# Theoretical roots

**THEORETICAL ROOTS OF ARTS-BASED METHODS**

From the very beginning humans have been drawn to expression, pleasure, belonging and spiritual being. We can only imagine the reason for humans leaving their own hand prints and drawing s15 000 or even 25 000 years ago in the Lascaux cave´s nearly 6,000 figures. Anthropologists and art historians have been theorizing they were made as a symbolic and ritualistic act to guarantee luck in hunting or as an accounting system of past hunting or maybe something else. (Fleming and Honour, 2009)


Sketch by Anne Pässilä, photo by Antti Knutas

At that time, man did not perceive an animal figure drawn on a rock as a form of art. In the past, artisans have been responsible for producing art and their work has been valued for their skill and identified as a craft and part of culture.

Art as the current perception of the creative act of professional artist has only begun to take shape from the beginning of a new era. Since that art has been provocative concept and some of us emphasize that it is related to imitation, imagination, evoking emotion and senses. Art can be broadly defined as a human action, creation and ways of expression, including for example dance, music, literature, theater, film, sculpture and paintings manifesting various way in different cultures and times (Fleming, and Honour, 2009).


Sketch by Anne Pässilä, photo by Antti Knutas

Interest in arts-based approaches and various forms of arts-based methods in business and management education (Taylor and Ladkin, 2009) as well as "education in, through and for communities" (Coemans & Hannes, 2017) has continued to grow in the 25 years since Eisner published his seminal work (1993) exploring the possibilities of bridging research in arts and science. Arts-based approach can be seen "**as a wide spectrum of practice**" (Owens, 2019, p.8) **where on the one point of spectrum there is an instrumental use of art and on the other point of spectrum art is having absolute value without any need to serve or benefit anything else than itself**.

Arts-based methods are as a concept itself methods that are based on a specific form of art. For example methods based on theater and drama are often designed with the help of basic elements of dramaturgical framing (role, situation, focus/perspective and tension) and are used in one or all stages of research.

Sketch by Anne Pässilä, photo by Antti Knutas

Owens (2019) definition of arts-based methods in education research is: “**A process of investigation leading to new knowledge effectively shared in which the arts play a primary role in any or all steps of the process**”. Coemans & Hannes (2017) define arts-based methods in community-based inquiry as: “**The use of artistically inspired methods by researchers and participants in a collaborative research environment where members of the community are actively involved either in creating art in the search for meaning or in providing a critical, situated response to artistically inspired formats of research dissemination from others**.”

Arts-based methods are classified as such: **Visual art**: Still images - Photography - Drawing - Collage - Painting - Graffiti Moving images - Video - Digital animation 3D artefacts - E.g. quilts, mosaics, masks, life-size marionettes. **Performing art**: Theatre/drama Dance Music Puppetry. **Live art**: Writing on the body. **Literary art**: Poetry Creative writing Reader’s theatre Multiple methods approach (i.e. combining different art genres) (Coemans & Hannes, 2017).

Identification can also be done **through a context** in which they are used and **through a purpose** they are serving. For example arts-based methods in organizational development, learning and change purpose can be: to increase empathy and awareness of emotions, to increase skills on reflection and reflexive practices, to elaborate individual and collective creativity (Taylor & Ladkin, 2009).

Identification from **community-based research context** with vulnerable community purpose can be:
-to overcome power imbalances between researcher(s) and the subject being researched, to give a voice,
-to better articulate experiences,
-to facilitate reflection and dialogue,
-to work with more vulnerable groups,
-to be able to explore more complex or sensitive issues that are difficult to verbalize,
-to motivate individuals,
-to develop specific skill,
-to influence social policy,
-to facilitate change
-to communicate research findings (Coemans &Hannes, 2017).

In a field of **organization, innovation and management studies** arts-based methods have several purpose and context:
- for gaining competences for creative problem solving and ideation in a studio-based learning and participatory design context, for example work of Meisiek (2016), Barry and Meisiek (2015) and Larsen and Friis (2018) .
- for increasing skills on reflection and reflexive practices, for example the focus of the work of Pässilä (2012) and Pässilä, Oikarinen and Harmaakorpi (2015) was in making sense of multiple needs, interest and tensions in innovation, and, in investigating how professionals gain collective understanding through their customer´s as well as each other’s experiences in perplexed situations with the help of research-based theatre, work done in a field of arts-based health research by Hodgins and Boydell (2014); Fraser and Sayah (2011); Nisker, Martin, Bluhm and Daar (2006); White and Belliveau (2011).
- for creating and strengthening emotional link to knowledge creation; to ´emotive knowledge` with the help of arts-based initiatives (Schiuma 2011, p. 3.) both on people – on their energetic and emotional states as well as on their attitudes and self-reflection – and on organizational infrastructure in in a knowledge management context, for example the work of Schiuma (2011) and with a focus on artful inquiry in management education, especially when on developing innovation competency for example the work of Darsø, (2008; 2017) and in a context artful inquiry (Barry, 1996)
- for emphasise on how the arts and artistic action allow organisational and societal impact, for example the work of Adler (2015)

In all cases it is relevant to identify which stage of research design arts-based methods can be used in: “*…generating or framing or finding the research questions, in generating or capturing data, in analysing data, in disseminating, sharing, keeping warm the results for further interaction and re-framing of questions…*” it is also relevant to think through research position “*doing research ‘with’ rather than ‘on’ participants, enlarging understanding rather than explaining meaning; making complex interactions visible; credibility and relatability; multiple ways of seeing the world; finding the most useful questions; making research accessible to all citizens*” (Owens, 2018 p. 10; Leavy, 2015; Bobadilla, Lefebvre and Mairisse, 2017).

