Today, where environmental and social inequalities are prevalent globally, and the call for decolonising academia leads to pertinent ethical questioning, for example, questioning the inequalities and inequities that arise in research processes (Sempere, Aliyu, & Bollaert, 2022), the role creative and co-developed methods can take to ensure multiple voices are heard is of interest. There is a long history of creative and artistic methods in academia and education, however the Arts and Sciences still for many are divided, or in some cases, science is misusing art: “[…] to promote its hard-sell, to offer images that beautify its results, soften its impact and mask its collusion with corporations whose only interest in research is that it should ‘drive innovation’ (Ingold, 2018, p225). The role art has in education is also being interrogated, such as Biesta (2020) questioning the expressivist and instrumentalist ways art education can be practised that fall short of what he describes as being the ‘real educational work’, which he describes as “[..] bringing children and young people into dialogue with the world” (Biesta, 2020, p117). Research that takes an active role in and for environmental justice can quickly lead us to question our responsibility as researchers. With this questioning comes the requirement, as Ingold (2018) critiques, for academic pursuit to ensure that the role of science as an ‘exporter of knowledge’, does not eclipse our societal duty of care and responsibility. This also demands us to understand why research is often done ‘on’ instead of ‘with’ participants, and within this understand in what context this is and is not appropriate. With methodological roots in Action Research (Townsend, 2019) and Educational Design Research (McKenny & Reeves (2019), this presentation collates creative 'participatory' methods (such as Digital Stories, Artivisim, Photovoice, Community mapping and Visual-timelines), found in both educational and research contexts, that seek to engage participants as co-developers of research: Examples from Art Education (Duncum, 2017), Photovoice projects such as Harper et al (2017), Partners in Science from Willyard, Scudellari, and Nordling (2018), and Rodríguez-Labajos (2022) Artistic Activism literature synthesis, are presented to ignite reflection on ways to enable participants to take on proactive and empowered roles within research. From this the future of research concerning EEJ is critiqued and concludes by calling for the role of co-creative and co-developed methods in academia to not be underestimated.

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