Arts-Based Phenomenological Research: Theory and Praxis

In this introduction to the special section on arts-based phenomenological research, we argue that incorporating artistic methods into phenomenological research design is a natural manifestation of the essential nature of phenomenology. F. Wertz (2022) called for psychology's important task of articulating the philosophical underpinnings of our empirical research methodologies. Thus, we first justify arts-based phenomenological research by rooting its methodology in phenomenological philosophers' deep appreciation for art across history, many of whom praised art as an ideal phenomenological language to express the essence of a lived experience in its originally concrete, visceral manifestation. Then, we demonstrate how phenomenological philosophy translates to research methodology, including arguments for the value of art and the aesthetic when doing phenomenological research. We introduce the four arts-based phenomenological research projects published in this special section, all of which incorporate artistic creation in various aspects of their phenomenological research methods-including data collection, interpretation, dissemination, and self-reflexivity. Each contributing author describes their unique methods and procedures of embracing arts-based phenomenological research to describe lived experiences in a manner that remains faithful to Husserl's phenomenological call to "go back to the thing themselves" in producing knowledge about human experience. We conclude by positioning arts-based phenomenology as an interdisciplinary qualitative methodology that belongs in both the human sciences and the psychological humanities, inviting phenomenological researchers to interrogate the link between the human sciences and humanities and to explore how phenomenological research as art can hold vast power for knowledge and transformation.