Arts-Based Inquiry in QI: Seven Years From Crisis to Guerrilla Warfare

This commentary reconsiders emerging standards for evaluation of the field of practice of qualitative inquiry and arts-based approaches. Specifically, this is a review of the dialogue around issues of standards that has continued through the first seven volumes of Qualitative Inquiry ( QI), from March 1995 through June 2001, and is inclusive of this special issue of QI devoted to arts-based inquiry. What has emerged in QI is an action-oriented worldview among qualitative researchers who value inquiry for its usefulness within the community where it originates. In this way, QI has contributed greatly to the construction of still emerging practices within a newly formed tradition of participatory, critical action research based on an ethics of human relationships. Arts-based inquiry is one aspect of this emerging tradition.