Arts Based Research as Collaborative Practice

For so many, especially those who do not identify as artists, art-making has been cut off from collective meaning-making activities.

Arts Based Research creates a space for a collection of subjectivities, for spontaneous visioning and public dreaming, allowing synchronicity, non-linearity and complexity to lead the way.

Relying solely on language in an era where written and verbal communications are so subject to conscription, misperception and intentional distortion has intensified the collective alienation and isolation.

We are also able to find ourselves and each other through art and image.

Arts Based Reseach as a group and collaboration process can de-center colonial communication practices such as argument, persuasion, debate, judgment, case-building, verbal sparring, defining, categorizing and opining.

Arts Based Research as a community practice allows participants to engage in a process that centers rest, silence, reflection, play, self-regulation, amplification, intuition, meaning making, and imagination and image and to hold these functions up as forms of power and ways of knowing.