Creating Together: Participatory, Community-Based, and Collaborative Arts Practices and Scholarship across Canada

By Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Seeing Through Artistic Practices: Collaborations Between an Artist and Researcher 
Vera Caine and Michelle Lavoi
Documents the collaboration between a printmaker/photographer and a narrative inquirer in Edmonton, Alberta, which began in the face of mourning the difficult stories around the disappearance of a research participant and evolved into an inquiry into storied and lived experiences to see the tactile traces of memory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: Apr 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781771120258

Book preview

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INTRODUCTION

When you put your knowledge in a circle, it’s not yours any more—it’s shared by everyone.

Douglas Cardinal, Leader-Post

November 28, 1995

Over the last three decades arts research has evolved through a myriad of incarnations, taking momentous strides forward by carving out creative spaces within scholarly contexts. From the groundbreaking work of art educator Elliot Eisner, much has been written about what constitutes arts practices as research, when such practices become research, and how the arts offer alternate ways of thinking, doing, and rendering interpretations and understandings (see among an array of emergent works: Barone & Eisner, 2011; Cahnamann-Taylor & Siegesmund, 2008; Irwin & de Cosson, 2004; Knowles & Cole, 2008; Leavy, 2009; Liamputtong & Rumbold, 2008). Today these movements continue to expand with increasing flexibility for customary methods and methodologies that involve a host of aspects, dispositions, and elements of the arts.

Canadian scholars have been among the leaders of arts-infused research, extending the aesthetic disposition and artistic energy of practice-led discourses in the process. For example, as Wiebe, Fels, Snowber, Margolin, and Guiney Yallop point out in this volume: "The editors of Arts-based research in education: Foundations for practice, Cahnmann-Taylor and Siegesmund (2008) have noted that Canada is a place ‘where arts-based research is more widespread’" (p. 53). Moreover, arts research happening in our locales is often framed as partnerships, set within community contexts, and involves deeply collaborative work, frequently residing on the academic margins as fertile yet sometimes suspect sites of inquiry, which begs key questions: How might we begin to understand what we sense to be different in the fluid, sometimes contradictory, even provocative demonstrations of intimate, embodied, and often messy expressions of scholarship? In what ways do the arts as research support new forms of creating collaborative understandings? Why does arts research matter across disciplines and within diverse communities of practice? What is our responsibility as arts researchers to create those very spaces that we know are needed to foster the scope, depth, and breadth of scholarship, which Rita Irwin (2004) so aptly describes as the arts with, in, and through our research?

At the forefront of this anthology, we situate multidisciplinary arts research practices as sites for critical conversations central to defining, exploring, and investigating current practices. The innovative research and experimental scholarly endeavours in this collection introduce readers to a host of issues related to the arts, including what constitutes expression and how to define the merits of creative scholarship to advance conceptual development and facilitate the maturation of creative research design. The nature of these many different forms of arts expression brings forward theoretical, methodological, and practical considerations in ways that help highlight the conditions, as well as the emotional and embodied qualities of creating knowledge through the arts.

In the course of this collection, we have striven to profile paradigms of thought about arts research that are defining this time and place in Canadian academic scholarship. This premise underlies our clustering of chapters that involve participatory, community-based, and collaborative arts practices as through-lines for the anthology. The authors for this collection include faculty, graduate students, community artists, and service providers engaged in many fields: the arts and humanities, social sciences, and health sciences, education (Indigenous education, counselling psychology, visual arts and drama education, and second language education), nursing, community and public health, mental health and psychiatry, sociology, social work, the fine arts, design, drama therapy, religious studies, applied human sciences, and interdisciplinary studies. All are actively researching and publishing in their areas of study. Artworks explored include applied theatre, digital storytelling, photography, mural painting, performance art, and poetry from scholars across Canada—British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland—and some scholars from beyond our borders who are collaborating with teams in Canadian contexts. While many of the studies are rooted in distinct regional Canadian landscapes, these localized projects are nevertheless translatable to broader audiences through the collaborative arts processes they model and the prevailing issues they address.

