Twenty-first International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

In the past twenty years, researchers in the humanities and social sciences have adopted inductive research methods such as oral history to understand how historical moments and events are understood and remembered from the perspective of ordinary people. In emergent practices of arts-based research (ABR), many who employ methods from the humanities and social sciences draw upon fields like oral history as a rich resource for including diverse perspectives and voices in art making. However, this model centers the artmaking of the individual researcher, who usually turns this testimony into artwork. This author asks, what kinds of knowledge could be revealed if we asked the participants of oral history interviews to instead engage directly in artistic creation? This paper discusses the development and implementation of what the author calls community-based research-creation (CBRC), which aims to democratize the creation side of ABR by welcoming ordinary people to participate in classes where they will develop artworks that draw upon personal meanings from collective course themes. Drawing on the author’s doctoral work that studies the city through landscape theory, the paper looks at concrete examples of participant work and consider how this work might contribute to a study. This paper concludes by discussing what the interjection of this visual testimony adds to the knowledge generated in a study in the humanities and social sciences. The author argues that this can both lead to richer results and democratize the visual aspects of arts-based studies.