VPA 5300.D01: Visual and Performing Art: Arts Practice-based Approaches to Research
CRN 69880
Duration: 01/15/2025 - 05/13/2025
Status: Open
Professor: Rina Kundu Little
This survey of arts-based research methods is applicable to the visual and performing arts. Arts-based research is a multi-disciplinary field, which looks at the synthesis of practice and research in creating and interpreting artistic expressions. Arts-based research adapts the tenets of the creative arts to address research questions in holistic and engaged ways in which theory and practice are intertwined. It is an umbrella term for many different approaches that combine scholarly inquiry and the arts. The methods tap into the artistic process as a primary mode of inquiry creating various forms of art to collect data, conduct analysis, and/or represent research. It is a type of qualitative research. Qualitative research makes sense of or interprets phenomena in their natural settings and in terms of the meanings people bring to them. It locates the observer-researcher in the world and consists of a set of interpretative, material practices that make the world visible. According to Eisner (2008),” a contribution the arts make to knowledge has to do with the provision of a fresh perspective so that our old habits of mind do not dominate our reactions with stock responses. What we seek are new ways with which to perceive and interpret the world, ways that make vivid realities that would otherwise go unknown.”