Perspectives on Contemporary Practices

With a specific interest in participatory, community-based, and collaborative arts research today, we begin by tracing the genealogy of our ideas, concepts, and orientations to earlier work of Canadian artists and scholars interested in creativity, from which the uptake of arts research across disciplines in Canada has, arguably, been profound. In this way we offer some tentative answers to the question of why this work, still in the process of emerging, is particularly vibrant within the current Canadian scholarly context.

Approaches such as Ted Aoki’s curriculum as a lived experience, offer a legacy that has inspired generations of curriculum scholars to reshape perceptions of learning and teaching through creative forms of expression, like life writing, which now flourishes in many academic realms. Perhaps by extension, arts research has met with more acceptance in Canada than elsewhere as a result of such innovative thinking. The first doctoral dissertation in the form of a novel, by Rishma Dunlop, was accepted at the University of British Columbia in 1999—a watershed moment that marked the beginning of a profound change in notions of research in Canada and beyond. Given this foregrounding of creativity in scholarship, it is not surprising that movements like a/r/tography emerged from communities of practice at the University of British Columbia (see Irwin & de Cosson, 2004; Springgay, Irwin, Leggo, & Gouzouasis, 2008); arts-informed research at the University of Toronto (see Knowles and Cole, 2008); and narrative inquiry at the University of Alberta (see Clandinin & Connelly, 2000), to note just three of the numerous examples from across the academic landscape that have established a strong presence within scholarship in Canada. Such approaches have continued to inspire new ways of doing research nationally, and all continue to grow on an international scale.

It might be argued too that Canada has a propensity towards openness and diversity in many areas, including what counts as research. Canada prides itself on its progressive ideology, as demonstrated by the piloting of a funding category by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) in 2005 for research–creation in the fine arts. Research–creation denotes an area of practice-as-study that has spurred deliberations on the equality of art and science in research funding, as well as the articulation of arts research as theory and methodology in graduate student research and across the academy. SSHRC acknowledges creative process as contributing to research activity and accepts creative outputs as evidence of expertise for purposes of evaluation, making research–creation a valid form of inquiry through artistic expression. Funding in this category is identified as primarily for fine arts disciplines, whereas arts research is thriving across disciplines. Alongside this new funding category, practice-led or practice-based research in the fine arts is a growing area of interest in Canada; the approach is exemplified in several chapters in this collection.

The Tri-Council Agencies, including the major Canadian funding bodies in the natural sciences and engineering (NSERC), health and medicine (CIHR), as well as the SSHRC, are emphasizing the need for greater public access to research through knowledge translation and knowledge mobilization. Arts research offers fertile ground for knowledge translation, especially in ways that meet the demands of research activities as community-centred and accessible to the wider society. This is evidenced in the diverse chapters included in this anthology. Certainly the arts, and, as we advocate, the arts as research, can be a way to produce knowledge, to contribute to human understanding, and to represent the complexities of human experience. A large and growing contingent of researchers in Canada is demonstrating the effectiveness of using alternative media and arts genres in communicating research findings and for interdisciplinary collaboration. Arts scholarship, then, is another way to communicate research results, with the potential to engage more varied audiences than traditional forms of research dissemination might, in ways that are emotional, empathetic, and embodied, as well as intellectual.

The arts, as a form and forum for knowledge dissemination through inter-disciplinarity, is another popular theme emerging in the Canadian academy that reflects funding structures. Arts practices have offered some flexible space for working across disciplinary divides, and, consistent with the academic foci on knowledge translation, participatory, community-based, and collaborative arts practices and scholarship also address a growing discussion within the Canadian government and within community organizations about research for social innovation. According to Government of Canada Policy Research Initiative (2010), social innovation respond[s] to challenges that are not being addressed through conventional approaches and often require[s] new forms of collaboration … including ‘co-creation’ and ‘co-production’ among citizens and institutional actors (p. 1). This understanding of social innovation is consistent with the arts framed as cultural democracy (Graves, 2004), and is seen as providing public access to the means for cultural production and decision making. Cultural democracy, which calls for direct public participation in the arts to create vibrant, living, and responsive cultural communities, is part of the discourse about public arts funding in Canada (Gattinger, 2011). In this way, participatory, community-based, and collaborative arts practices and scholarship have much to offer in addressing growing trends within the academy and in the increasing role of research for social responsibility.

