The Use of the Arts Throughout the Participatory Action Research Process

Long before research professionalized into protocols and peer review, communities made and shared knowledge through story, image, song, and movement.People named their conditions in murals, argued about justice in theater, carried memory in music, and rendered the unspeakable visible through making.Formal research, in its drive toward the propositional and the measurable, has too often left these ways of knowing at the door, treating the arts, if it considered them at all, as ornamentation arriving safely after the "real" work was done.In recent years, action researchers globally have begun to reckon with the costs of that exclusion: who text-bound dissemination reaches and who it leaves out, whose knowledge it legitimizes and whose it renders illegible, and how much of what communities understand about their own lives never survives translation into the conventions of the academic article.This special issue takes up the arts as a method: a set of practices capable of doing rigorous, generative work at every stage of inquiry.The Action Research Network of the Americas (ARNA) offers a fitting home for this conversation.Initially organized in 2012 by five action research network initiators, ARNA was created to support and promote a wide variety of participatory research traditions across the Americas and beyond.Its mission is to provide a collegial, practice-oriented, and professional development space where practitioners and students of action research can share ideas, develop initiatives, and strengthen the position of action and participatory research in diverse communities around the globe.ARNA's work is grounded in knowledge democracy: the belief that knowledge production, knowledge dissemination, and public inquiry should honor many ways of knowing and serve critical social, educational, and environmental concerns.Its values of honesty, integrity, inclusiveness, multivocality, engagement, achievement, sustainability, and democracy offer a powerful frame for this issue.They remind us that participatory research is a methodology and a set of ethical commitments about who gets to ask questions, whose interpretations matter, and how knowledge should move in the world.The 2025 ARNA conference centered the arts as a form of communicating and making meaning throughout the research process, and it is the learning and exchange from that gathering that this special issue, produced in partnership between the Journal of Participatory Research Methods and ARNA, seeks to extend and make portable.