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
Performance as Research
The body in space generates knowledge. Performance-based research positions the stage, the classroom, and the public square as research sites where embodied experience produces data that cannot be captured through traditional methods alone.
- Embodied knowledge production
- Performance ethnography
- Spoken word as scholarship
- Audience as co-researchers
Critical Autoethnography
The self as site of inquiry. Critical autoethnography places lived experience at the center of scholarly investigation — not as anecdote appended to the "real" research, but as evidence that illuminates structural conditions.
- Self as research site
- Personal narrative as structural critique
- Vulnerability as methodological rigor
- Identity as analytical framework
Creative Nonfiction
Narrative-driven scholarly writing that brings the texture, tension, and voice of creative prose into academic discourse. This method insists that rigor and readability are not opposites — that the best scholarship can move a reader emotionally while advancing theory.
Multimodal Inquiry
Research that moves across forms — combining text, image, sound, movement, and digital media to construct layered representations of complex phenomena. No single mode is privileged; each contributes what the others cannot.
"The method is not separate from the message. How we inquire shapes what we can know."
— Dr. KSP