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The use of popular expressive arts as antidotes to the pathologies of the parallel processes of lifeworld colonization and cultural impoverishment has been under-theorized. This article enters the void with a project in which breast cancer survivors used collages and installations of everyday objects to solicit their authentic expression of the psycho-social impacts of lymphedema.
The article enlists Jurgen Habermas' communicative action theory to explore the potential of these expressive arts to expand participants' meaningful engagement with their lifeworlds. The authenticity claims inherent in the art forms fostered collective reflexivity and spontaneous, affective responses and compelled the group to create new collective understandings of the experience of living with lymphedema. The article contributes theoretical insights regarding the emancipatory potential of aesthetic-expressive rationality, an under-developed area of Habermasian theory of communicative action, and to the burgeoning literature on arts-based methods in social scientific research.
Keywords: expressive arts, cancer survivorship, Habermas, theory of communicative action. The use of expressive art forms, 1 such as dance, photo-essays and theatre, for the research enterprise has been advocated for some time for example Blumenfeld-Jones, ; Lapidus, ; Conrad, However, arts-based research is new to health studies.
Of the over 70 arts-based health studies reviewed by Boydell et al , the majority were published in the past 5 years. In non-research contexts, the arts have been enlisted for health policy development and health promotion campaigns Carson et al , Theatre, with its gestural, sensual and aesthetic language, has become an established tool in health research to convey patients' lived experiences Gray et al , , ; Mitchell et al , ; Rossiter et al , This article draws from a theatre-based project regarding the psycho-social impacts of lymphedema, a complication from the treatment of breast cancer that involves swelling and associated abnormal accumulation of observable and palpable protein-rich fluid Armer, ; McLaughlin et al , In the project we used the expressive arts of collages and everyday-objects installations with a group of breast cancer survivors in order to create an ethnodrama — a dramatic performance of their lived experience — for subsequent presentation to other survivors and health-care providers.
