Creative Inquiry: Qualitative Analysis In Visual Research

One encounters an image and experiences a qualitative intensity that cannot immediately be articulated. In art-based research, this awareness is not simply a formal property of images; it has methodological implications. Research-creation approaches have similarly argued that creative practices should not be understood as secondary forms of dissemination but as sites where knowledge itself is generated, negotiated, and mobilized (Rather, 2024).

If semiotic abduction is understood as the introduction of a mediating hypothesis in response to perceptual disturbance, then it cannot remain confined to the interiority of the individual observer. Hypotheses do not arise in a vacuum. They emerge within socially structured regimes of perception, interpretation, and legitimacy. The irritation of doubt that Peirce describes is always already situated within habits that are themselves collective (Peirce, 1931-1935). For example, montage and collage preserve an openness across images, fragments, and contexts. They maintain the productive tension between what is seen, what resists interpretation, and what might connect otherwise disconnected elements. Hypotheses are not simply formulated; they are arranged, tested, displaced, and reconfigured through visual relations.

This session invites papers that explore the questions of:

1. The role of researcher and the ethics of visual research

2. The relevance of qualitative analysis in/as social and political process

3. Creative and abductive processes as shared and participatory

4. Epistemological and ontological positions and processes in creative research

5. Other questions of analysis in creative research