Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research

Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples, and Issues

J. Gary Knowles, Ardra L. Cole, J . Gary Knowles, Ardra L. Cole

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781412905312
• eBook ISBN: 9781483365886
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

"This work?s quality, diversity, and breadth of coverage make it a valuable resource for collections concerned with qualitative research in a broad range of disciplines. Highly recommended." —G.R. Walden, CHOICE

The Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Inquiry: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples, and Issues represents an unfolding and expanding orientation to qualitative social science research that draws inspiration, concepts, processes, and representational forms from the arts. In this defining work, J. Gary Knowles and Ardra L. Cole bring together the top scholars in qualitative methods to provide a comprehensive overview of the past, present, and future of arts-based research. This Handbook provides an accessible and stimulating collection of theoretical arguments and illustrative examples that delineate the role of the arts in qualitative social science research.


Key Features

• Defines and explores the role of the arts in qualitative social science research: The Handbook presents an analysis of classic and emerging methodologies and approaches that employs the arts in the qualitative research process.
• Brings together a unique group of scholars: Offering diverse perspectives, contributors to this volume represent a wide range of disciplines including the humanities, media and communication, anthropology, sociology, psychology, women?s studies, education, social work, nursing, and health and medicine.
• Offers comprehensive coverage of the genres employed by qualitative researchers: Scholars use multiple ways to advance knowledge including literary forms, performance, visual art, various types of media, narrative, folk art, and more.
• Articulates challenges inherent in alternative methodologies: This volume discusses the issues and challenges faced when employing art in research including ethical issues, academic merit issues, and even funding issues.

Intended Audience
This is an essential resource for any scholar interested in qualitative research, as well as a critical resource for all academic and public libraries.

PART I

KNOWING

Acknowledging art’s place in qualitative research methodologies is, for some, long overdue—the argument unassailable, a “no-brainer.” For others, the union of art and research is nothing short of paradoxical. Regardless, the alliance cannot be taken lightly. To welcome the arts into social science research, not as a subject or object of study but as a mode of inquiry, requires deep consideration. Seeing methodology through an artful eye reflects a way of being in the world as a researcher that is paradigmatically different from other ways of thinking about and designing research. And, as with any other significant undertaking, it behooves researchers to understand the many levels and implications of such a methodological commitment. Drawing from linguistic analysis we argue that understanding the deep structure of any methodology is a necessary starting point.

We begin the Handbook, therefore, by plumbing the very depths of methodological consideration—what it means to know. The two opening chapters provide a historical and epistemological context for exploring the relationship between the arts and knowledge. The authors illustrate and analyze the role of culture in shaping paradigmatic perspectives, and problematize the role of Western culture, in particular, in privileging into dominance a paradigm that has served as dictator over the production of scholarship, sanctioning what counts as knowledge and subjugating alternative perspectives. Taken together, the chapters provide a foundation for considering art, in its many forms, as a way of knowing, and knowing, in its many forms, as an art.

• Art and Knowledge, Elliot Eisner
• The Art of Indigenous Knowledge: A Million Porcupines Crying in the Dark, Thomas King

1

ART AND KNOWLEDGE

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♦ Elliot Eisner

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The idea that art can be regarded as a form of knowledge does not have a secure history in contemporary philosophical thought. The arts traditionally have been regarded as ornamental or emotional in character. Their connection to epistemological issues, at least in the modern day, has not been a strong one. Are the arts merely ornamental aspects of human production and experience or do they have a more significant role to play in enlarging human understanding?

The positivist tradition that has animated western philosophy during the first half of the 20th century viewed the arts as largely emotive rather than primarily informative. The arts are forms that you enjoyed, or felt strongly about, or savored for their delicacy. They had little to do with matters of knowledge. For knowledge of the empirical world you rely upon synthetic propositions whose truth value can be determined. And if you needed to know something about logical relationships, analytic propositions were the sources of data you would manage or manipulate (Ayer, 1952).

