ABSTRACT

From the social sciences, scholartistry accepts a logical discipline of inquiry built upon inferential and abductive reasoning. The world beyond us is active, changing, reforming; it is not passively waiting for discovery. Scholartistry emphasizes the role of the researcher as an active creator of data within cultural contexts, who plays with possible levels of interpretation. In an era of social media, this is not a foreign concept to students. An individual who holds an apparatus can engage in active exploration of possibility and the way things might otherwise be. However, this same individual can also assume a more passive stance of seeking out a predetermined statement and recording what the individual intended to find. Both approaches create arts-based research, but an attitude informed by scholartistry would be more inquisitive and aware that through iterating images, new possibilities and new perspectives emerge.