Voices, Silences, and Telling Secrets

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss how the intersection of qualitative inquiry and poetic-inquiry grounded in arts-based research allows me to construct knowledge about self and the transnational shuttling of two female graduate students from India during their first year of education in the United States. Resonating with the participants’ experiences, I describe the messiness of being an insider-outsider researcher and use arts-based research to portray the in/visible forms of voice, silence, and secrets. Specifically, I play with poetic representation to blur the boundaries between the researcher and the researched while integrating multiple forms of arts-based ways of collecting data that explore how silence and secrets function in the lives of transnational females. Calling for an integration of arts-based epistemologies, I emphasize the need to conceptualize arts-based approaches not just at the data representation stage in qualitative inquiry but throughout the entire qualitative research process.