Conference Agenda

The Arts-Based Research Global Consortium is a group of international scholars who have gathered together for the purpose of advocating for the visibility, accessibility, and valuation of arts-based research approaches in addressing human rights, social justice, and critical global issues. Currently, the values of empathy, understanding, introspection, and truth, relative to the communal human condition are at a critical point within our current socio-political context and climate. The regard and positioning of these human values directly relate to how we construct and protect our global community, our roles and agency in these communities, the socio-political discourse, the advancement and dissemination of knowledge, and the ultimate impact on our survival and evolution. Within this context it behooves us to study these phenomena in the social and health sciences critically exploring, disrupting, and deconstructing the implicit research philosophies that drive and contribute current neoliberal and colonizing trends in defining truth, knowledge, justice, values, and our overall inclusive quality of life. This videograph presents a brief overview of the founding, mission, and works of the ABR Global Consortium.

The impact of current trends in technology, digitalization and mass media on our global

culture raises questions regarding the responsibility and ethics of research decisions in

contemporary social and health sciences. Embedded in the dominant paradigms, these trends subtly affect our worldviews, our valuation of the human condition, and the nature of socio-political discourse. In such critical post normal times, radical imagination and epistemic activism that embrace non-dominant modes of knowledge production in the social and health sciences becomes a necessity. Arts-based research (ABR) is resonant with the onto-epistemological perspectives and methodologies necessary to challenge and disrupt current unilateral and hegemonic paradigms underlying decaying societal and geo-political constructs. In this paper, we discuss the radical imaginative philosophy that motivates arts-based research methodologies as an approach to social activism and epistemological change.

This paper presents the philosophy, innovative methods, and final aesthetic synthesis of a collaborative arts-based research project about the lived experience of COVID-19. The project was initiated in 2020 and completed in 2022. Nineteen international arts-based research scholars participated as co-researchers, submitting their arts-based and narrative responses to the project. The six-member core research team guiding the project collected and organized the submissions while simultaneously entering into immersive, iterative, dynamic, arts-based data generation, dialogic analytic and syntheses processes with co-researchers, and each other. Materials-discursive analytic processes, arts-based responses, sensorial coding, intersubjective dialogues, and arts-based assemblages conducted iteratively throughout the project. The performative result captured the sensory, embodied, and emotional experiences of the evolving stages of the pandemic as identified by and resonant with the co-researchers and multiple audiences. These stages were identified during the project by the co-researchers as: initial anxiety and panic; reflection and creativity; and resilience. The final synthesis of the project is an arts-based and performative piece using video and interactive gallery venues representative of these stages.

Community-Based Participatory Action Research (CBPAR) promotes collaborative knowledge production and social transformation by engaging community members as co-researchers. However, sustaining meaningful participation and equitable communication remains a challenge, particularly in settings marked by power asymmetries and cultural complexity. This article introduces the VisionArte methodology, which integrates art-based methods and sensory ethnography to foster youth engagement and enhance dialogical processes within CBPAR. Developed through fieldwork conducted in 2023–2024 with Indigenous youth in San José de Chiquitos, Bolivia, the study explores how visual and sensory tools—such as visual mapping, embodied exercises, and data portrait drawing—can build trust, strengthen communication skills, and amplify marginalized voices. A central finding is the transformative potential of collective sensory envisioning exercises, which enabled youth to articulate pressing concerns—ranging from domestic violence and healthcare access to pollution and narcotrafficking—while simultaneously challenging researchers’ assumptions about local priorities. By emphasizing co-creation, emotional attunement, and community-driven design, the VisionArte methodology demonstrates how tailored visual and sensory approaches can foster inclusive participation, redistribute epistemic power, and support long-term engagement in participatory research. This article contributes to the growing literature on art-based methods in CBPAR by offering both theoretical insight and practical guidance for designing equitable research interactions.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce, define, and outline the continuum of arts-based research philosophies and best practices. In doing so we hope to provide a comprehensive guide to understanding and assessing the rigor of ABR for those who: a) evaluate research in peer-reviewed journals; b) review funding opportunities; c) teach, study and conduct ABR.

Arts-Based Research (ABR) is an approach to research that aims to access and explore phenomena that exist beyond tangible, observable, and descriptive forms of ways of being and knowing using artistic forms of inquiry. ABR aspires to study the more elusive and intangible sensory-embodied, aesthetic, and intersubjective dimensions of human experience and social discourse that are beyond words and otherwise inaccessible. The investigation of these dimensions of the internal human experience contributes to the insight and illumination about the human mind, perceptions, and related behaviors. ABR falls under the wider umbrella of creative practice-based research, and research-creation, among others, which are differently represented and explored across different disciplines and geographical locations. With this paper we aspire to increase the visibility, credibility, and accessibility of ABR by proffering guidelines to defining, reading, understanding, conducting, and evaluating ABR. To accomplish this, we present definitions of ABR, when it might be used, philosophical assumptions or worldviews underlying ABR, methodological practices, and approaches to evaluation as well as ethical concerns that must be considered when assessing the quality and rigor of ABR.