Part of the reason for the separation of the arts from matters epistemological pertains to the belief, a true one I would argue, that the arts are largely forms that generate emotion. We seek out the arts in order to take a ride on the wings that art forms provide: The arts are ways to get a natural high. This high is secured largely through our sensory response to the way sound is arranged, as in music; to the way colors are composed, as in visual art; to the ways in which the movement of a human body excites us as we experience its motion in time and space, as in dance. The sensory side of human experience is primary in the arts, or so it is believed. Plato himself regarded the senses as impediments to the achievement of that exalted state in which forms could be known (Plato, 1992). The weights and chains of the prisoners incarcerated in Plato’s caves were really surrogates or proxies for the distractions that our senses imposed upon whatever our rational mind could possibly muster. Put most simply, the sensory systems that were stimulated through the arts were misleading; they lead one away rather than toward that form of critical rationality upon which truth depends.

Plato’s ideas about mind, knowledge, and rationality are much more than ancient history. The model that they have provided has impacted our conception of intelligence and of rationality itself. It is not surprising, therefore, that it should have provided the model that has shaped our conception of science. That mathematics has been regarded as the queen of the sciences is a result of the legacy that Plato’s theory of knowledge has left us.

Aristotle, however, had another view, and it is one that in many ways is closer to the most recent thinking done on methodology in social science research. Aristotle made distinctions between kinds of knowledge that people can secure. The three types he identified were the theoretical, the practical, and the productive (McKeon, 2001). The theoretical pertained to efforts to know things that were of necessity, that is, things and processes that could be no other way than the way they are. The processes and products of nature are prime examples. Practical knowledge was knowledge of contingencies. What are the local circumstances that need to be addressed if one was to work effectively or act intelligently with respect to a particular state of affairs? The productive form of knowledge was knowledge of how to make something. How can this table be fashioned? How can this sculpture be shaped?

In differentiating types of knowledge, Aristotle comes closer than Plato to the kind of artistry that is relevant to arts-informed qualitative research. With Aristotle, we get an effort to draw distinctions in the service of conceptual clarity. This aim is wholly congruent with current efforts to make distinctions between types of research, even to redefine the meanings of research so that they are no longer singular, but multiple. Research differs in the ways in which it is conducted and in the products that it yields. What one needs to research in a situation must be appropriate for the circumstances one addresses and the aims one attempts to achieve. Such an aspiration acknowledges differences in the levels of precision that are achievable. Aristotle cautions us that an educated man expects only as much precision as the subject matter will admit. It is as foolish to seek approximations from mathematicians as exactitudes from poets (McKeon, 2001). What the term knowledge means depends on how inquiry is undertaken and the kind of problem one pursues. Even the term knowledge may be regarded as problematic. Knowledge as a term is a noun. Knowing is a verb. And knowing may be a much more appropriate descriptor of the processes of inquiry made in pursuit of a problem that will not yield to a set of rigidified procedures. Inquiry always yields tentative conclusions rather than permanently nailed down facts. The quest for certainty, as Dewey (1929/2005) pointed out, is hopeless.

What does it mean to know? Here, too, there are a variety of conditions under which the term know or knowledge can be used. One can know that something is the case. One can know how something was done. One can know why something operates the way it does, and one can know how. For example, consider a medical relationship. “I remember this patient quite well, but I do not have a diagnosis for his illness.” In this example, two types of knowledge emerge, the first pertaining to matters of recognition or recall, and the latter to theoretical or practical understanding. The doctor recognizes the patient, but doesn’t know what is causing his problem. Clearly, one can know the former and not the latter, and one can know the latter without knowing the former. How one would find out which was which would depend on one’s aims. Each variety of knowing bears its own fruits and has its own uses. The point here is that knowing is a multiple state of affairs, not a singular one. In pragmatic terms knowing is always about relationships. We need to know different things for different purposes, and sometimes we know some things for some purposes but not for others.

In traditional approaches to the conditions of scientific knowledge, the pursuit of certainty has been a longstanding ambition. Furthermore, knowledge is conceptualized as the ability to provide warranted assertions. Warranted refers to the provision of evidence regarding the truth or falsity of the assertion, and the term assertion itself belongs to a universe of discourse in which language is its representational vehicle. However, it has become increasingly clear since the latter half of the 20th century that knowledge or understanding is not always reducible to language. As Michael Polanyi says, we know more than we can tell (Polanyi, 1966/1983). Thus, not only does knowledge come in different forms, the forms of its creation differ. The idea of ineffable knowledge is not an oxymoron.

