This workshop explores one of the biggest challenges for researching with/through arts: finding a way to address the artfully produced data consistently both in scientific and artistic terms. To do so, we will collectively explore the form of a curated exhibition.

Curation offers an understanding of the process of presenting and exhibiting artwork as a thoughtful act of caring – also as taking care of – both about the art, the authors and the audiences (  et al., 2019). Curating is a stagecraft, an orchestration, a way of theatrically and rhetorically persuading the audience, inviting and disposing to a particular way to experience the artwork (Preziosi, 2019).

An exhibition is not the end product in curation – contrasting to the results on a research project – but it is “a site for carrying out this research, as a place for enacted research” (Sheikh, 2019 p. 102); exhibiting here means that the exhibition is itself part of the ongoing processes. In this way, the curating exceeds the exhibition as the first refers to the way of thinking and approaching the artwork, it is a mode of thinking aesthetically about something other than art (Sheikh, 2019).

Analytically, curating resembles Cluster Analysis to show the similarities in the different ‘stories’ taken from the poems. Following Lynn Butler-Kisber (2021), this mode of analysis means taking the artwork as series or collections with the intent to get “a prism-like rendition of the subtle variations of a phenomenon, while at the same time giving a more holistic understanding of it” (p. 34). This process would arguably address the concerns in literature of diluting the individual value of each artwork as it would keep them intact by only framing them together as similarly inclined pieces that collectively reflect a common story.

As a curated exhibition each artwork “is studied for its individual characteristics and message, while drawn into interpretations of a body of work” (Persohn, 2021, p. 38). Thus, this workshop will recreate the challenges of curating an exhibition: to clearly devise ways of presenting the data, in a way that adds value to each of them individually as much as to all of them collectively. Spaid (2020) calls the thinking collectively as devising “relational clusters” (p. 34), where the adjacent artwork is elevated by its shared references between each other, the audiences, and the world.

To facilitate the methodological exploration and creating of these relational clusters, we will engage with and collectively reimagine the first author’s artfully produced data, taken from their latest research project that used Poetic Inquiry (Faulkner, 2019; Penwarden, 2021; 2022; Prendergast, 2009; Schoone, 2019; Schoone, et al., 2022; Vincent, 2018). Together, we will put into practice the curatorial approach, rehearsing one way of engaging with artfully produced research data as we seek to enhance its meaning.

In this workshop, the participants will have the chance to be curators, in the same way that the first author produced a curated exhibition in their project. The material will be opened and shared with the participants so that we experience and discuss a way of stagecrafting research data critically, artistically and horizontally as an academic community.

We will recreate the process of curating an exhibition to address the many complementing and overlapping aspects of presenting data artistically. By attending this workshop, the participants will get to experience a way of doing art-based research in a safe space and using real data by crafting relational clusters as an exhibition, they will become collaborators in the research production, and will get to discuss and reflect broadly and openly about new ways of doing research with the arts.

To engage with the curatorial turn in art-based research, this workshop will use the data from the first author’s latest research project on Early Career Academics’ (ECAs) experiences of teaching in Higer Education. Exploring ECAs’ experiences means engaging with a complex field of study. Considering the emotionality of the academic work (Djerasimovic & Villani, 2020; Hollywood et al., 2020; Khan, 2021; Stupnisky et al., 2016; 2019), ECAs’ experiences of teaching and their academic work can be quite different and varied. Currently, the literature speaks of pleasure, anger, enthusiasm, disappointment, precarity, overload, joy, sadness, lack of recognition, belonging, lack of control, unfamiliarity, passion, uncertainty, among many others (Bloch, 2016; Nästesjö, 2020; 2022; Oliveira et al., 2024; Robinson & Hilli, 2016). Mindful of that, the first author developed research to address the issue empirically, following the argument that the experiences of ECAs would be coherent with the learning processes they are and have been transiting. Integrating the emotionality of the experiences into the research design, art-based research was deemed appropriate using poetry, and thus some poems were created as data for the project. In this workshop, the participants will encounter the poems in the room, and will be invited to experience them firstly on their own. Following the procedure from the research project, the participants will be invited to engage with an iterative process of reading and re-reading, going through the different poems back again to check how they can make sense. The aim here is to create groups so that reading the poems in a particular sequence transform the poems themselves as well as produce an intended effect on the reader/audience. For this, the poems will be printed out and carefully read, while writing our reactions to them as side notes. Then, we will create small groups, where the task will be to produce the relational clusters, curated exhibition. They will be encouraged to do it outside the room, while the first author arranges the space according to the exhibition proposed in their project. From that, we will share each groups proposal and rationale, and contrast it with the research project version. As the manipulation of data takes place, the analytical work in terms of curation became less a simple putting together to bring about a theme or certain commonalities and is turned into a series of actual transformations of the data as they are being organized and structured artistically.

Sánchez & Sebastián (2024) elaborate on the relationship between emotions and learning to state that emotions are not predetermined, dependant solely on the individual nor on the social situation but are developed relationally. So, experiences can be transformed through liminal affective devices (Stenner & Zittoun, 2020; Zittoun & Stenner, 2021) as a mediated, technical and artificial effort for meaning-making through art. Thus, a clear turn is proposed, as the key concern would not be what the research data is or says, but what it does. With Art-Based Research as an epistemically consistent way to research experiences (Sánchez, 2023), here art and aesthetic would support the transformation of emotions in culturally and personally meaningful ways. Thus, the main purpose here wouldn’t be discussing what Art-Based Research is, or to discuss what curating an exhibition is. Following Vygotski (1925/1974), we will discuss what they do. Otherwise called “boundary work” (Sigfúsdóttir, 2021), an exhibition acknowledges a work that sits both with the arts and research fields. In a sense, output created through Art-Based Research practices could be disseminated both in academic and cultural institutions and forms. By recreating the process of curating an exhibition we would be thinking about the artwork and extending the relationships identified and reflected upon meaningfully; we would highlight their distinctiveness as pieces of poetry; and we would actively expect and pre-act to the different ways in which the audiences can engage with the exhibition. The implications and value of taking part of this workshop would be to actively exercise a shift in our conception and practice of researching and analysing from the content addressed and methodology used, to the activity itself in its productive character. We would engage with what we intentionally do and produce when we research educational experiences surpassing the discreteness of data.

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