Becoming in Pieces:​ Collage Making and Narrative Inquiry as Tools to Understand Identity Formation of Immigrant Women

Introduction
Arts-based qualitative methodologies are increasingly recognised for their potential to reveal holistic and intersectional dimensions of lived experience. Yet, within social science research, creative and accessible methods remain underused as systematic approaches to knowledge making. This project proposes utilizing arts-based narrative inquiry as a critical, decolonial, and economically accessible methodology for examining belonging and identity among immigrant women. The project proposes to demonstrate how creative methods can support meaning-making across cultural and linguistic boundaries, offering multidisciplinary opportunities to re-centre holistic stories.

Goals and Methods
This project will engage adult immigrant Indian women to explore how creative storytelling can help make sense of belonging from a reflective perspective. Guided by a critical feminist and intersectional framework, the research design integrates visual and textual forms of data through phased cycles of storying, reflection, and co-analysis. Collage was chosen for its accessibility across differences in income, technological access, and artistic experience, allowing participation without material or skill-based barriers. Its tactile and visual nature helps participants express what might be difficult to convey through words alone. Collage functions simultaneously as a generative prompt, an interpretive site, and an analytic instrument. Narrative meaning-making unfolds through reflective engagement, allowing participants and researcher to co-construct insights.

Expected Results
The study expects that collage-making will help participants express complex, layered experiences that may not emerge through conventional qualitative methods. These creative processes are anticipated to reveal how belonging and identity are continuously shaped by memory, place, and emotion, offering deeper epistemological insight into lived experience

Conclusions
The study proposes that arts-based narrative inquiry contributes to emerging paradigms of qualitative research by expanding how knowledge is generated and interpreted. It positions creative, accessible, and reflective methods as vital for broadening the theoretical and methodological foundations of qualitative inquiry.