Critical Approaches to Arts-Based Research
Special Edition of UNESCO Observatory refereed e-journal, Multidisciplinary
Research in the Arts
Call for Papers: Critical approaches to arts-based research
Arts based research and its proponents have come a long way in the past few years. Whether
framed as arts-informed practices, practice-led research or applied research, it is certainly
interesting times for those working at the nexus of arts, research and scholarly thought. There
has been an unprecedented proliferation of discourses and approaches and we are continuing to
move away from a defence of arts based research and its ‘validity’ and toward a celebration of
this proliferation of diverse ways of knowing and doing. This ‘coming of age’ of (what we here
call) ABR opens new possibilities for critically theorising and epistemologically interrogating
deeper understandings of its works and workings.
Leavy and Cahnmann-Taylor (most recently), and McNiff, Eisner and others (for longer), have
urged us to move beyond an either/or positioning in relation to scientific paradigms that still
dominate academic research and research environments. Rolling (2010) further reminds us that
“arts based research methodologies are not analysed as an alternative to social science or
historical methods….[but rather] enacted along a spectrum between both scientific and artistic
ways of comprehending the human experience and doing productive cultural work” (p 103).
Yet the Achilles heel of ABR remains its under-theorisation. This issue seeks to address a gap
in ats-based research to understanding its full potential as an alternate conceptual and research
paradigm, through rigourous critical approaches.
This Special Issue celebrates the opening of new doors in theorising innovative arts-based
research. We welcome contributions from a range of global contexts, submission formats, and
across all disciplines. We avoid any attempt to codify or limit the parameters of what
contemporary arts based research is or can be. Indeed we seek the opposite: to highlight its
ever-expanding possibilities.
We invite contributors to embrace what Rolling calls “art for scholarship’s sake” (2010, p 102),
suggesting tangible moves not only toward new methods and methodologies, but toward shifts
of paradigm. From visual, musical and other performative methods to a slippage of arts based
research into interdisciplinary merging like visual sociology (Taylor 2013), this volume
attempts to explore the ways in which arts based research is moving beyond a lack of critical
interrogation. Indeed, we believe that ABR will only rhizomatically expand under such
scrutiny, and this volume is a recognition of this new potential.
This special edition aims to encourage critical analysis and dialogue about:
(a) the objects and subjects of arts based research for the 21st century;
(b) poststructuralist, posthuman and other critical approaches to arts based research;
(c) the interdisciplinary application of performative and practice-led research in
transferable (methodological) models.
We invite contributions that connect analysis with applied practice in any form or format. We
invite contributions from those who find arts based research problematic as well as productive.
We also seek contributions that describe efforts to redefine the boundaries of ABR in the early
21st century, by such agents as researchers, activists, teachers, young people, artists and
policymakers. We strongly encourage digital assets as submissions or part thereof.
We are particularly interested in topics such as:
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formal, informal and alternate sites of arts-led research in education
power, governmentality and the arts
new and emerging methodological perspectives
imagination and creativity as practice-led methods
affect and memory in ABR
virtual / online ABR as embodied practice
cultural / corporeal geographies of arts based research
visual sociology and other hybrids
zombie arts as institutional liberatory practice
All submissions will be double-blind peer reviewed. This journal uses Harvard stystem
for referencing, and full STYLE GUIDELINES are available on the website. Full paper
submissions of up to 8000 words (all inclusive) are DUE 2ND JUNE 2014 to one of the two
guest editors:
Dr Anne Harris, Monash University at: Anne.Harris@Monash.edu
Or Dr Mary Ann Hunter, University of Tasmania at: maryann.hunter@utas.edu.au
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