The liberation of the term knowledge from dominance by the propositional is a critical philosophical move. Do we not know what water tastes like, although we have very few words and virtually all of them inadequate for describing what water tastes like, or what music sounds like, or what someone looks like? Words, except when they are used artistically, are proxies for direct experience. They point us in a direction in which we can undergo what the words purport to reveal. Words, in this sense, are like cues to guide us on a journey. The utility of these cues depends upon their ability to help us anticipate the situation we wish to avoid or encounter.

The reason the deliteralization of knowledge is significant is that it opens the door for multiple forms of knowing. There are, indeed, propositions whose truth value is significant and whose claims are testable through scientific procedures. At the same time, there are utterances and images that are intended to be evocative of the situation they are designed to describe. Consider photography. Photographs can be powerful resources for portraying what cannot be articulated linguistically. We see this in the work of Edward Steichen, Dorothea Lange, Paul Strand, and other important photographers of the 20th century. But the ability to reveal is not limited to the talents of such photographers; it is available to those whose talents in photography are more ordinary. The point here is that humans have created within the context of culture a variety of forms of representation. These forms include the visual, the auditory, the gustatory, the kinesthetic, and the like. It includes forms of representation that combine the foregoing modalities as well. These forms of representation give us access to expressive possibilities that would not be possible without their presence. Technology provides new means during each generation for representational possibilities to be extended and diversified. The availability, for example, of neon tubes has made possible forms of sculpture that Michelangelo himself could not have imagined. Thus, technological advances promoted through scientific knowledge make new forms available to those who choose to use them.

This Handbook is an encomium to the use of new forms of representation in the service of improved understanding of the human condition. Rather than being constrained with criteria and methods formulated decades, indeed centuries, ago, this Handbook invites scholars to invent new ways through new means of representing what matters in human affairs. In this sense, the Handbook is something of a groundbreaking effort.

One should not conclude that new materials, technologies, and methods are the only innovative resources to be used to create arts-informed research. The way language is treated itself has a great deal to do with what it has to say. Consider, for example, Annie Dillard’s book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and focus upon the marriage between acute perception and artistically crafted prose.

It was sunny one evening last summer at Tinker Creek; the sun was low in the sky, upstream. I was sitting on the sycamore log bridge with the sunset at my back, watching the shiners the size of minnows who were feeding over the muddy sand in skittery schools. Again and again, one fish, then another, turned for a split second across the current and flash! the sun shot out from its silver side. I couldn’t watch for it. It was always just happening somewhere else, and it drew my vision just as it disappeared: flash, like a sudden dazzle of the thinnest blade, a spark over a dun and olive ground at chance intervals from every direction. Then I noticed white specks, some sort of pale petals, small, floating, from under my feet on the creek’s surface, very slow and steady. So I blurred my eyes and gazed upward toward the brim of my hat and saw a new world. I saw the pale white circles roll up, roll up, like the world’s turning, mute and perfect, and I saw the linear flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random down a rolling scroll of time. Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water. I was the lip of a fountain the creek filled forever; I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I was fleshflake, feather, bone. (Dillard, 1974, pp.31–32)

This brief excerpt gives one a sense of what the artistic treatment of language makes possible. What, in this case, it makes possible is the writer’s ability to give the reader a virtual sensory experience of nature in all its glorious richness and complexity. It is different from and, some would argue, more than a literal description; it is an artistic rendering, one that is evocative and that, psychologically speaking, gives us transport to another part of the world.

Let us distinguish for a moment between the descriptive and the evocative. Let the descriptive focus on the desire to create a mimetic relationship between something said and something done. The evocative has as its ambition the provision of a set of qualities that create an empathic sense of life in those who encounter it, whether the work is visual or linguistic, choreographic or musical. In all cases, emotion and imagination are involved. Art in research puts a premium on evocation, even when it has sections or aspects of it that are descriptive in character. Put another way, art is present in research when its presence enables one to participate vicariously in a situation.

Experiencing a situa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART I: KNOWING
• PART II: METHODOLOGIES
• PART III: GENRES
• PART IV: INQUIRY PROCESSES
• PART V: ISSUES AND CHALLENGES
• PART VI: ARTS IN RESEARCH ACROSS DISCIPLINES
• About the Authors
• About the Contributors
• Index