Arts-Based Research Methods
Scholarship that sings, performs, and builds worlds. These are not decorations on the research — they are the research.
Why Arts-Based Methods?
Traditional academic methods were not designed to hold the complexity of intersectional, embodied lives. When the research question lives in the body — in pain, in joy, in movement, in refusal — the method must meet it there.
Arts-based research methods are not alternatives to "real" research. They are expansions of what research can be. They produce knowledge that surveys and interviews cannot access. They reach audiences that journal articles never will. And they honor the creative intelligence of communities that have always known through art.
Poetic Inquiry
Poetry as research methodology — not metaphor, not embellishment, but a rigorous mode of inquiry that excavates truths inaccessible to conventional academic prose.
In Dr. KSP's practice, the poem functions simultaneously as data collection, data analysis, and research findings. The compression of poetic language mirrors the compression of lived experience under systems of power. The line break is a methodological choice. The stanza is a unit of analysis.
"The poem does not illustrate the data. The poem is the data."— Dr. KSP
Visual Arts Representation
Via visual arts, Dr. KSP brings her work into the three-dimensional. Here, she frames and reframes, colours and re-colours her narrative-heavy data, giving data other ways to be represented. This exists alongside traditional qualitative methodological training — adding her own painting and visual arts to accompany her research projects. She has exhibited work on disability in this capacity, related to her dissertation.
Accessible Research Methods
Dr. KSP intentionally engages with research methods that utilize universal design for research and universal design for learning. Beginning in her Ph.D. program — where it was imperative to her study — she continues to design projects with accessibility, participant safety, and wellness at the center, particularly given that her research often engages with neurodivergence.
Caribbean and Indigenous Research Methods
Here, Dr. KSP returns home — to consider, study, and reify methods that uniquely center Caribbean and, in other cases, Indigenous research methods. She is part of a growing set of scholars in the Caribbean Methodology group who advance this knowledge and these ways of conducting research.
"The methods I choose are deeply personal, and in service to my participants."
— Dr. KSP