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Arts-informed, visual research was conducted to document the pictorial metaphors that appear among original drawings of information. The purpose of this paper is to report the diversity of these pictorial metaphors, delineate their formal qualities as drawings, and provide a fresh perspective on the concept of information.

The project utilized pre-existing iSquare drawings of information that were produced by iSchool graduate students during a draw-and-write activity. From a data set of 417 images, 125 of the strongest pictorial metaphors were identified and subjected to cognitive metaphor theory.

Overwhelmingly, the favored source domain for envisioning information was nature. The most common pictorial metaphors were: Earth, web, tree, light bulb, box, cloud, and fishing/mining, and each brings different qualities of information into focus. The drawings were often canonical versions of objects in the world, leading to arrays of pictorial metaphors marked by their similarity.

Less than 30 percent of the data set qualified as pictorial metaphors, making them a minority strategy for representing information as an image. The process to identify and interpret pictorial metaphors was highly subjective. The arts-informed methodology generated tensions between artistic and social scientific paradigms.

The pictorial metaphors for information can enhance information science education and fortify professional identity among information professionals.

This is the first arts-informed, visual study of information that utilizes cognitive metaphor theory to explore the nature of information. It strengthens a sense of history, humanity, nature, and beauty in our understanding of information today, and contributes to metaphor research at large.

This paper aims to explore the concept of information in records and archives management (RAM) from a fresh, visual perspective by using arts-informed methodology and the draw-and-write technique.

Students and practitioners of RAM in Australia were asked to answer the question, “what is information?” in a drawing and then to describe the drawing in words. This produced a data set of 255 drawings of information or “iSquares”, for short. Compositional interpretation and a framework of graphic representations by Engelhardt were applied to determine how participants envision information and what the renderings imply for RAM.

The images reveal an overwhelming recognition in RAM of the diversity of media formats of information and the hyperconnectivity of information in networked information systems; and illustrate the central place of human beings within these systems. These findings offer striking, accessible illustrations of major concepts in RAM and enable new understandings through the construction of stories.

There are both pedagogical applications and practical implications of this work for students, practitioners and knowledge workers. The graphical representations of information in this research deepen the understanding of textual definitions of information. The data set of iSquares provides opportunities to create new storyboards to explain information definitions, practices and phenomena in RAM disciplines, and, to explain related concepts such as data, information, knowledge and wisdom hierarchy.

This is the first study in RAM disciplines to provide visual illustrations of information using graphical image representations.

There is an urgent need in terms of changing world conditions to move beyond the dualist paradigm that has traditionally informed design research, education and practice. Rather than attempt to reduce uncertainty, novelty and complexity as is the conventional approach, an argument is presented in this article that seeks to exploit these qualities through a reconceptualisation of design in creative as well as systematic, rigorous and ethical terms. Arts‐based research, which ‘brings together the systematic and rigorous qualities of inquiry with the creative and imaginative qualities of the arts’, is presented as being central to this reconceptualisation. This is exemplified in the application of art‐informed inquiry in a research unit for graduating tertiary‐level interior design students. The application is described in this article and is shown to rely substantially on the image and its capacity to open up and reveal new possibilities and meaning.

This paper aims to report on the author's recent research examining the meaning and practices of educating for solidarity, specifically from anti‐racism and decolonizing perspective. The research is part of the critical exploration on new educational approaches on solidarity building among workers and trade union members in the broader political and economic context of neoliberalism.

Utilizing the research methodologies of participatory action research, arts‐informed research and critical autobiography, the research draws on the words and visual images made by the participants who are labour educators and activists from Aboriginal and racialized communities. In‐depth interview and the Aboriginal talking circle method were used to deepen the dialogue among this group of activists. By focusing on their authentic voices and lived experiences, the research is grounded in Dei's stance on the importance of the embodied knowledge as part of the necessary conditions for anti‐racism education work and political action.

The findings reveal a sense of profound gap between what participants experience as daily practices of solidarity and what they envisioned. Through the research process, the study explores and demonstrates the importance and potential of a more holistic and integrative critical labour education approach on anti‐racism and decolonization. The study proposes a pedagogical framework on solidarity building with four interlinking components – rediscovering, restoring, reimagining and reclaiming – as a way to make whole.

A further research implication will be to explore the possibility and application of this proposed pedagogical framework with a group of trade union activists from racialized and non‐racialized backgrounds.

The pedagogy of solidarity offers a transformative process for activists to engage in critical dialogue on how to build solidarity across constituencies. The solidarity circle dialogue process provides a space for critical reflection.

This is an original research integrating Aboriginal worldview and arts‐informed research, to explore the potential of a new pedagogy that is grounded in restoring people's spirit, recovering their voices so they can have the courage to reimagine; and reclaim in order to make whole. The value of the research lies in its hopefulness as a tool of countering the politics of division and fear.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of an arts-based methodology in conducting a doctoral study on The Nile Project, an East African based musical collective. Despite some evidence that music is an effective tool for qualitative inquiry, there are few studies on its use, especially the use of musicking in the interview process.

The author used a qualitative and arts-based research approach.

Outcomes suggest that music may help to create an “in-between” space challenging researcher positionality and giving voice to the “researched.” Music also acted as a bridging agent encouraging open and honest dialogue and relationship building.

Findings suggest that music may be a useful tool for researchers interested in arts-based and participatory methods in qualitative research particularly when interviewing participants with varied linguistic, cultural, political and musical backgrounds.

There is sparse research on the use of musicking in the interview process of qualitative research.

This article examines the power relationships between researcher and participants, children and adults, drawing on the theories of transgressions and resistance in power, during a research project concerning children's experiences of the visual arts.