Creating Together: Finding our Artful Affinities

At a two-day SSHRC-sponsored workshop at Concordia University, Montreal, in 2012, authors (or representatives from each of the author groups) whose chapters had been accepted for inclusion in this book met to share their arts research practices, to provide a framework through which we could begin to envision a community of inquiry undertaking arts research practices as a means of producing knowledge. In the process of sharing we told stories, watched videos, and performances, danced, knitted, played drama games, walked a labyrinth, listened to poetry, took photographs, and dialogued about the intentions, multiplicities, and junctures of our work.

As we reviewed the richly varied contributions to this collection we identified a number of intersecting themes across chapters that attend to the liveliness, the commitments, and the affinities of the work of authors engaged in visual, textual, and performative arts-based research in contemporary contexts.

From a participatory perspective (Heron & Reason, 1997), there are aspects of process, place, story, embodiment, health and well-being, and witnessing and relationship that define creating together in this collection. The notion of process is at the heart of many of the practices represented; the stirring, mixing, evolving, and emergent nature of process is seen as central to arts practices. A sense of place is another repeated theme, whether represented through understandings of home, or homelessness, urban or rural environments, landscape or the land, or conflict of the land and people, as well as conflict itself as a place of opportunity—where, out of conflict and uncertainty, opportunities for transformation emerge. Story is another central concept, since storying experience is fundamental to understanding human experience, and manifests in many of the chapters in the form of narratives, poetry, and shared stories, as well as the revealing of tangling and untangling relationships through stories, and stories of community engagement. Embodiment emerges as a theme in the presentation and performativity of bodies, in talking about bodies in action, and by eliciting embodied knowledge. Authors explore how we embody knowledge and how our bodies have knowledge. Related to the body, the power of the arts for promoting well-being and healing is another common theme. Many of the chapters respond to some form of suffering. Authors attend to experiences of trauma and the processes of mourning, along with expressions of compassion and peace that promote greater understanding or sustainability and explore spirituality through arts practices. Together with healing as a theme, the process of witnessing is central to many chapters. Oft-times, processes of creating together involve listening, seeing, attunement, and attentiveness, mindful attendance, or with-ness. Such participatory practice may be described as a disposition that is rooted in humility, conviction, trust, and vulnerability on the part of the artist–collaborators and researchers. In these ways an ethics of relationship is at the heart of the arts research collected here—honouring relations with others, with the land, with stories, and with the past.

Community is naturally an overarching theme in this anthology, but in nuanced ways that demonstrate the complexity of community in action. Several chapters explore the cultural and social realities of diverse and often under-represented communities of practice and resistance, and/or examine community through anti-oppressive or decolonizing lenses allowing the arts to create space for alternative action—for community advocacy, for addressing civic issues, for empowerment, for inviting voice and positioning community members as active agents for change. As an alternative to deficit-based frameworks, these chapters invite community engagement and dialogue, building support networks, and provoking social change. A key point is the way diverse communities and colleagues come together in dialogue with one another, and in the process explore the nature of collaboration itself. Definitions, conditions, parameters, and limits of collaboration add to the discourses under way with the kinds of tensions needed to better articulate collaboration at both the artistic level and at the community level. The chapters demonstrate instances of emergent collaboration, how to be in collaboration, and how to facilitate collaboration, and in the process of collaboration learn what collaboration entails.

