Reimagining Citizen Research: a Postdigital Arts-Based Approach to Inclusive Research Methods

Abstract

Abstract Left feeling isolated by the Covid-19 pandemic, artists working within Art in Motion (AIM), a participatory contemporary arts organisation operating as a collective of learning-disabled and neurodiverse artists and non-learning-disabled and non-neurodiverse artists, based at Spike Island, an international centre for the production and exhibition of contemporary art in Bristol, UK, wanted to reach out to similar UK-based arts organisations. Their goal was to understand the challenges these organisations were also facing and to build a sense of community. A citizen research project, taking an arts-based, practice-led, and participatory approach, was developed by artists working within AIM to challenge assumptions about learning-disabled and neurodiverse artists engaging in research and inform the inclusive development of the visual arts sector in the UK within a postdigital landscape. The project’s approach followed the recent expansion of longstanding notions of citizen science into the social science and humanities. The project involved the co-development of accessible, practice-led, creative research tools that built on the creative practice of artists working within AIM, bridged the digital and the physical, and took an overarching postdigital perspective. Visual metaphors were drawn on and a ‘suitcase’ of practice-led research tools was developed, where researchers could select tools needed for a series of both virtual and in-person research trips. Such tools included reflective practice, questionnaires, interviews, visual scribing, and mapping. This article charts the development of the project as artists took on the collective role of researchers in a postdigital context. It reflects on the positionality and experience of a collective of artists working as citizen researchers, while expanding upon the concept and the value of research for a diverse art collective in a hybrid virtual-physical art context. It concludes that citizen research can be made more inclusive and accessible through arts-based, imaginative methods, particularly when researchers hold multiple identities and active roles in the research process.

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