Houses, swimming pools, and thin blonde women: Arts-based research through a critical lens with impoverished Bedouin women

This article presents drawings and explanations of marginalized Bedouin women within the welfare system in Israel as a speech act that captures the lacks, pain, struggles, and integrations or solutions that they experience during cultural transition. One focus is the experience of rapid transition to modernity of marginalized women. Another is the theoretical challenge of finding a form of arts-based research in which to capture this. The article shows how the art captures not a dual but a multifaceted reality, conveying the emotional pain of economic and social lacks and a constant wish for and struggle toward physical and emotional spaces. The article presents the outcome of a theoretical model to analyze the art and explanations that relates both to the art as an inherent expression of self (according to humanistic and arts-based paradigms) and to art as a culturally embedded expression of self in context (according to critical theories).