Conference Agenda

Against the backdrop of this year’s congress theme, this paper explores how the creative, material, and community-based practice of contemporary knitting shapes our way of being in and responding to the world. Furthermore, it asks how we might engage in qualitative inquiries while acknowledging the vibrant entanglements and assemblages of the non-human, advocating for non-textual documentation as well as speculative processes as essential parts of arts-based research.

In my ongoing PhD project, I explore the growing resurgence of knitting as a communal activity and its potential to shape the practitioner’s understanding of everyday life, asking how practices of social, material and embodied collaboration evoke forms of care and response-ability (Haraway, 2016). I advocate for a movement between the boundaries of theory and practice, one that treats making as thinking, and, as such, I experiment with qualitative methods that embrace and take the interplay between human and non-human seriously. During my time as a visiting scholar at the Faculty of Education at the University of Melbourne, I was introduced to the concept of a/r/tography. To me, the concept, which stems from an “understanding of arts-based research as enacted living inquiry” (Springgay et al., 2005), resonated with my research’s aim of engaging with materials as active participants, and in continuation thereof, understanding how creative, embodied practices influence the ways we know and experience the world.

Based on a series of knitting workshops conducted during my research stay, I explore how a/r/tography can serve as a method for engaging participants with their everyday lives through the material act of knitting. As practiced in a/r/tography, I also draw on my own lived inquiry as a knitter, weaving in autoethnographic reflections and exploring how these experiences inform my research.

The arts are becoming more common in management education to move beyond traditional teaching and prepare students for the complex, uncertain, and value-driven challenges they face in organizations and society. Despite their growing application, the field remains fragmented, marked by divergent definitions, epistemological foundations, and varying degrees of artistic integration. This paper addresses this fragmentation by drawing on 70 qualitative case studies that highlight aesthetic epistemologies as well as constructivist and experiential approaches.

This study explores how the arts are integrated into business education in diverse forms such as poetry, photography, and performance. It does so through a systematic review of peer-reviewed research (1998 and 2024). The study follows PRISMA standards and employs a transparent, traceable methodology supported by Zotero, R, and OSF. This process strengthens credibility and rigor in qualitative reviews which is increasingly relevant with the growing use of AI.

Thematic coding synthesizes key debates and epistemological foundations in the literature, deepening understanding of artistic inquiry and its educational intentions. It also showcases methodological diversity while highlighting the strengths and limitations of these experimental and creative practices, particularly in transdisciplinary settings.

Building on these insights, this paper introduces a comparative framework that makes a distinction between arts-based, arts-informed, and arts-related teaching methods. This framework positions practices along a continuum of artistic integration, ranging from immersive to illustrative uses of art, while clarifying their educational purposes and outcomes. The framework clarifies different ways of integrating art in qualitative inquiry and reducing ambiguity in terminology.

By mapping both the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of integrating art, the study advances theoretical clarity, provides educators with a practical tool for reflection, and supports transdisciplinary research on the transformative potential of the arts. It also fosters methodological innovation and sparks critical discussion on the role of arts-based inquiry in transdisciplinary settings.

This presentation is a blend of immanenent writing, psychogeography and street-art based on a long-term visit to Florence, the cradle of the Rennaisance, to ask questions about the contemporary return of fascism in Europe. it is born from a curiostiy with British poets in Florence, colonials but also radicals who provide an ideal position for an interrogation of politics and place. The aim is to follow the lives of Grand Tour poets, exploring their own resistance to British culture to develop an artis-based refelction of Italian protest, but also wider assemblages of dissent. The talk will involve the pressentation of twelve art works accompanied by immanant writing, poetry and movement.

This study explores the teaching of writing as an art form, based on teachers’ experiences. More specifically, it focuses on creative writing as an out-of-school activity and the art form known in Finland as literary art (Swe. ordkonst). The aim of the study is to explore how teachers of literary art for children and youth, within the context of basic education in the arts in Finland, express their teaching practices. We pose the following research question: What do literary art teachers express that they do in literary art education within basic education in the arts? The study is grounded in performative theoretical perspectives, based on relational ontology, and we use poetic inquiry as method of analysis. Expressions from six literary art teachers are interwoven into five research poems. The results show that teachers in literary art emphasize writing as an art form and highlight writing as a complex, moving, affective, unpredictable, and co-creative process. The role of the literary art teacher can be seen as hybrid, where the teacher is simultaneously a writing artist, educator, and reader.

This presentation discusses findings from an arts-based qualitative activity that is part of a longitudinal PhD thesis project. The larger study explores the lived experiences of a polyamorous network (polycule). Eight members of an interconnected polycule were invited to create individual collages that visually represented their personal journeys, identities, and relational dynamics within polyamory. Drawing on feminist, queer, and relational ontologies, this project privileges participant meaning-making, inviting multiple truths to coexist in visual and narrative form.

Collage, as both method and product, offers a unique way to access and represent the layered, non-linear, and affectively rich terrain of polyamorous life. Participants engaged the medium to explore themes such as boundary negotiation, fluid kinship, emotional labor, and the interplay of autonomy and connection.

The resulting presentation features reproductions of all collages, accompanied by brief participant narratives and key interpretive themes that emerged. Through this multimodal presentation, the project seeks not only to illuminate how polyamorous people conceptualize and communicate the complexities of their relationships, but also to foreground the potential of visual methodologies in qualitative research on intimate life.

This work contributes to broader conversations in sexuality studies, visual sociology, and arts-based research by demonstrating how creative expression can make space for voices often marginalized in normative narratives of love and partnership. The presentation invites viewers to engage visually, emotionally, and intellectually with the participants' representations, and to consider how collage can serve as both an archive of experience and a form of resistance to dominant relational scripts.