Becoming Research With Shadow Work: Combining Artful Inquiry With Research-Creation

The authors explore different wonderings to illustrate some possible ways in which postqualitative inquiry and scholarship is becoming and shaping the lives of scholars. To do this, we draw from previous work in arts-influenced inquiry and make connections with arts-based research and “research-creation” to explore how researchers can generate possibilities and becoming through the process of creating art in a purposefully relational manner. In these creations, our becomings intersect with shadow-philosophy, each other, and event happenings we conducted with postqualitative researchers. Rather than conceptually discussing various forms of postqualitative inquiry, we attempt to practice it. In this way, we use arts-inspired research to explore intersections between research and creation. These types of relational encounters produce thinking and materials which belong to life, senses, and affect, and could have a (scholarly) life of their own.