Methods at the boundaries of the arts and humanities, and social sciences

This article by Jen Tarr also appears in the MethodsNews Autumn 2014 issue.

 

What makes a social science? Is it the methods we use, or the way we use them? To what extent can we adopt or adapt methods from arts based disciplines, and why might we want to? What are the challenges in doing that?

 

Arts based social research aims to do several things: broaden the kinds of questions we can ask as social scientists and the kinds of knowledge we can have about the world; acknowledge that not all expression is verbal or text-based; and take up recent challenges in qualitative research around performative social science or 'live methods'¹ in thinking about how methods produce particular kinds of findings. Methods from the arts are sometimes referred to as 'creative methods', but this is a misnomer if it implies that only these methods require creativity. Creative research develops across many methodological paradigms, both qualitative and quantitative.

 

The Communicating Chronic Pain and MIDAS (Methodological Innovation in Digital Arts and Social Sciences) projects are funded under NCRM call for Methodological Innovations Projects addressing methods at the boundaries of the arts and humanities and social sciences. Communicating Chronic Pain has explored and evaluated a variety of arts based methods including expressions on social media and drawing and sculpting, digital photography, music and sound, and physical theatre through workshops with patients, clinicians and carers as a way of expressing the highly subjective experience of living with chronic pain. MIDAS explores six ethnographic case studies in the arts and social sciences, looking at methodological connections and synergies between different sites and how they engage research differently.

 

Some of the existing work on arts-based methods^2,3 tends to assume the inherent value of bringing the arts into social research without fully interrogating the tensions that emerge from combining different disciplinary traditions together. Methods from the arts enable us to ask different kinds of questions, but when we work across disciplines we need to avoid simply working to the lowest common denominator if we want to say anything useful. 

 

Researchers working at the boundaries of the arts and humanities and social sciences have encountered issues that highlight disciplinary conventions. Firstly, to what extent do arts-based methods require the researcher to become a participant? Is the researcher positioned differently than in other forms of qualitative research? Many researchers, including myself, have encountered points in the research process where we have been forced to take a more hands-on, participatory approach than we might otherwise have done. Disciplinary expectations in the arts may mean that these forms of involvement are more often normalised. Secondly, how did the digital impact upon, or drive the development of the research process? Digital methods make new forms of expression possible: while traditional forms of qualitative research tend to work on text through interview transcripts, fieldnotes and other written documents, new technologies are making images, sound and video far more accessible, potentially further blurring the boundaries between the arts and social sciences. One thing social science can learn from the arts is how to better account for site specificity: how does the site or context (conference presentation, journal article, lecture PowerPoint) affect what we produce?

 

Finally, where are the boundaries between arts and social science? How far can we go, in blurring those boundaries? Is it possible to accept certain kinds of art as social science, or are we merely building dialogue between disparate disciplinary traditions? Will arts outputs always be secondary to a peer reviewed journal article, or is there a place for art as primary outcome in social research? What criteria would we use to judge it? For now, such outputs are likely to remain separate to the journal articles and other formal outputs we produce.

 

 

Carey Jewitt, Nina Wakeford, Elena Gonzalez-Polledo and Jen Tarr explored some of the key issues they face in their research, at the Methods at the Boundaries session at the 6th ESRC Research Methods Festival.

 

 

References