Utilizing Arts-Based Research Methodology to Center Marginalized Voices through an Intersectional Lens

This workshop describes how arts-based methodologies facilitate creative entry points into discussions surrounding healing and harm. The facilitators provide a BIPOC, womanist , interdisciplinary lens from social welfare, art therapy, and drama therapy. Creative arts therapists utilize the arts to promote healing, growth, and wellness with various patients, clients, and communities. Increasingly they translate their arts-based clinical skills into the research they conduct. Research methodologies are increasingly interested in qualitative and arts-based methods, such as Photo Voice, yet when arts-based methods are promoted, they are often conducted by non-art therapists. The facilitators will share the creative practices they have utilized in their qualitative research, specifically data collection and data analysis, to address concerns surrounding managerialism in higher education and Black healing and liberation. Utilizing the arts as a way to obtain data, particularly regarding topics that may be difficult to put into words, and more specifically for participants who are marginalized in academic spaces. Attending to critical race feminist and intersectional theories, the facilitators are concerned with the practice of power, oppression, racism, and sexism and how these realities impact the lived experiences of BIPOC persons. Furthermore, critical race feminism and intersectionality centralizes the voices of those who are marginalized and silenced, finding value in their narratives. In order to deeply understand these stories, the facilitators democratize research by promoting novel and creative research methodologies. Ultimately, new solutions to social work policy and practice can be imagined and realized. The facilitators invite attendees to bring in a research question or interest to workshop. The facilitators aim to engage participants in the following: 1. Recognize how culturally informed arts-based methodologies can unsettle traditional norms and research paradigms; 2. Identify arts-based data collection methods that recognize the ways in which marginalized persons, particularly BIPOC womyn and Black persons, express themselves ; and 3. Understand ways to analyze arts-based methodologies informed by creative arts therapy theories and practices