Researching like an artist

The use of art in collaborative ideas-making and efforts to effect change is currently enjoying a resurgence amongst researchers, activists and international development practitioners. There is well-grounded critique from practitioners of the unequal power dynamics associated with this kind of socially conscious art-making and the risk of ‘art-washing’ problematic practices. What is less clearly articulated is how the arts can lead participants — whether researchers, activists, development practitioners or community members — to new ways of knowing and imagining, disordering familiar power and knowledge inequalities to make way for new ideas. In this chapter, the authors situate, describe and reflect on two series of workshops they led in Uganda and Bangladesh. In the workshops, they developed and tested new creative methodologies intended to equip researchers and practitioners to break out of traditional roles, articulate aspirations and enlarge the scope of what ‘development’ might mean. Approaching research like an artist making art — noticing, pattern-spotting, distilling, slipping in and out of performance and deferring to the different expertise and skills in the room — gives researchers and participants tools for seeing the world in different ways.