Co-creating bodily, interactive, and reflexive knowledge through art-based research

In the past few decades, there has been a growing amount of interest toward alternative research methods within consumer culture research. The goal of such approaches is to engage understanding in a more multisensory, bodily, and experiential manner. While aiming to transgress traditions of research, alternative approaches often end up inadvertently repeating existing structures of knowledge. To provide a perspective on how alternative methods could utilise the full power of the tools they propose to use in research, this paper introduces art-based research (ABR), a process-oriented methodology that involves taking on artistic practice as part of research. ABR is bodily, interactive, and contextualised, employing a different approach to what knowledge is, how and when knowledge is created, and who is a part of knowledge-creation. The paper suggests that ABR can become an important political tool for critiquing traditions of and discussing power structures within academia.