Visually Reflective and Radically Meta: A Wordless Narrative About Doing Wordless Narrative Research

As a progressive branch of qualitative research that draws from different expressive forms to understand social phenomena, visual arts research often relies upon conventional academic discourses and scholarly writing to discuss how it functions as a research methodology. Following this critique, this visual essay explores how to do visual art research through the expressive forms employed in the visual art research itself. For this visual essay, I self-reflexively analyze how I do wordless narrative research, a visual art research methodology that draws from the expressive storytelling capacity of wordless novels to understand social, cultural, and emotional experiences too subtle for language. Through a critically self-reflexive process, I question what it looks like when I am doing wordless narrative research and how I might use the expressive form of wordless storytelling to better understand this research process.