# Artful inquiry
*Authors: [Anne Pässilä](https://www.linkedin.com/in/annepassila/)*
Attribution: Based on Barry, D. (1996) Artful Inquiry: A Symbolic Constructivist Approach to Social Science Research. Qualitative Inquiry. Volume: 2 issue: 4, page(s): 411-438

Summary
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**Art-form**^1^: Multiple methods approach
Can be used to facilitate data collection about political and emotionally complex issues and is generally focused on collective, rather than individual, reflection about such issues. Can also be used to elicit narratives that capture the embodied experience and relationships to the data collected through scientific processes. This captures both interpretation of data and emotional components.

*Artful inquiry*

**Requirements**
* Time: 1 - 4 hour Inquiry session
* Difficulty^2^: 5 stars, requires skills and knowledge based on Augusto Boal´s theatre practice and Paulo Freire´s pedagogy, as well as data curating skills (Wolff, A., Wermelinger, M. and Petre, M., 2019. Exploring design principles for data literacy activities to support children’s inquiries from complex data. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 129(41-54)
* What you'll need: drama studio or open working space
* Participants: Adults

Description
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**Steps**
1. Framing a burning issue
2. Contract for sharing
2. Warming up (any theatre game that creates playfull atmosphere)
3. Starting in pairs: sharing an imaginative life line where burning issue is emerging. Giving a topic to it.
4. Creating small groups (3-6 person in each) and giving a task to articulate topics in context with the help of hot seating (drama convention where group interviews a person in role to build persona/characters in order to clairfy situated perspectives)
5. Searching data related to phenomen that is explored (identified as burning problem)
7. Reconstructioning a burning problem as an incident which allows particpants to explore its dynamics, power tensions and basic assumptions
8. Identifying meanings
9. Drawing a map of how things are interlinking

**Which stage to use it in**
* Identification, Design and Deployment

**Why it is useful**
It supports a multi-voiced interpretation of the data sets and enables understanding more about emotional and organizational/ societal dynamics as well as discovering interconnections between various actors’ lived experience of the system in which participation is both encouraged and discouraged.

**How to document**
Video

**Analysis**
Ethnodrama

*Footnotes*

^1^ Categories are based on Sara Coemans and Karin Hannes. 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 (2017), 34–49.
^2^ 1-5 stars, I star being easy to facilitate and do not require deep artistic skills and 5 stars requiring deep level artistic skills.

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