The Bricoleur Researcher, Serendipity and Arts-based research.

Abstract

My work as a critical autoethnographer has been haunted by Elliot Eisner’s insistence that arts-based research should find a place of its own and not adhere to the scientific method. I have found that the more I worked as a Bricoleur researcher, using arts-based methods, the more I came to understand that there is no need to find a place, but rather return. I argue here that as arts-based researchers the notion of serendipity and the role of a bricoleur, are useful to make sense of embodied, sensory, and at times messy, research processes.