Getting Mixed Up: Arts-Based, Contemplative, and Equity-Driven Approach to Thematic Analysis (Poster 8)

• In Event: Themes Without Coding: Expanding Approaches to Thematic Analysis

Abstract

This poster represents an abridged version of a chapter that engages in contemplative art-making, writing, and connecting different aspects of people’s experiences to expand beyond traditional approaches to create thematic narratives. The context of such contemplative art-making emerged from critical moments while teaching an Introductory Qualitative Research Methods class to doctoral students, as an educator of color, in a predominantly and historically white institution.

The methodological moves are non-linear and iterative, even if it is articulated in some sequential manner. Contemplative art-making, writing, beholding, and interrogating one’s stuck places, involved deep dialoguing and cultivating interconnectivity between self, other, and elements of the qualitative research process that unfolded due to a class activity. Utilizing a bag portrait activity in class, where students created front- and back-stage versions of their self-portrait on two sides of the bag and included paraphernalia from their critical milestones in life inside the bag, informed a duoethnography project.

Through the duoethnography project, which involved art-making, reflective writing, deep listening, and tracing critical milestones in their lives, students were able to concretize various philosophies of inquiry. They built connections with their ways of being, knowing, living, thinking, and feeling in their studies. Immersive embodied engagement allowed for journeying into one’s own inner negotiations, leading to a need for both stillness and analytical reflections. These reflections were expressed through art-making and thematic narratives.
Given that when students encounter qualitative research, they often feel overwhelmed by a barrage of terminology, these activities helped mitigate the sense of overwhelm and replaced it with confidence in their own sense-making. We created engaged discussions where these processes and products of sense-making were mapped onto understandings of subjectivity, theoretical and ontoepistemic frameworks. Themes created included a narrative and visual composition. In this poster I demonstrate how one can move between narrative and visual theming to create a multidimensional, complex retelling and remembering. My hope is that participants in a poster session may take up this approach, but not to replicate, but to experience it as a generative and expansive form of sense-making to arrive at themes from a place of deep awareness and interconnectivity.

Author

• Kakali Bhattacharya, University of Florida