Using Participatory Arts-Based Approaches to Promote Inclusive Research

Abstract

This chapter explores the value of participatory arts-based approaches to research with individuals and groups that experience social exclusion and marginalization. Such approaches aim to “make a difference” to real world challenges and are grounded in social justice, using multiple creative ways drawn from the arts to represent experiences, including written word and performance, music and visual art forms including film and photography. Arts-based approaches provide a range of tools to enable participants to express themselves in creative ways using the narrative, words, or visual imagery that they choose. This may help to challenge mainstream categories, assumptions, and taken for granted understanding to provide new ways of appreciating people’s real lived experiences. Co-production within a participatory arts-based approach may help to improve the lives of marginalized and seldom heard groups by providing an opportunity to enhance dialogue on important societal issues linked to inclusion and exclusion. It can be both research and dissemination tool, enabling participants to become co-disseminators as their arts-based outputs can be powerful tools of dissemination with the potential to engage a wider audience than traditional research reports or papers. Specifically, this chapter illustrates discussion of the value of “performance poetry” as an arts-based research methodology with reference to two case studies that used the method. The “Seen but Seldom Heard” project worked with young people with disabilities and the Seldom Heard Voices project worked with homeless people. Both groups experience social exclusion and marginalization and embraced an opportunity to write and perform their work.