Arts-Based Research: Affective Experiences Bridging Research and Practice

Introduction: Despite expanded methodologies, traditional social work research still tends toward hierarchical and positivistic methods, while qualitative and arts-based approaches are less common. The arts have relevance for social work research, practice, and teaching. Arts-based research (ABR) is commonly used in social justice-related milieux in recent years. ABR tends to be more accessible than other research methods, invites creativity and imagination, and amplifies marginalized voices. Arts practices can shift traditional power structures and recenter knowledge and tend to evoke emotions and experiences not always accessible using only words.

Freire’s (2000) idea of critical consciousness, which emphasizes emerging awareness of inequities and social conditions through cyclical processes of reflection and action, aims to inform the democratization of knowledge and motivate social change. Using this lens, we explored the potential of ABR as a liberatory and democratizing practice. We posed this research question: How can ABR contribute to the experience of liberation?

Methodology: Three social work scholars, involved in arts-based research and teaching for many years, became acquainted through an academic meeting on Zoom. Noting our similar interests in ABR, we began to meet online, eventually engaging in a collaborative autoethnography (CAE) exploring meanings and impacts of ABR. Given the reflexive nature of this project, each of us was both a researcher and a participant. We discussed previous experiences with ABR, then created and shared our own art pieces to represent those experiences. Meetings were carefully documented through recordings, transcripts and artwork. We analyzed these data using a collective, phenomenological approach.

Results: Rigorous qualitative analysis yielded a set of themes around ABR’s capacity for liberation and the recentering of knowledge. ABR was experienced as a liberatory method, disrupting typical power dynamics and ‘objective’ academic processes, rather inviting each research-participant’s full humanity into the project. The findings revealed an affective component to this ABR CAE, namely the freedom implicit in the emergence of an intersubjective bond as a CAE team, which could not have been predicted or pre-designed. The creation of this “space” was continually and mutually negotiated and meaningful. The project’s exploratory nature with the artistic endeavors, non-hierarchical interactions, and lack of a methodological “road map” contributed to a liberatory and evocative experience for us as participants and as researchers. In active opposition to traditional and neoliberal markers of positivistic research, these findings emerged not despite—but because of—these conditions.

Implications: In contrast to the hierarchical, exclusionary, and purportedly objective nature of some academic research, this study demonstrates that ABR fosters valuable and accessible pathways to knowledge creation, recentering of knowledge, and notions of “expertise”. ABR disrupts power distinctions between “researchers” and “participants.” Furthermore, ABR engenders the space within which a set of meaningful, evocative experiences can occur. This study portends potential for application of ABR in research, practice and teaching. These findings suggest ABR is liberatory not just as a method of inquiry and knowledge dissemination, but also as an avenue for interventions well-suited to invite inclusion, build community, and explore and address social inequalities.