Creative methodologies have gained traction across socio-legal and criminological research, offering tools to engage with the lived, emotional, and structural complexities of courts and policing. These methodologies align with broader trends in contemporary ethnography (Kara, 2020), as demonstrated by Elliot and Culhane’s (2016) call for imaginative ethnographic practices, Causey’s (2017) exploration of drawing as a method, and Rumsby’s (2020) use of retrospective collaborations with illustrators to revisit ethnographic findings.
Hodgson and Lewis (2022, 2023, 2025) analyse the benefits and limitations of arts-led police-community engagement, exploring its ability to give voice to marginalised groups and generate empathy that can lead to changes in police attitudes and behaviours. These findings inform their own research practice in partnerships exploring young people’s feelings of safety and their views on policing. This includes the co-commissioning of a play (After Preston, 2023) and creative-led workshops with marginalised youth in schools, resulting in artistic outputs that express their lived experiences of policing (Keeping us Safe? 2024).
The emotions and empathy generated through creative methods are also being used to investigate issues of racism within policing in ways that challenge and potentially change behaviours (Project Seshat, 2025). For instance, engagement with dramatic narratives as proxies for officers’ experiences can facilitate more authentic and transparent discussions. Empathetic storytelling is also used to build rapport in spaces of opposition or inequality, supporting (albeit fragile) moments of solidarity and fostering affective encounters that may lead to broader changes in police practice.
Recent works also underscore the value of creative methods in research on courts. Fernandez et al. (2024) develop 'collective ethno/graphy' to analyse processes of depoliticisation that obscure the structural and racialised dimensions of violence as they unfold within the regulated space of the courtroom. In this approach, ethno/graphic drawing is not only a method of self-reflexivity, but also ‘a practice of representation’ and a technique of observation in its own right. Anwar and Aardse (2024) similarly combine traditional empirical methods with visual arts in order to highlight the interplay between speculative security measures and judicial processes in terrorism trials.
Beyond the courtroom, creative methods such as walking (O’Neill et al., 2021) and participatory theater (Kaptani & Yuval-Davis, 2008) offer innovative ways to examine the spatial, sensory, and dialogical aspects of justice. Graphic and visual methods can further highlight the reparative and affective capacities of creative research. Mookherjee (2022) examines how graphic ethnographies can evoke visceral experiences of fear and violence beyond the search for the ‘unsayable and unseeable,’ advancing nuanced understandings of survivors’ experiences. Martínez-López de Castro et al. (2022) discuss the importance of artistic experience for the development of empathic capacity.
Against this rich background of work and within the overarching theme of Creative Methods as Research, we invite papers that deal with the following suggested (but not exhaustive) provocations:
(1) Collaborations and/or co-creations. What are good practices in the development of creative methods, either alone or in collaboration with others? What are the opportunities and challenges encountered in developing creative collaborations? Who controls the production and circulation of knowledge in the collaboration, and according to which standards? How is the relationship between artist and researcher understood? What impact does collaborative working have on the practice of the artist and of the researcher?
(2) Emotions. How do creative and community engaged methods speak to the emotional, affective, and embodied dimensions of courts and policing? In what ways can these approaches foster the expression and analysis of experiences that are often overlooked in traditional research methods? What emotions do these research practices evoke? How can they produce forms of empathy and solidarity, or not?
