Feeling knowing: the nature and purpose of arts-based research methods

Sophie Tamas

Chapter 24 in Handbook of Interpretive Research Methods in the Social Sciences, 2025, pp 376-388 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Art provides a vast range of communicative options well suited to the complexity and opacity of human experience. Arts-based methods are increasingly adopted by interpretive scholars to expand the depth and reach of academic work. However, art is not just an expansion pack for academic modes of representation. Its creative and connective power relies on respect for feeling (sensation, affect, and emotion) as the framing condition for knowing. In arts-based methods both feeling and thinking are recognized as interdependent bodily functions rather than the effects of an abstract sovereign mind. This chapter offers an autoethnographic discussion of my relationship with (writing about) arts-based methods, their nature and purpose, the models of subjectivity and power they demonstrate, and their generative potential for research and teaching, as shaped by Indigenous theory and by my own experiential path. It aims to enact and describe some of the theoretical and practical gifts and challenges of enlisting the arts in knowledge production.

Keywords: Art; Research methods; Subjectivity; Emotion; Creativity; Fear (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781803926384
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