Access Points into Creative Arts Inquiry (CAI) | Arts-based Research (ABR)

Imagine the terrain of Inquiry | Research as an entangled and relational ecosystem in which an ever-expanding array of approaches to the arts as | within | for research | inquiry co-exist. Some encounters between approaches are harmonious and others are ecotonal…

A series of short experientially-based workshops facilitated by Dr Deborah Green

Are you an educator or healthcare professional who uses an inquiry-approach in your practice or research and would like to enhance or include creativity?

Perhaps you are a researcher interested in arts-based research?

Or possibly an artist or creative arts therapist who wants to research in a way that aligns with your creativity and practice?

Maybe you are already an established arts-based researcher and creative arts inquirer, and would like some new or refresher access points? Or you might simply be curious…

Then this is the series of workshops for you. All, from beginners to experienced, are welcome.

A lightly traced outline of the CAI | ABR Access Points workshop series:

What is a creative arts inquiry (CAI)?

For us at MIECAT this process engages multimodal arts, and values working together with human and more-than-human others, to see what emerges from our experiencing.

What is arts-based research (ABR)? 

Friend of MIECAT, Shaun McNiff defined this approach to research as including “the use of the creative process as a way of understanding experience” that is “defined by its close relationship to the practice of art therapy” (McNiff, S, 1998, Art based research, Shambhala)

What will you experience?

Research has traditionally been in harness to carefully structured designs aimed at testing measurable data to produce universalisable ‘Truth’ that explains and predicts.

What becomes possible, however, when creativity rewilds this? When responsive, intuitive, inquisitive, sensorial, bodied, reflective | reflexive | diffractive, imaginative, dialogical multimodal-making becomes a legitimate way of generating and reporting knowing | knowledge?

This series of three inter-linked but separable educational workshops offer an opportunity to actively engage with arts-based approaches to Research | Inquiry. Through creative ways of accessing, generating, depthing and sharing arrivals, participants will experiment with what happens when the arts become methods for experiential exploration, animate intra-active generation, and co-creation and dissemination of knowing.

Each experiential workshop explores a different access point into CAI | ABR, beginning with a simple question:

Workshop 1: How do we know?

Access Point 1: The Arts of Knowing explores how creative practice makes available forms of knowing | knowledge that are embodied, intuitive, relational and imaginative.

Saturday 19 September 2026 ONLINE
12:00pm - 4:00pm AEDT

Workshop 2: How do we research?

Access Point 2: The Arts of En-strange-d (E)Inquiries* explores creative methodologies that invite us to make-strange, to question assumptions, to move beyond familiar ways of thinking and intra-act differently with the matter and making of our inquiries.

Saturday 24 October ONLINE
12:00pm - 4:00pm AEDT

*This session will also be held IN PERSON on Sunday 22 November 9.30am-1.30pm AEDT at The MIECAT Institute, Fitzroy while Dr Deb Green is in Melbourne. Details here

Workshop 3: How do we share what emerges?

Access Point 3: The Arts of Rewilding Research Reporting explores imaginative and arts-rich ways of communicating research in accessible and evocative ways that shimmy beyond conventional academic writing.

Saturday 28 November 2026 ONLINE
12:00pm - 4:00pm AEDT

What you'll need

A stable internet connection, Zoom, a quiet space that allows for creative making and movement, and a selection of simple creative materials.

You are invited to imagine this Inquiry | Research terrain as an entangled and relational ecosystem in which an ever-expanding array of approaches to the arts as | within | for research | inquiry co-exist. Some encounters between approaches are harmonious and others are ecotonal. These short workshops will call in the presence several established and emerging method|ologies and that are akin to the form of Inquiry taught in our MIECAT courses. 

Bring your curiosity, willingness to experiment, and openness to not always knowing where the inquiry might lead. These short workshops are educational. 