Sites of Arts Research: Clustering Chapters

Presenting a diverse collection of research studies across disciplinary boundaries united by the use of arts practices as sites for research, the chapters in this anthology include a wide range of ideas, eclectic scholarly arts practices, degrees of intensity with the research, and differing ways to render research, as well as a range of authors, from emerging to established scholars. Such difference is an important attribute in representing our ways of creating together, recognizing that the work is always in progress, partial, and evolving over the course of scholarly life. For this reason initial efforts are profiled alongside more formal presentations of research from senior scholars.

We have arranged our chapter contributions into three clusters: Participatory Arts Practices; Community-based Arts Scholarship; and Collaborative Arts Approaches. The clusters do not represent mutually exclusive practices, but are offered as encounters with arts research practices, operating across the blurred and overlapping boundaries of participation, community engagement, and collaboration. They are entry points to understanding the processes, proximities, and particularities developing with, in, and through arts research. This is a perspective that is fundamentally different than research that strives to quantify or qualify theory, methodology, or practice. At the same time, the arts research documented in these clusters follows expected standards of research design, with rigour—or as Carl Leggo suggests, with vigour—blending aesthetic and critical perspectives in discussions of doing research (Sinner et al., 2006).

Given the understandings offered by the authors, arts research does not demonstrate a static concept or a static method of inquiry. Instead, the collection demonstrates how authors are thinking about possibilities, suggesting new assemblages within interdisciplinary research networks that emerge in response to the significant shifts under way in the academy today. As we have come to know the scholars and the scholarship herein, we realize that each deserves a unique way of being situated and received, and we invite expansive interpretations and understandings of this language of scholarly arts practices that is both distinctive and yet shared across disciplines.

I Participatory Arts Practices

Opening our anthology is Warren Linds (Concordia University), Linda Goulet (First Nations University of Canada), Jo-Ann Episkenew (Indigenous People’s Health Research Centre), Karen Schmidt (File Hills Qu’Appelle Tribal Council Health Services), Heather Ritenburg (University of Regina), and Allison Whiteman (File Hills Qu’Appelle Tribal Council Health Services) with Sharing the Talking Stones: Theatre of the Oppressed Workshops as Collaborative Arts-based Health Research with Indigenous Youth. In this participatory project with the File Hills Qu’Appelle Tribal Council Health Services in Saskatchewan, the research is informed by an Indigenous, decolonizing lens, and involves workshops using theatre games and other activities to create a space where Indigenous youth can critically examine how the choices they make affect their health. The theatre processes also develop leadership skills as the youth develop confidence, begin to question habitual thinking, and become aware of possibilities for alternative action.

Diane Conrad (University of Alberta), Peter Smyth (Edmonton and Area Child and Family Services), and Wallis Kendal (iHuman Youth Society) bring forward a project, Uncensored: Participatory Arts-based Research with Youth, working with high-risk youth from the community arts organization iHuman Youth Society, in Edmonton, Alberta. This university–community partnership developed arts-based workshops using interactive theatre, storytelling, poetry, rap, digital arts, and other popular arts forms created with and by the youth to educate social service providers for working with high-risk youth. It resulted in a series of encounters with service providers that were also empowering for the youth.

Katherine M. Boydell (Hospital for Sick Children, University of Toronto), Brenda M. Gladstone (University of Toronto), Elaine Stasiulis (University of Toronto), Tiziana Volpe (Hospital for Sick Children), Bramilee Dhayanandhan (York University), and Ardra L. Cole (Mount Saint Vincent University) share their research, The Co-creation of a Mural Depicting Experiences of Psychosis, which documents the use of arts-informed inquiry as an alternative form of data collection and representation to further illuminate the pathway to mental health care for youth experiencing psychosis. Young people worked collaboratively with researchers, clinicians, and artists in the creation of a mural to be installed in secondary schools in Ontario and Prince Edward Island to create awareness and promote understanding of first episode psychosis.

Naureen Mumtaz’s (University of Alberta) Participatory Action-based Design Research: Designing Digital Stories Together with New-Immigrant/Refugee Communities for Health and Well-being, summarizes a thesis project using visual communication design and participatory design research with the aim of influencing social change in the context of new immigrant and refugee community health. The project focused on how to design communications to mobilize a group of multicultural health brokers for advocacy and information-sharing about health and well-being issues. Project participants created digital stories as creative expressions of their cultural and social realities.

