Critical arts-based research in education: performing undocumented historias

The article seeks to elucidate and academically position the genre of critical arts-based research in education. The article fuses Critical Race Theory (CRT), life history and performance, alongside work with undocumented American students of Mexican origin, to show how a politicised qualitative paradigmatic re envisioning can occur in which counter-histories and counter-stories can be co-created into a powerful, evocative, and transformative arts-based performance text: Undocumented Historias. The article reflects on how critical arts-based research in education can function as a means to legitimise, empower and promote the voices of the educationally and socially marginalised; evoking an experiential and sensual means of feeling and knowing by which researcher and researched may co-recover, interrogate and enrich an anti-colonialist critique of the dominant social order.