In this paper, the author employs concrete research poetry as a visual representation of a metaphor analysis. Using autoethnographic methods, she explores the experiences of eight single mothers of children and young adults with mental illness. She conducts a metaphor analysis of semi-structured interview data and generates concrete poetic structures from metaphors that emerged from the data. In the process, she transforms data into art.

We interweave arts-based inquiry, painting, and autoethnography, to critically examine one researcher's fearful narratives around cancer, death, dying, and family myths. These methods give us the distance to deconstruct Christine's past schema in order to take away its powerful influence on her life. This destabilized illness narrative leads to a transformational narrative of peace. Arts-based inquiry invites the viewer/reader to engage in similar acts of deconstruction and transformation.

Research suggests that, compared to heterosexual counterparts, gay men and other sexual minorities are at higher risk of developing emotional distress and mental disorders. The sexual minority stress model attributes these health disparities to the chronic social stress that arises in response to exposure to antigay mistreatment and sexual prejudice pervasive in the culture. Little research has been done to illuminate the lived experience of exposure to prejudiced behaviors and attitudes and this inquiry aims to begin to fill this gap by addressing the following questions: What is the experience of being mistreated for being gay or perceived as gay? What is the experience of being exposed to sexual prejudice when one is gay? Using the writing of autobiographical poetry as a process of inquiry and the resulting poems as narrative data, I explore my own experiences with antigay encounters and sexual prejudice over the course of my life. The intent is to vivify and magnify the phenomenon under investigation via evocative poetic renderings aimed to foster empathy and embodied understanding in the reader.

This article discusses collaborative meaning-making in arts-based research. It introduces a project in which an artist-researcher invited a physician and an art historian to help to interpret medical students’ hand-made drawings of the female reproductive system and the conception process. The authors elaborated on different viewpoints and modes of talking during the data interpretation, and discussed how these were founded on, and disrupted, their professional roles in various ways. The article discusses how these different viewpoints about the students’ drawings complemented or conflicted with each other. It also discusses the use of associations and humor in these interpretations, and the experiences of emotional discomfort during the process.

A Transdisciplinary Journal (ARI) is a forum dedicated to exploring and advancing art as and/or within the research process across disciplines and internationally. We began this journal, because, over the last decades research practices that draw on the arts have grown exponentially. There are numerous books devoted to these practices as well as conferences, special days at conferences, special interest groups of national and international professional organizations, and journals that are friendly to these approaches, including those that have published special issues. We saw the demand for a journal devoted to these practices. It was important to us that the journal was an inclusive space in two key ways: accessibility and content.

More multifaceted than the mere titles we maintain—as daughters, sisters, wives, and teachers, for example—sexuality is a part of our identity worth exploring and honoring. Women’s stories, gathered in a questionnaire, highlight sexual identity in Panty Pennants—an exhibition held in late 2012 at the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center in Kansas City, Missouri. The author uses a process of thinking with deconstruction to explore various texts from the exhibition. In doing this, she learns to hear silence, to see women as multi-dimensional, and to disrupt culturally learned hierarchies of unearned privilege and oppressive power for purposes of gender equity and social justice.