Through the looking glass: A step-by-step guide to arts-based reflexivity

For social scientists, understanding our complex relationship to the human experiences we study may be uniquely illuminated by artistic methods, especially for scholars seeking opportunities for creative expression while conducting their scholarly work. The purpose of this paper is to outline a guide to arts-based reflexivity , a step-based method that employs both textual/linguistic and creative/aesthetic tools to increase scholars’ engagement with their positionality and their relationship to their artistic and scholarly works. This flexible yet clear process contributes to existing literature on reflexivity by (a) responding to calls for actually “doing” reflexivity rather than offering only a theoretical explanation of reflexivity and (b) diversifying what are commonly only textual or linguistic tools for reflexivity such as journaling and memoing. Through this piece, the author outlines a step-based guide to arts-based reflexivity, offers one of her arts-based reflexivity processes as a case example, and outlines implications and future directions for the method.