Saara Jäntti, Tuulikki Kurki, Jari Martikainen, Sari Pöyhönen and Tuija Saresma

The idea of this publication was born when a group of scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds gathered together at the University of Jyväskylä some years ago to discuss our arts-based research projects. We all had faced challenges in publishing multilayered knowledge produced in these projects and pondered how and why the forms of scientific publications could – and should – be diversified. The meeting inspired us deeply and convinced us of the importance of continuing the discussions and making the voices of scholars struggling with these issues heard. It is not our intention to define what knowing, researching and publishing differently is; rather, with this volume we wish to sketch some potential outlines and, most importantly, invite you as a reader to join the discussion.

This publication discusses arts-based research and publishing. In English language research literature, research that makes use of art is named in a number of ways. We use the term ‘arts-based research’ since it can be understood as an umbrella term for different approaches using art. Also ‘knowing, researching and publishing differently’ can be approached and understood in many ways. On the one hand, it can refer to intrapersonal and interpersonal modes of research processes based on dialogue between science and art. On the other hand, it can be understood in terms of reflections on the norms and conventions of and boundaries between science and art as well as the nature of knowledge produced and achieved through them. All these issues have been discussed also previously. In the context of Western cultures, combining science and art has long traditions. For example, feminist and post-colonial scholars as well as other scholars in humanities and social sciences have challenged the notion of objective knowledge and called for the importance to embrace more nuanced understanding of knowledge (e.g., aspects of power, embodiment, affect) in academic research. This call for a more diversified knowledge was also propelled by paradigmatic changes conceptualized as visual, material, embodied and affective turns as well as increasing interest in arts-based approaches. There has been and there is a call for reflecting on “alternative” ways of researching and publishing also from the epistemological point of view since arts-based research produces knowledge that is difficult – and sometimes even impossible – to express in the form of a traditional, written academic research article. Forcing multilayered modes of knowing into an academic research article may appear as “epistemic violence”.

At the turn of the 21 ^st century, also scholars in Finland started talking about doing science differently, breaking conventions of research writing, and changing the ways of doing research. In research writing, there has been a shift from impersonal, external and objective reporting towards more personal, narrative and even artistic ways of writing. Also, more personal and creative research methods are also being used in research processes. The different ways of conceiving and producing knowledge become especially concrete in multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research projects, which also pose a number of challenges for publishing. In this publication, we are interested in looking beyond the traditional ways of doing and publishing research and ask how arts-based research and publishing can promote more diverse ways of knowing as well as doing and publishing research.

The editors of this volume all work in the field of humanities and social sciences and have used arts-based approaches in their research. Their disciplines include languages, applied linguistics, literature studies, cultures studies, art history, ethnography, social psychology, sociology and gender studies. In these disciplines, peer-reviewed research articles form the norm of scientific publication and arts-based publishing represents publishing differently. For scholars of other disciplines, ‘doing, knowing and publishing differently’ can mean different things.

This volume includes 22 articles, essays, photo-essays, video- and audio-publications that discuss doing and publishing research differently using arts-based approaches. Our invitation to contribute to this volume aroused wide interest, and in the first phase, we received more than 50 abstracts. We did not want to define authors’ approaches in detail, but we outlined that they should focus on arts-based approaches and reflect on matters related to publishing in one way or another. In addition, it was regarded as important that authors could decide themselves what doing and publishing research differently means for them.

The volume is divided into 6 sections, each approaching arts-based research and publishing from a different angle. Introduction serves as an opening to the scope of this volume mapping and sketching the premises, aims, potentials and challenges of arts-based research and publishing. It considers the potential of arts-based approaches to enrich and challenge traditional perceptions of scientific publications as well as increase the openness and diversity of science.

Section two Art as the Basis for Research includes publications where art has been used and produced alongside more traditional language-based research methods. The authors of this section elaborate how they have utilized diverse arts-based, artistic and collaborative methods, such as sensory walk, soundscape, video poetry, theatre, drawing and music in their studies.

Section three Doing Research Differently as a Means of Producing Knowledge and a Form of Scientific Publication discusses different theoretical and methodological approaches to arts-based research. Approaches drawing from visual arts, music, multimodality and creative writing have been used in the articles of this section to examine migration, arts-based university assignments, collaboration of researchers and artists, collaboration with meme community, and epistemological considerations.

Section four Performances and exhibitions discusses performance, exhibition and conference presentation as a form of scientific publication. In exhibitions and performances, the publication is experienced rather than read: the experience is corporeal, spatial, place-bound and multi-sensory. The articles show how the choice of location affects the reception of arts-based publications as well as the meanings they convey. Similarly, in exhibitions the mutual relationships of the works influence their interpretation.

Section five discusses the Politics of Research and Publication. The contributions of this section commit to a view where research is political. They share an understanding that scholars can – and perhaps even must – position themselves and commit to particular theoretical, epistemological, or political views. Therefore, the researchers and/or researcher-artists of this section do not think of themselves as “neutral” or “objective” producers of scientific knowledge.

Section six Places and Cases deals with the connection of materiality (e.g., place), body and material culture to memories, cultural assumptions and affects through the means of place-related art, photographs, films and theatre of objects. The articles, visual materials and recordings presented in this section examine arts-based methods as tools to reach and make the multi-layered meanings of cultural phenomena visible, which can easily be overlooked. According to the articles, arts-based methods provide a means to critically examine and dismantle stereotypes and prevailing concepts as well as involve the audience in a critical reflection of meanings.