Arts-Based Research as a Radical Methodology Within Healthcare

This chapter puts forward the proposition that the use of the arts within healthcare research allows for a radical agenda to emerge. The arts can give shape and voice to those experiences and lives that have been silenced and hidden by structural practices of prejudice and discrimination. By avowing themselves of different ontologies and epistemologies, the arts challenge practices of domination and mastery, 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 to create a space within which 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, and an overview of contemporary arts-based research within healthcare, the chapter will expand upon these themes, putting forward a structure for framing arts-based research within healthcare, which will make it appropriate for adapting to, and responding to, a changed society that desperately needs reimagining.