Arts-Based Research as a Way to Bridge Emotional Versus Social Knowledge of Community Workers

Poverty as expressed in food insecurity may negatively affect the victims' physical, social, emotional, and cognitive functioning. This article focuses on the discrepancy between the cognitive structural explanation of food insecurity, and the emotional impact that students hold in relation to this social problem, as shown in their images of poverty. This discrepancy is accessed through arts-based research that uses a projective drawing and phenomenological explanation to reveal these gaps between what social practitioners know and what they feel in relation to food insecurity and hunger. The above paper will show that that while the students may verbally "speak" systemic or socially critical theories of poverty and of food insecurity, they "draw" food insecurity through fatalistic, psychological, and individualistic theories of poverty, or experience and draw dissonance between what they want to draw (what they think) and what they end up drawing (what they experience). The article shows how images can help reveal this gap between what is thought and what is felt, so as to enable social practitioners more self-awareness as a base for effective interventions in relation to poverty.