Designed for

Artists, creative practitioners, creative arts therapists, educators, researchers, postgraduate students, community practitioners and curious minds alike, these workshops offer an accessible entry point into creative arts inquiry and arts-based research. Whether you are considering postgraduate study, developing your own research practice, or interested in exploring new ways of thinking and knowing, you are warmly invited to join us.

Please note

These short workshops are educational. Despite MIECAT’s approach to arts-based research and creative inquiry being linked to therapeutic arts practice, participation in this Access Points series should not be viewed as therapy or supervision.

Colouring in details of the CAI | ABR Access Points workshop series:

Through guided multimodal creative, embodied, relational and imaginative processes, the Creative Arts Inquiry (CAI) | Arts-based Research (ABR) Access Points workshops will facilitate a playful space in which to explore how the MIECAT form of Inquiry may fruitfully entangle with several established and emerging method|ologies.

Before each session, we will send out pro/evocative materials and a reflective invitation to help you prepare. You are also welcome to bring and work with your current area of active-inquiry. Afterwards, we will offer optional readings and creative provocations to support you should you wish to continue your explorations.

Access Point 1: The Arts of Knowing

What types of knowing | knowledge become possible when we become-with the arts through making, sensing, moving and pondering? 

Why are these forms of knowing relevant?

In this experiential session you will be guided through a richly-layered experiential inquiry combining MIECAT’s multimodal creative inquiry approach and Laury Rappaport’s Focusing-Orientated Arts Therapy (FOAT) to explore your own relationship with knowing | knowledge.

From this, we will dialogically harvest insights into the distinctive and relevant forms of knowing applied within and generated by CAI | ABR. Together we will reflect on knowing as a gerund, considering how the arts generate forms of inquiry-relevant knowing that are embodied, relational, intuitive, uncertain, practice-based, generative, ancestral, multiple, disruptive, ineffable and more-than-human.

Access Point 2: The Arts of En-strange-d (E)Inquiries

What happens when we intentionally set aside taken-for-granted assumptions and encounter ourselves and our inquiries differently?

What strange shifts in perspective, unexpected insights and surprising knowings might become possible?

Creative Arts Inquiry | Arts-Based Research open options for unique approaches to method|ology. In this experiential inquiry, we will journey creatively with core methodological elements of arts-based, phenomenological reduction, exploring and implementing its various manifestations of making-strange, decentering and bracketing as ways to disrupt assumptions and creatively enter the alternative worlding of the imagination.

In this experiential session you will be guided through a layered experiential inquiry into an area of ‘stuckness’ from your own research or practice. We will experiment with a blend of the MIECAT approach to multimodality and emergence, Sandra Faulkner’s poetry inquiry, and Expressive Arts Therapy’s decentering. From this, we will dialogically harvest insights into the process and implications of making-strange as a generative methodological orientation within CAI | ABR.

Access Point 3: The Arts of Rewilding Research Reporting

How might we increase the accessibility and potency of how our research is shared?

What becomes possible when the arts are alive in how we ‘report’ research in ways that can be experienced rather than simply read?

Creative Arts Inquiry | Arts-Based Research open possibilities to productively disrupt traditional academic research reporting. Contemplating this possibility calls for some newly made-up words. How about Aesthetology – ways creative aesthetics may be present throughout both the process and final product. Or Wildscriptology – ways of scripting that rewild research away from domestication within traditional Western academia.

You will be asked to bring a piece of writing, a project or emerging idea to this workshop. You will be guided to journey creatively using a blend of the MIECAT approach to relational experiencing and multimodality, the Anna and Daria Halprin Life/Art Process, and Shaun McNiff’s imaginal dialoguing to explore this draft ‘report’. You will generate options for how this work may assume innovative forms. From this, we will dialogically harvest insights into how CAI | ABR may help us embrace various imaginative ways to communicate our inquiries that honour arts-based knowing | being | becoming and are accessible to a wide readership | audience.

Image credit: Deborah Green, A plethora of p-pushing primates, 2019, digital collage.