Reshaping the space created by organizational aesthetics and following organization scholars’ growing interest in art both as an organizational phenomenon and as a different register of meaning-making, we focus on art-based research methods as a possible avenue for mobilizing emerging, creative, unconventional, hybridized research practices through arts and thus rethinking the future of qualitative research in management and organization. The paper is mainly concerned with the practical organizing of the multi-epistemic methodological encounters between organization research and artistic practices and between organization scholars and artists, departing from our research process in a European project on craft ecosystems. Without suggesting a displacement of established methods, we propose a process of weaving artistic practices and established qualitative methods (i.e. ethnographies) as separate, but interdependent sets of epistemic threads, both contributing to the research fabric. Mobilizing the sensitivity of artistic practices for publicness and public engagement and their aesthetic work with the sensorial, ineffable, and invisible, our experimentation suggests ABR as a way to open the space for a reflexively engaged scholarship. Finally, far from being frictionless, we identify some of the challenges of organizing and performing ABR in organization research: the risk of instrumentalizing art, the difficulty of dealing with the political economy of engagement, and the hurdles of interdisciplinarity.
