Arts Based Research as Collaborative Practice
Community Discussion hosted by Martha Crawford
Accompanying materials, photos & art by Elena Solano
July 13, 2025
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.
“Research is a messy process; art making is also a messy process.”
“The right symbol or name in the right place can break silences and provide new insights.”
What is Arts Based Research?
“For people who might not be familiar with arts-based research, it’s a set of methodological tools that adapt the tenets of the creative arts to ask research questions in engaged ways. The arts can be used as the entire method of inquiry or they can be used as one phase of the methodology. So the art form could be used for data generation, analysis, representation, or for all of it—there's a continuum. Some arts-based research mirrors qualitative research in that researchers go out and they collect ethnographic observations or in-depth interviews, generating data in a traditional way to analyze and/or represent it using an art form. Then all the way at the other end of the continuum, you have art as the inquiry—as the process of discovery itself. And I don't think any of these methods are better or worse, I just want to present a range of options.” — An interview with Dr. Patricia Leavy
Arts Based Research (ABR) harnesses and melds the creative impulses and intents between artistic and scientific practice. ABR is a transdisciplinary approach to knowledge building that combines the tenets of the creative arts in research contexts (Leavy, 2009, 2015; McNiff, 2014; Chapter 2, Handbook of Arts-Based Research)
