Harmonic Chaos: the autoethnography of a creative, process-oriented, and multimodal qualitative enquiry project

In this article, we present a creative, process-oriented, and multimodal qualitative enquiry project conducted by five undergraduate psychology students and their instructor. The project started as a course assignment on creative research methods aiming to explore the theme of inspiration. However, the project’s initial theme soon proved to be a device that catalysed the unfolding of the process rather than being an end in itself. Using photovoice, drawing, and collage-making, we engaged in a layered collaborative process of reflection, emotional sharing, and meaning-making. The writing of this article itself became an extension of the method, weaving our voices together into a shared narrative. Through this collaborative autoethnography, we engaged with a set of generative questions: How can creative methods help us explore psychological and social experience? In what ways might collaborative and multimodal enquiry catalyse emotional openness, reflexivity, and the co-creation of meaning? And how might such creative practices extend psychological research towards more relational and embodied understandings? We called our project Harmonic Chaos to reflect the balance that we experienced between chaos and self-organisation during the process.