned that my poems were not good enough and that I did not know enough about poetry to write a poem! So, I consciously took steps to improve my skills. As well as reading poetry, I reached out to a renowned poet at our institution who kindly met with me and was keen to collaborate on a found poetry project. Her enthusiasm and positive feedback on the poems I crafted gave me the confidence to keep experimenting. Additionally, the reactions of audience members (from exhibitions and conferences) keeps me inspired. I find that people respond, in a very real way, to the shared human experience in a poem. Of course, publishing and peer review is not an easy process. But it never is, regardless of whether you are using arts-based methods or not. I am consciously pragmatic, using research poetry more in exhibitions and conference presentations than publications. Overall, however, I have found reviewers and editors generally receptive to this more unconventional way of analyzing and presenting work.
EVONNE: In terms of first steps for novices, I would recommend two steps. First, actively engage with the literature in this space (a good starting resource is Leavy, 2009). Second, dive in and start experimenting with research poetry. Take an old interview transcript, and try to compose a research poem by rearranging the words in poetic form. For me, the poem creation process was immediately challenging, enjoyable, and addictive.
Leavy, P. (2009). Method meets art: Arts-based research practice. New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Wilson, S. (2008). Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods. Halifax, NS: Fernwood.