Arts-Based Research as a Radical Methodology Within Healthcare

This chapter outlines the role of the arts within healthcare research from the perspective of the creative and expressive arts having a radical agenda to challenge the status quo. The arts give shape and voice to those experiences and lives that have been silenced and hidden by structural practices of prejudice and discrimination. The arts challenge the colonial and capitalist practices of domination, and the mastery of human and non-human others through rationality, as they appear within academic research and healthcare practices. The arts bring imaginative, intuitive and embodied experiences into the same space as reason and logic in order to create a radical ethics of care, so that the marginalised becomes centred, and participants become the beneficiaries and co-producers of knowledge. Drawing upon the authors knowledge and practice of the use of the arts within therapeutic and research contexts, the chapter expands upon these themes, putting forwards a structure for framing arts-based research within healthcare, which makes it appropriate for adapting to, and responding to, a changed society that we desperately need to imagine.