One of the core focus in applying arts to particaptory communication of science is based on stotytelling and emerging narratives that are unlocking us.


> Please think a spectrum of arts-based methods and make a drawing of it. Please place your own practice in it.

## References

Adler, N. (2015) Finding Beauty in a Fractured World: Art Inspires Leaders – Leaders Change the World, The Academy of Management Review 40(3): 480-494.

Balestrini, Mara & Rogers, Yvonne & Hassan, Carolyn & Creus, Javi & King, Martha & Marshall, Paul. (2017) A City in Common: A Framework to Orchestrate Large-scale Citizen Engagement around Urban Issues, pp. 2282-2294. CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025915

Barry, D. (1996) Artful Inquiry: A Symbolic Constructivist Approach to Social Science Research. Qualitative Inquiry. 2 (4): 411-438.

Barrry, D. & Meisiek, S. (2015) Discovering the business studio. Journal of management education 39(1): 153-175.

Bobadilla, N. Lefebvre,A. and Mairisse, P. (2017) Dysfunction: critics, ethics,and challenges of arts-based research dissemination. Conference paper presented in 33rd EGOS Colloquium 2017, The Good Organization, Asprirations, Interventions, Struggles, Copenhagen, Denmark 6th-8th July.

Coemans, S., Hannes, K. (2017) Researchers under the spell of the arts: Two decades of using arts-based methods in community-based inquiry with vulnerable populations. Educational Research Review 22: 34-49.

Eisner, E. (1993) Forms of Understanding and the Future of Educational Research, Educational Researcher 22(7):5-11.

Coemans, S., Wang, Q., Leysen, J., Hannes, K. (2015) The Use of Arts-based Methods in Community-based Research with Vulnerable Populations: Protocol for a Scoping Review. International Journal of Educational Research, 71: 33-39.

Darsø, L. (2008) Wisdom: A Backdrop for Organizational Studies, in D. Barry and H. Hansen (eds.) The SAGE Handbook of New Approaches in Management and Organization, pp. 332-343. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore: Sage.

Darsø, L. (2017) Co-creating meaning through Artful Inquiry, in T. Chemi and L.Krogh (eds) Co-creation in higher education : students and educators preparing creatively and collaboratively to the challenge of the future, pp. 131-149. Rotterdam: Brill Sense.

Eisner, E. (1993) Forms of Understanding and the Future of Educational Research, Educational Researcher 22(7):5-11.

Fleming, J. and Honour, H. (2009) A World History of Art. Revised seventh edition. Laurence King Publishing Ltd.

Fraser, K. & Sayah, F. (2011) Arts-based methods in health research: A systematic review of the literature. Arts & Health 3(2): 110-145.

Hodgins, M. & Boydell, K. M. (2013) Interrogating Ourselves: Reflections on Arts-
Based Health Research [67 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 15(1), Art. 10, [http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1401106](http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1401106)

Larsen, H. and Friis, P. (2018) Improvising in Research: Drawing on Theatre Practices. In P. V. Freytag & L. Young (Eds.) Collaborative Research Design: Working with Business for Meaningful Findings, 341-376. Springer.

Leavy, P., (2008:2015) Method Meets Art: Arts-based Research Practice. A practical guide and introduction to art-based research in narrative inquiry, fictionbased research, poetry, music, dance, theatre, film, and visual art. New York: The Guildford Press.

Meisiek, S. (2016) A studio at a business school? In s. Junginger and J. Faust (eds) Designing business and management, pp. 159-166. London: Bloomsbury.

Nisker, J., Martin, D., Bluhm, R., and Daar, A. (2006) Theatre as a Public Engagement Tool for Health-Policy Research, Health Policy 78(2-3): 258-271.

Owens, A. (2019). Thinking about arts-based methods: an introduction. In Benmerqui, R., Owens, A., and Pässilä, A. (eds.) Beyond Text – Art-based methods for research, assessment, and evaluation. https://beyondtext.weebly.com/

Pässilä, A., Oikarinen, T. and Harmaakorpi, V. (2015) Collective voicing as a reflexive practice, Management Learning 46( 1): 67-86.

Schiuma, G. (2011) The Value of Arts for Business, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Taylor, S. and Ladkin, D. (2009) Understanding Arts-Based Methods: Managerial Development. Academy of Management Learning & Education 8(1): 55-69.

White V. and Belliveau G. (2011) Multiple perspectives, loyalties and identities: Exploring intrapersonal spaces through research-based theatre. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 24(2): 227–238.

Video reference
Evocative report by artist Laura Mellanen & researcher Anne Pässilä 2013 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQasQFNYW5I

###### tags: `art-based methods guide` `book` `context`