The bringing together of the arts and qualitative inquiry is changing the face of social science research. The increasing shift toward arts-based research has raised complex questions, such as how to evaluate its quality and even whether distinctions exist between what is art and what is research. In this defining work, Gary Knowles and Ardra Cole bring together the top scholars in qualitative methods to provide a comprehensive overview of where arts-based research has come, and where it is going. Through various categories of art and art-based research - namely epistemological, historical, methodological, thematic - will address all the significant issues of conceiving and conducting arts-based or arts-informed research in the social sciences and humanities, as well as the challenges of composing final representations of the research.