Data were gathered conducted in two Scottish primary schools by employing visual and arts-based methods, and the article discusses the role they played in revealing acts of power between participants as well as providing insight of a child's world.

The article concludes by emphasising how these methods revealed a network of power acts which supported children to transgress, resist and reveal their world to the adult.

The role of reflexion on the part of the researcher is key when undertaking research adopting participatory methods such as visual methods.

The article contributes to the ongoing discussions concerning visual methods research and their use in participatory research, and illustrates the complexities of power in this field.

The authors, seven women–writers–performers–artists–academics, have been working collectively for a year, storying, de-storying and re-storying the experience of our lives. The authors write to “taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect” (Nin, 1976), to uncover and learn ourselves through writing (Richardson, 1997), to take the “risky” steps of talking to each other about our inner lives (Palmer, 1998). Cognisant of the limitations and masculinities of traditional academic discourses, in form and content, and heavily confined by neoliberal expectations to count and be counted, we write and express the stories of lives the authors did not choose or imagine – lives we are given and live through. Our expression inhabits aesthetic, contemplative and sensory ways of knowing and employs poetry, image, song and story to create a polyvocal account of women’s lives, voices, struggles and learning. The authors share here part of our collective memoir and its development. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper is designed as a collective memoir.

The authors write and express the stories of lives we did not choose or imagine – lives we are given and live through. The expression inhabits aesthetic, contemplative and sensory ways of knowing and employs poetry, image, song and story to create a polyvocal account of women’s lives, voices, struggles and learning. The authors share here part of our collective memoir and its development.

The research focuses on autoethnography and lived experience.

Auto-ethnography/lived experience offers rich insights into the personal and political actions and actors within higher education.

The purpose of this paper is to first articulate and then illustrate a descriptive theoretical model of documentation (i.e. document creation) suitable for analysis of the experiential, first-person perspective.

Three models of documentation in the literature are presented and synthesized into a new model. This model is then used to understand the findings from a phenomenology-of-practice study of the work of seven visual artists as they each created a self-portrait, understood here as a form of documentation.

A number of themes are found to express the first-person experience of art-making in these examples, including communicating, memories, reference materials, taking breaks and stepping back. The themes are discussed with an eye toward articulating what is shared and unique in these experiences. Finally, the themes are mapped successfully to the theoretical model.

The study involved artists creating self-portraits, and further research will be required to determine if the thematic findings are unique to self-portraiture or apply as well to art-making, to documentation generally, etc. Still, the theoretical model developed here seems useful for analyzing documentation experiences.

As many activities and tasks in contemporary life can be conceptualized as documentation, this model provides a valuable analytical tool for better understanding those experiences. This can ground education and management decisions for those involved.

This paper makes conceptual and empirical contributions to document theory and the study of the information behavior of artists, particularly furthering discussions of information and document experience.

Poetic inquiry is an approach that promotes alternate perspectives about what research means and speaks to more diverse audiences than traditional forms of research. Across academia, there is increasing attention to decolonising research. This reflects a shift towards research methods that recognise, acknowledge and appreciate diverse ways of knowing, being and doing. The purpose of this paper is to explore the different ways in which poetic inquiry communicates parallax to further decolonise knowledge production and dissemination and centre First Nations’ ways of knowing, being and doing.

This manuscript presents two First Nations’ perspectives on a methodological approach that is decolonial and aligns with Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing. In trying to frame this diversity through Indigenous standpoint theory (Foley, 2003), the authors present two First Nation’s women's autoethnographic perspectives through standpoint and poetics on the role of poetic inquiry and parallax in public pedagogy and decolonising research (Fredericks et al., 2019; Moreton-Robinson, 2000).

The key to understanding poetic inquiry is parallax, the shift in an object, perspective or thinking that comes with a change in the observer's position or perspective. Challenging dominant research paradigms is essential for the continued evolution of research methodologies and to challenge the legacy that researchers have left in colonised countries. The poetic is often invisible/unrecognised in the broader Indigenist research agenda; however, it is a powerful tool in decolonial research in the way it disrupts core assumptions about and within research and can effectively engage with those paradoxes that decolonising research tends to uncover.

Poetic inquiry is not readily accepted in academia; however, it is a medium that is well suited to communicating diverse ways of knowing and has a history of being embraced by First Nations peoples in Australia. Embracing poetic inquiry in qualitative research offers a unique approach to decolonising knowledge and making space for Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing.

Poetic inquiry offers a unique approach to centring First Nations voices, perspectives and experiences to reduce hegemonic assumptions in qualitative research.

Writing about poetic inquiry and decolonisation from a First Nations’ perspective using poetry is a novel and nuanced approach to discussions around First Nations ways of knowing, being and doing.

Working creatively as a researcher should be a core foundation in doctoral studies, though it may be an isolating, even risky, endeavour. The purpose of this paper is to share the author’s journey through the “darkness” of innovation in research methodology.

At the heart of this research journey was Portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 1983), which emerged early in the post-modern evolution of qualitative research. While exploring Portraiture, the author found researchers used this methodology in varying ways: application, appropriation and interpretation. In stumbling through Portraiture, the author discovered patchwork as their bricoleur’s toolbag. Patchwork provided a torch that gave light to the darkness of the research process enabling interpretation of Portraiture for alignment of method and research problematic[1].

Looking back at the research journey, the author recognises the steps into post-qualitative research and the need for methodological innovators to share their journeys for inspiration, to develop understanding and open the way to greater creativity and innovation during the research process.

This paper provides an original view to Portraiture along with the addition of patchwork as a way of engaging with methodology as well as data.