Transformations : the significance of community spaces: how can researchers draw methodological inspiration from the communities they study?

We have recently come to the end of a two-year project based on a case study of Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL), an organisation where creativity, art and design are embedded within organisational culture and everyday practice. Despite having very few artistic talents or crafting skills ourselves, from the beginning we saw the importance of these things to many of our research participants, and so began to consider how we could reflect this in both the project’s methods and its knowledge exchange. Below, we give some background on the project, and then discuss how we drew on arts-based methods and collaborations with artists to positively disrupt conventional data collection and dissemination techniques in our disciplines.