Arts-Based Research(ABR) Special Interest Group (SIG)
May 28-May 30, 2027
ABR SIG Symposium
The ABR SIG will host a one-day Symposium. During the Symposium we will convene a meeting led by invited experts engaging participants in interactive forms of inquiry, expression, and performance that embody current practices and issues in ABR. All who have registered for the ICQI conference are welcome!
Introduction and Background
Arts-Based Research (ABR) is based upon the premise of utilizing various forms of artistic practice as a primary means of investigating and understanding human experience, extending to more materially sensitive, nondiscursive, and intuitive ways of knowing. Grounded in a worldview of pluralistic intersubjective ontologies and dialectic aesthetic epistemologies, ABR seeks to disrupt usual binaries such as thought and sense, mind and matter, the human and the nonhuman, and space and time. The result is an evocative, aesthetically powerful, and artistic performance that illuminates new insights intended to transform the experience and perceptions of audiences.
Through provocation and contested interactions, ABR invites the exploration of multi-dimensional human sensory, emotional, and embodied phenomena otherwise inexpressible and out of reach through formal, academic, and explanatory analysis. ABR also transcends disciplinary boundaries and is intended to therefore have applications across multiple domains and impact global socio-cultural and socio-political arenas. While the potential contributions of ABR are vast, the pragmatic issues of methodology, translation, evaluation, credibility, ethics, and, in some cases, dissemination, require ongoing productive and creative discourse.
Provocations that will guide the ABR SIG program include:
- Re-visiting definitions of Arts-Based Research. How would you characterize arts-based research? What is arts-based research and what is it not? How might ABR illuminate issues around local, national, and international crises?
- Constructing and characterizing worldviews implicit in arts-based research. How do we conceptualize and articulate the onto-epistemology of ABR? How do these perspectives guide the identification of ABR problems, questions, and strategies? How do socio-political contexts contribute to how we construct these worldviews, form our questions, and formulate our investigative and disseminative strategies to illuminate socio-political resistance and change? How might ABR explore shifting worldviews?
- The problem and the question. What are the unaddressed research problems and social issues that might require arts-based research approaches? How might ABR address socio-political and cultural issues differently than other research traditions?
- Methodological dilemma. How do we maintain the onto-epistemological integrity of the arts-based worldviews while developing systematic arts-based approaches to inquiry?
- How do new ABR methodologies facilitate addressing new research questions?
- What arts-based investigative practices have you applied to your own research?
- What skills are required to conduct arts-based research?
- What are some unnamed methodologies for conducting social research that can be extrapolated from your explorations as an arts-based researcher?
- How have local, national, and international crises necessitated new arts-based approaches and technologies?
- Advancement of knowledge. What implications might arts-based research have for yours and related fields in advancing knowledge? How can insights and dissemination methods from arts-based research advance knowledge and accessibility around local, national, and international crises? How might arts-based research practices from other fields influence your work?
- Social justice, dissemination, and global impact. What are examples of critical-activist arts-based research outcomes serving as models of social justice and public engagement—whether rethinking global and intellectual contexts, critiquing contemporary events, problematizing norms, or contesting ideologies? What are some ways in which ABR could provide insight into global impacts and additional international crises?
- Evaluation and credibility. What are current methods for evaluating the authenticity, credibility, and aesthetic power of arts-based research projects?
- Ethical issues and responsibilities. As an arts-based researcher, what are some of the challenges for authenticity and credibility that we face? What is our moral and ethical responsibility? What is our responsibility to our participants and audiences?
