books - solspiré

Poetic Inquiry: Vibrant Voices in the Social Sciences
Co-edited by Monica Prendergast, Carl Leggo and Pauline Sameshima

Poetic Inquiry features many of the foremost scholars working worldwide in aesthetic ways through poetry. The contributors (from five countries) are all committed to the use of poetry as a way to collect data, analyze findings and represent understandings in multidisciplinary social science qualitative research investigations. The creativity and high aesthetic quality of the contributions found in the collection speak for themselves; they are truly, as the title indicates, "vibrant voices". This groundbreaking collection will mark new territories in qualitative research and interpretive inquiry practices at an international level. Poetic Inquiry will contribute to many ongoing and energetic debates in arts-based research regarding issues of evaluation, aesthetics, ethics, activism, self-study, and practice-based research, while also spelling out some innovative ways of opening up these debates in creative and productive ways. Instructors and students will find the book a clear and comprehensive introduction to poetic inquiry as a research method.

Climbing the Ladder with Gabriel
Pauline Sameshima, Roxanne Vandermause, Stephen Chalmers, and Gabriel

Climbing the Ladder with Gabriel demonstrates the power of photography and poetry to render the experience of methamphetamine addiction and recovery through the art of an interdisciplinary research methodology. Instructors, students, recovering addicts, and prevention/recovery advocates will find this a valuable resource.

There are many ways to "know the world". The authors of this remarkable text have adopted an eclectic mix of methodologies from the arts and sciences to portray the experience of methamphetamine addiction. While it may never be possible to fully "know" another's experience, this book provides readers with one of the most intimate portraits of a methamphetamine addict ever assembled. The reader will be touched by the juxtaposition of everyday joy and the hopelessness and regret so poignantly portrayed by these authors. The book is also hopeful, documenting that, even in the throes of terrible addiction, unique humanness survives and recovery is always possible. - John M. Roll, Professor and Associate Dean, College of Nursing. Director, Program of Excellence in the Addictions, Washington State University.

The authors of this remarkable work have opened the door for new ways of compiling and revealing what it means to be a human being caught in the dangerously perplexing problem of drug addiction and its fallout in a wide circle of social problems. By summoning up both a rigorous philosophy and procedural logic as a baseline and an artfulness that gives the bare bones of hard data a very human face, a heartbeat, and a voice that everyone can hear, they make a compelling case for such work in arts-based research and for pluralism in social science research design and methods. This is art caught in a handshake with science that matters. – Ivan Brady, Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus, Anthropology, State University of New York, Oswego.

What a fantastic idea! What a great accomplishment! – Laurel Richardson, Professor Emeritus of Sociology and international leader in qualitative research, The Ohio State University.

This poetic inquiry performs a vibrant testimony to the possibilities of personal and political transformation that can emerge in research that is heartful and artful. When we collaborate creatively and lovingly, we can find the ways of bountiful hope for living together with health. – Carl Leggo, Professor and Poet, Language and Literacy, University of British Columbia, Canada.

Seeing Red: A Pedagogy of Parallax
Pauline Sameshima

Seeing Red is written in the form of an epistolary bildungsroman—a didactic novel of personal developmental journeying. The work is a fiction (letters from a graduate student to the professor she is in love with) embedded in developmental understanding of living the life of a teacher researcher. The work shares the possibilities of how artful research informs processes of scholarly inquiry and honors the reader's multi-perspective as integral to the research project's transformative potential.

Winner of the 2007 AERA Arts-based Educational Research Outstanding Dissertation Award, 2007 CSSE Arts Researchers Teachers Society Outstanding Dissertation Award, 2007 CSSE Canadian Association of Teacher Education Dissertation Recognition of Excellence Award, and the 2007 Ted T. Aoki Curriculum Studies Prize.

Short Book Reviews at Publisher’s Site
Full Book Reviews:
Raunft, R. (2008, August). In National Art Education News. pp 22-23.
Siegesmund, R. (2009). In Journal of Arts & Learning, 25(1), 164-170.