In the closing chapter of the first cluster, Izumi Sakamoto (University of Toronto), Matthew Chin (University of Michigan), Natalie Wood (George Brown College, Toronto), and Josie Ricciardi (Regent Park Community Health Centre, Toronto) in The Use of Staged Photography in Community-based Participatory Research with Homeless Women: Methodological Learnings, describe a research project engaging the arts with women and transwomen who have experienced homelessness in Toronto, Ontario. In this study, participants explore how, through their experiences of homelessness, they build support networks with each other in order to survive. The project used staged photography and subsequent art-related dissemination activities as participatory research methods informed by principles of anti-oppression, empowerment, and cultural democracy. Focusing on women’s individual and collective strengths through the arts, their research offers an alternative perspective to the deficit-based frameworks around homelessness.

II Community-based Arts Scholarship

Opening our second cluster of research studies, Nisha Sajnani (Lesley University), Warren Linds (Concordia University), Alan Wong (Concordia University), Lisa Ndejuru (Concordia University), Lucy Lu (Minwaashin Lodge—Aboriginal Women’s Support Centre, Ottawa) Paul L. Gareau (University of Ottawa), and David Ward (lab six and a half, Concordia University) bring us The Living Histories Ensemble: Sharing Authority Through Play, Storytelling, and Performance in the Aftermath of Collective Violence. This playback theatre ensemble practises at the intersection of oral history, trauma, community dialogue, and arts-based research as part of a major community–university oral history project in Montreal, Quebec. This chapter, written in the form of a dialogue between ensemble members, examines how engaging in embodied, interactive, improvisational theatre has given rise to new interstandings about the experience of violence and its aftermath.

Devora Neumark’s (Concordia University & Goddard College, Vermont) Co-activating Beauty, Co-narrating Home: Dialogic Live Art Performance and the Practice of Inclusiveness, presents her most recent cycle of research-creation describing a series of live art events that took shape around several historical factors: the establishment of the State of Israel and concomitant oppression of the Palestinians; the role attributed to the beautification of home as an integral part of the survival of the Jewish people; and the Jewish cultural affirmation of home(land) as exemplified in multiple iterations of a theatrical production, Jewish Home Beautiful. The community dialogic performances were aimed at provoking social change and nurturing the emergence of new ways of knowing; interrogating the power dynamics associated with personal and cultural narratives; and motivated by the desire to address the injustice of domicide through an encounter with the aesthetic, ethical, social, and political forces that shape individual and communal life.

George Belliveau (University of British Columbia) in Using Drama to Build Community in Canadian Schools, presents the case studies of two schools in Canada where teaching artists are integrating forms of theatre and drama to develop artistic and community engagement. In Halifax, Nova Scotia, a theatre company worked on a number of theatre-related projects with students at an independent school. In an elementary school in Vancouver, British Columbia, university-based teaching artists engaged in drama-based activities with students. Belliveau details the benefits of learning through/with/from the arts for the community of students, teachers, parents, and teaching artists in these two sites.

Our last chapter in the second cluster by Nancy Bleck (Emily Carr University of Art & Design) leads us in a discussion of Witnessing Transformations: Art with a Capital C—Community and Cross-cultural Collaboration, about a project known as the Uts’am Witness. Bleck relates her experience as co-founder, artist, and researcher from inside the project, through story and photography, bringing forward the voices of her collaborators to consider how the arts can support participation by creating understandings at sites of tension and, at times, of conflict. In this chapter, the role of artistic practice is questioned from the perspectives of diverse communities as well as how the artist becomes an active player in contemporary society around these challenging issues by strengthening relationships to the land, water, and among nations, both from settler societies and from First Nations.

