Exiting the House of Mirrors: The Decolonial Potential of Arts-based Participatory Research

Knowledge is neither neutral nor passive. The knowledge that we create as social science researchers has the potential to change the world that we study, perpetuating different values, and reinforcing or challenging inequalities in both blatant and subtle ways. Accordingly, the call to decolonise and democratise social scientific research speaks to both the social responsibility duty of the university and to the authenticity and integrity of the knowledge we create; knowledge that cannot be allowed to continue to parade the white, Western, cis, heterosexual, able-bodied male as the benchmark norm against whom all others are measured. Arts-based research, a methodological approach which uses artistic tools and understandings to inform data collection, analysis and/or dissemination, offers a transformative method through which many of the assumptions of this mainstream model can be challenged, with a view to creating radically different forms of knowledge in new and innovative ways. This is particularly true of arts-based participatory research approaches like collaborative poetics, which challenge extractive, product-driven research models by enlisting participants as equal status co-researchers. Accordingly, this chapter considers the decolonial possibilities of arts-based (participatory) research, presenting examples of autobiographical, participant-authored, and collaborative research poetry to illustrate the power of this approach. It also discusses the limitations of arts-based research as a decolonial method, considering the important caveat that the arts are not a panacea and no method is inevitably decolonial.