Telling Participants' Stories

This book is the product of extensive research. In this book we celebrate a significant emerging direction in qualitative research: the blending of the critical and the creative. This represents an extension of critical research that is grounded in the critical social sciences with its emphasis on social justice, to embrace the rich resources and insights that the creative arts can provide as a means of enhancing the process and experience of research and the meaningful portrayal of research findings. For example, stories provide a rich and realistic way of portraying the wide variety of human experiences that qualitative researchers seek to illuminate, as do other creative tools such as poems, paintings and narratives. In this way, creativity extends the capacity of the critical research paradigm to look deeply into the way people’s lives are experienced and transformed by emancipatory practices.