III Collaborative Arts Approaches

In the third cluster of chapters focusing on collaborative arts research, Barbara Bickel (Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL), Medwyn McConachy (community artist and earth-based activist, Vancouver Island), and Nané Jordan’s (University of British Columbia) Wombwalks: Re-attuning with the m/Other, explores the art practice of the Gestare Art Collective, which evolved within a framework of women’s spirituality and honours the Divine Feminine. Their Wombwalks project, a long-distance collaborative practice linked by digital technologies, is set in walking the ancient geomantic architecture of the labyrinth. In their chapter, the artists interpret the collective events through deep listening and re-attunement to the archaic m/Other, as an instrument for peace, assisting them in coming to a compassionate awareness of their individual yet collective relations with each other.

Vera Caine (University of Alberta) and Michelle Lavoie’s (University of Alberta and MacEwan University) Seeing Through Artistic Practices: Collaborations between an Artist and Researcher, documents the collaboration between a printmaker/photographer and a narrative inquirer in Edmonton, Alberta. The collaboration began in the face of mourning the difficult stories around the disappearance of one of Caine’s close research participants and evolved into an inquiry about storied and lived experiences in an effort to see the tactile traces of memory. The photography and narrative operate as co-compositions of what it means to see the invisible. The authors emphasize the process of engagement, the ethics of collaboration, and the attentiveness brought to a marginal space of disappearance.

Patti Pente (University of Alberta) and Pat Beaton’s (visual artist, Vancouver, British Columbia), Soot and Subjectivity: Uncertain Collaboration is an a/r/tographical research project where two visual artist/educators explore sense of place through collaborative artmaking, informed by uncertain and irregular rhythms of fire. As part of a larger study undertaken as an experiment in landscape art and educational critique, this inquiry questions the nature of artistic collaboration when subjectivity is conceptually loosened from the normative associations of individualism within neoliberalism. Collaboration within the performance of subjectivity is tied to unpredictable moments of relationality, where landscape art emerges in synchronic and diachronic synergy. The agential potential in collaborative creative practice as a form of transformational pedagogy is considered in relation to the attitudinal and practical ways we live in the land.

Heather McLeod, Sharon Penney, Rhonda Joy, Cecile Badenhorst, Dorothy Vaandering, Sarah Pickett, Xuemei Li, and Jacqueline Hesson (all at Memorial University of Newfoundland) collaborate as scholars in Arts-based Representation of Collaboration: Explorations of a Faculty Writing Group, in which their self-study projects demonstrate how the arts support and contribute to understanding lived experiences in the academy. The eight-member-all-woman writing group questions representation, knowledge construction, and collaboration, and how, as new academics, they make sense of their identity. The group used inkshedding to reflect upon, understand, query, and comment on one another’s artworks, allowing each member to have a voice that is valued and embraced, and in turn, offers empathetic insights to one another.

Bringing the final cluster and the anthology to a close, Sean Wiebe (University of Prince Edward Island), Lynn Fels (Simon Fraser University), Celeste Snowber (Simon Fraser University), Indrani Margolin (University of Northern British Columbia), and John J. Guiney Yallop (Acadia University) provide a point of departure in A Poetic Inquiry on Passive Reflection: A Summer Day Breeze, as they unveil how their community of poetic practice collaborated to examine their post-secondary learning environments, and how, through poetry, they advocate for a passive reflexivity to resist the simplified empirical truism that data is something to be collected. In the process they question the economic overtones of the efficient research machine: Collect, Analyze, Report, Repeat.

In the course of creating together, we have come to regard this anthology as a gathering, a project that has mobilized working definitions of participatory, community-based, and collaborative arts research practices as a conversation offered from many perspectives and places, across a series of openings that are the ideas, places, and peoples we are collectively. We are not seeking to produce a definitive text, nor do we suggest that this collection is all-inclusive, or necessarily geographically bound, even though our arts research and writing is occurring in Canadian contexts. Instead, we regard this collection as a site that can encourage scholars, students, and community members to pose questions and question understandings as openings, in an effort to advance the topics, ideas, concepts, and conversations scholars have shared in these chapters. This anthology serves as an expression of an ontological community that instigated and fostered debate and practice through the arts as research. It is our hope that Creating Together resonates as spaces of possibilities in which we may find the how and why of sustaining the inquiry that is indeed at the centre of our arts research practices.

