Arts-Informed Research

Goals of Arts-Informed Research

Arts-informed research is a mode and form of qualitative research in the social sciences that is influenced by, but not based in, the arts broadly conceived. The central purposes of arts-informed research are to enhance understanding of the human condition through alternative (to conventional) processes and representational forms of inquiry and to reach multiple audiences by making scholarship more accessible. The methodology infuses the languages, processes, and forms of literary, visual, and performing arts with the expansive possibilities of scholarly inquiry for purposes of advancing knowledge. Arts-informed research is grounded in creative expressions of qualitative research traditions that are informed by the arts broadly defined. Researchers working in this way can greatly extend and enhance those traditions by placing attention on the development of research processes and representations that are inspired and informed by being situated in one or more of the arts.

Arts-based research and arts-informed research are similar in many ways, including the goal of researching in ways that more fully acknowledge the richness and complexity of human experience. The term arts-based educational research is more widely used to describe qualitative research that involves or includes the arts in some capacity to advance knowledge and communicate research understandings. Arts-informed research attends more specifically to the relationship between form and purpose—how an art form can inform both the research process and representation for purposes of making research/knowledge more accessible to diverse audiences, including but beyond the academy. Gary Knowles and Ardra Cole developed this arts-related approach during the mid- to late 1990s for the purposes of enhancing and broadening the communicative possibilities of qualitative researching involving the arts through the process of inquiry as well as the representation of research accounts.

Arts-informed research is a way of redefining research form and representation and creating new understandings of process, spirit, purpose, subjectivities, emotion, responsiveness, and the ethical dimensions of inquiry. This redefinition reflects an explicit challenge to logical positivism and technical rationality as the only acceptable guides to explaining human behavior and understanding. Bringing together the systematic and rigorous qualities of conventional qualitative methodologies with the artistic, disciplined, and imaginative qualities of the arts acknowledges the power of art forms to reach diverse audiences and the importance of diverse languages for gaining insights into the complexities of the human condition. The dominant paradigm of positivism historically has governed the way in which research is defined, conducted, and communicated and has consciously and unconsciously defined what society accepts as knowledge; however, it is not a paradigm that reflects how individuals in society actually experience and process the world. Life is lived and knowledge is made through kitchen table conversations and yarning at the wharf or transit station or coffee shop or tavern, in the imaginative spaces created between the lines of a good book or by an encounter with an evocative photograph, or in an embodied response to a musical composition or an interpretive dance. These moments of meaning-making, however, are not typically thought of as knowledge. Knowledge, as society has learned to define it, dwells beyond the realm of the everyday. It is discovered by intellectuals—researchers and theorists—and held by them until its implications are determined and passed on for consumption. Knowledge is propositional and generalizable, and research is the process by which it is generated. According to this paradigmatic view, knowledge remains the purview of the academy, where it can be carefully defined and controlled.

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