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does “research,” and it stands in some contrast to
“research” in its use in emergent traditions of qualita- tive research.
Arts-Based Research
Arts-based research draws on emotive and affective responses to experiences, senses, and bodies in explo- ration of space and place; it arouses imaginative and emotive aspects of intellect; and it opens alternatives for interpretive and creative praxis. Primarily, it addresses the need to explore new options for represent- ing research that are produced within new paradigm methodologies. Arts-based researchers appropriate many different forms of the arts for reporting on research, including dance, film, plastic arts, photogra- phy, drama, poetry, and narrative writing.
Types of Critical
Arts-Based Inquiry Methods
To do critical arts-based inquiry, researchers-as-artists and artists-as-researchers create spaces for dialogue and facilitate openings for diverse voices. They engage in multiple collaborations of varying types. Although theory provides guidelines for work (both process and product) that is political, pedagogical, moral, and eth- ical, the purpose of the work is to change accepted theory, create new understandings, and involve a broader community in reflective practice so as to ini- tiate meaningful actions that complete political com- mitments to social justice, democratic equity, and emancipation of oppressed peoples. It follows, then, that there are no prescribed methods for doing critical arts-based inquiry. The methods will be those that fit the context and priorities of the Indigenous or local community where the research occurs as well as its forms and traditions of art. Modes of performance will fit meanings and be chosen for their “power to inform,” and they are not limited to public murals, films and photographic displays, oral and written poetry and stories, installations, dance, and dramatic and comedic performances. Quality of critical arts- based inquiry hinges on inclusivity, reflectivity, advo- cacy, and the potential of such inquiry to inspire various types of actions such as the following.
Dialogue/Discursive Action
Within critical pedagogies, the goal of the researcher is educative and includes engaging people
in narrating their own lives to better understand their lived realities. These social narratives reveal problems inherent in social structures that are played out in people’s lives. Voice is itself a social problem.
Dialogue reveals problems of voice. Voice ties to rela- tionships, hierarchies and distribution of power, issues over whose knowledge is important, and questions about how we know. Furthermore, it is possible to bridge cultural differences by sharing one’s narratives of lived experience in dialogue with others. Dialogue creates community through empathy for others based in understanding others’ lived realities.
For example, interviews, a common method used in qualitative research, are opportunities for storying indi- viduals’ lives. The interview is an opportunity to give personal voice to a social problem, and it is a forum for critical dialogue. In critical dialogue, meanings are co- constructed but always controlled by the person telling his or her own story, yet the interview presents an occa- sion for questioning culturally preferred terms of lan- guage and interrogating the cultural systems that have deterred or provided opportunities in an individual’s life. In critical arts-based research, dialogue is perfor- mative, and it both draws from and challenges the con- ventions of various literary genres.
Collaborative Action
Collaboration bridges the gap between the researcher and the researched. The task of the critical arts-based researcher is to facilitate inclusion. In prin- ciple, the critical arts-based project provides openings for entry of as many affected people as possible in the processes of inquiry. Among the properties of collab- orative interaction in critical approaches to research is explicit recognition of difference within communities.
Many arts are well suited to demonstrate, represent, and facilitate conflict, tension, difference, processes of change, and juxtaposition of multiple values and points of view.
Reflective Action
Critical arts-based research is produced by critical consciousness, which is achieved through interactions and mutual struggle among people in discourse com- munities. It is the goal of such research to encourage both participants and audiences of arts-based perfor- mances to engage in critical reflection such as is nec- essarily precedent to meaningful political action. In critical arts-based research, reflective action might be Critical Arts-Based Inquiry———143
achieved through poetry, theater, dance, and other per- formances that are presented to diverse audiences as precursors to dialogue that generates empathy and understanding and also erases the boundaries of “oth- erness” between people in diverse communities.
Performance/Performative Action
Importantly, for critical arts-based research, use of various art forms is not reserved for reporting research findings; instead, forms of art are adopted from within the community as an already existing form of dialogue that embodies the culture of research participants.