Anita and Diane

May 2014

References

Barone, T., & Eisner, E. (2011). Arts based research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Cahnamann-Taylor, M., & Siegesmund, R. (Eds.) (2008). Arts-based research in education. Foundations for practice. New York, NY: Routledge.

Clandinin, J. D., & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Dunlop, R. (1999). Boundry Bay: A novel as educational research. Doctoral dissertation, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC.

Gattinger, M. (2011). Democratization of culture, cultural democracy and governance. Canadian Public Arts Funders Annual General Meeting. Whitehorse, Yukon. Retrieved from: http://www.cpaf-opsac.org/en/themes/documents/CPAF_2011_AGM_Democratization_of_Culture_Cultural_Democracy_Governance_Mar082012_000.pdf

Government of Canada Policy Research Initiative. (2010). Talking about social innovation: Summary of international roundtable on social innovation. Workshop report. Ottawa, ON: Author. Retrieved from: http://www.horizons.gc.ca/eng/book/export/html/986

Graves, J. B. (2004). Cultural democracy: The arts, community and the public purpose. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Heron, J., & Reason, P. (1997). A participatory inquiry paradigm. Qualitative Inquiry, 3 (3), 274–294.

Irwin, R. (2004). A/r/tography: A metonymic métissage. In R. L. Irwin & A. de Cosson (Eds.), A/r/tography: Rendering self through arts-based living inquiry (pp. 27–38). Vancouver, BC: Pacific Educational Press.

Irwin, R. L., & de Cosson, A. (Eds.) (2004). A/r/tography: Rendering self through arts-based living inquiry. Vancouver, BC: Pacific Educational Press.

Knowles, J. G., & Cole, A. L. (Eds.) (2008). Handbook of the arts in qualitative research: perspectives, methodologies, examples, and issues. Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications.

Leavy, P. (2009). Method meets art: Arts-based research practice. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Liamputtong, P., & Rumbold, J. (Eds.) (2008). Knowing differently: Arts-based & collaborative research methods. New York, NY: Nova Science Publishers.

Springgay, S., Irwin, R., Leggo, C., & Gouzouasis, P. (2008). Being with a/r/tography. Rotterdam, NL: Sense.

Sinner, A., Leggo, C., Irwin, R. L., Grauer, K., & Gouzouasis, P. (2006). Arts-based dissertations: Reviewing the practices of new scholars. Canadian Journal of Education, 29(4), 1223–1270. Retrieved from: http://www.csse.ca/CJE/Articles/FullText/CJE29-4/CJE-4-Sinneretal.pdf

PART 1

PARTICIPATORY

ARTS PRACTICES

Our first cluster focuses on chapters involving arts research practices that are participatory, defined as engaging participants alongside researchers in all stages of inquiry and artmaking. The inquiry tradition known as participatory action research (PAR) grew alongside the popular education movement of the 1960s and 1970s led by Paulo Freire (1988, 1993). PAR was taken up in projects in the developing world, with early projects in Tanzania, and a strong influence from Canadian adult educators (see Hall, 2005). In these contexts PAR was aimed at producing practical knowing for the benefit of the community, for education, for community dialogue, and for raising consciousness.

Participatory work in communities in the developing world frequently used popular arts forms as ways of engaging community members in inquiry processes, as spaces for cultural exchange, incorporating storytelling, song, dance, photography, puppetry, and theatre. Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (1979) is one example of a participatory arts approach known for directly engaging audiences in critical creative processes. In participatory arts by the people and for the people, interactions and relations are key.

These traditions continue in critical scholarship in Canada; and in the projects shared in this cluster—where participants, often from groups marginalized by society, are framed as co-researchers and actively involved in arts creation. Participatory arts research approaches tackle issues of power that shape relations of inclusion–exclusion and authority. As Izumi Sakamoto, one of our contributing authors, said at