23. Arts-based environmental research

Arts-based research engages with a broad range of creative mediums and genres to gather data and to communicate ideas, experiences, and feelings about the environment. The tremendously diverse range of creative arts-based methods greatly expands traditional environmental data gathering tools and offer new techniques for capturing otherwise elusive environmental experiences. Creative research provides opportunities to explore meaning, ritual, symbolism, and the visceral, sensory, embodied, and affective elements of environmental experience, as they can represent valid ways of knowing but may not be well represented in traditional environmental research approaches.