Critical arts-based research is public pedagogy. The telling of life stories can take many art forms. For instance, Indigenous arts often relay stories based in tradition, history, and social realities. Arts can be used to demonstrate the conflict of individuals in a changing world where cultural values are in conflict. They can be used to interrogate stereotypes. Arts-based critical inquiry is action based, process oriented, and situated in real-world problems, events, and communities. Art is used more for its power to emotionally involve audi- ences and research participants, create dialogue, cause questions, and raise doubts than for representation.
Within its limited representational scope, critical arts-based research uses the power of imagination to inspire community efforts to solve social injustices and opens spaces in which to imagine and hope for the creation of circumstances of social equality.
As with other forms of arts-based research, the performative turn in social science research is inter- disciplinary, drawing primarily from new paradigm research in sociology, anthropology, communication, and education. Its basic tenet is that cultures are per- formances (of language, rites, and everyday events) and that, by reproducing the phenomena of everyday events in new reflections of understanding of these performances, researchers can intervene and resist hegemonic traditions in thought, language, and action.
Performances of possibility, arrangements that recover meaning from tradition, offer hope and create new ways to see and be in the world.
Ethics of Critical Arts-Based Inquiry With the new paradigm of community-based research, the values behind reporting conventions have evolved.
Writing and other representations of critical arts- based inquiry deliberately expose the research processes; textual coherence gives way to “messy texts” that expose and even amplify disagreements between researchers and participants, contradictions between beliefs and actions, power relationships in the research community, and conflicts, holes, and gaps in the information used to develop meanings.
Transparency is a guiding concept for critical arts- based researchers. Gone are the objective omniscient voices of researchers. The values, worldviews, and assumptions about the research process, the commu- nity of participants, and the researcher are exposed and explained in the mediation of meanings brought out during the research process.
Inquiry is a moral act as well as a political act. The primary value exercised in critical arts-based research is the ethic of care. An ethical critical inquirer pays attention to the feelings and emotional investments of participants, is responsive to conflict, and is con- cerned with analyzing and discussing the political implications of all aspects of the work. Because the arts are conducive to thick descriptions and detailed multivoiced narratives about everyday experiences, they provide useful formats for conducting inquiry that is dialogic and portrays “truths” in flexible dynamic forms. This does not mean that they are impartial; they tell the stories and perform the activi- ties of particular groups and individuals whose lives are improved by reinvigorating an ethics of care at a societal level. Through demonstrations of injustice, there is hope for a dialogue of care to emerge and the possibility for social change to emerge out of dia- logue. The arts are uniquely suited to provoking reflection, creating opportunities for dialogue with others about meanings taken from reflection about a work of art, and forming communities of people based in the hope for social change. Such is the func- tion of critical arts-based research. The performative dimension of arts-based research moves the audience to discourse and beyond; it evokes communal expres- sions of understanding that reveal the engaged imag- ination, the powers of empathy, and the embodied responses to art.
Susan Finley
See alsoArts-Based Research; Community-Based Research;
Participatory Action Research (PAR); Performance Ethnography
144———Critical Arts-Based Inquiry
Further Readings
Barone, T. (2001).Touching eternity: The enduring outcomes of teaching.New York: Teachers College Press.
Denzin, N. K. (2003).Performance ethnography: Critical pedagogy and the politics of culture.Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage.
Fine, M., & Weis, L. (2005). Compositional studies in two parts: Critical theorizing and analysis on social (in)justice.
In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.),The SAGE handbook of qualitative research(3rd ed., pp. 65–85).
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Finley, S. (2003). Arts-based inquiry in QI: Seven years from crisis to guerrilla warfare.Qualitative Inquiry, 9,
281–296.
Finley, S. (2005). Arts-based inquiry: Performing
revolutionary pedagogy. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.),The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 681–694). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Garoian, C. R. (1999).Performing pedagogy: Toward an art of politics.Albany: State University of New York Press.
Kincheloe, J. L., & McLaren, P. (2005). Rethinking critical theory and qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S.
Lincoln (Eds.),The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 303–342). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.