This approach introduces collage-making as a reflexive research practice within graduate research methods instruction. The innovation is grounded in feminist epistemology and decolonial pedagogical commitments, and theorises three interconnected concepts that reframe how research capacity is understood and cultivated: epistemic shame as a pedagogical barrier, epistemic self-trust as a pathway to reintegration, and embodied knowledge as a research resource.

In practice, students are invited to create collages as a method of surfacing research interests before committing to formal question development. The collage-making process engages somatic cues, affective responses, and non-linear associations. These are the forms of knowing that conventional research training tends to suppress. By working with image, texture, and composition rather than academic prose, students access dimensions of their intellectual and experiential selves that structured question-development exercises routinely foreclose.

Students are given approximately 30 to 40 minutes to construct a collage representing themes, images, and questions that resonate with their emerging research interests. They then write brief reflective notes explaining the connections between their visual composition and the issues they feel drawn to investigate. These reflections become the starting point for facilitated dialogue in which students articulate how their personal, cultural, and political experiences shape their research questions.

The intervention, when situated within explicit theoretical commitments to epistemic justice, collage-making functions as a diagnostic practice that exposes the limits of dominant forms of inquiry while providing students with experiential access to alternative epistemologies. The process enables what the educator theorises as epistemic repair: the reintegration of ways of knowing that students had previously rejected or suppressed within academic contexts.

This practice is being documented and theorised in a manuscript currently in preparation, co-authored with a colleague: Rogers, T. A., & Lubin Langtiw, C. (in preparation). Your body is your first research site: Collage as a pathway from epistemic shame to epistemic

self-trust.

This approach enhances student learning by:

• Interrupting epistemic shame, enabling students to approach research design from a position of self-trust rather than self-doubt

• Providing structured access to embodied knowledge as a legitimate research resource, expanding the epistemological range available to emerging researchers

• Supporting students in developing research topics that are genuinely connected to their intellectual curiosity, cultural inheritances, and lived experience

• Increasing students’ willingness to integrate personal and political histories into their scholarly work in rigorous and theoretically grounded ways

• Strengthening reflexive capacity by engaging students in meaning-making processes that operate before and alongside academic language

Student outcomes documented through this practice include greater connection to research topics, increased willingness to draw on personal and political histories in scholarly work, and enhanced capacity for reflexivity.

The collage intervention requires no specialist equipment or artistic training beyond access to magazines, paper, and adhesive. This makes it one of the most practically accessible innovations in this portfolio. Its theoretical underpinnings, epistemic shame, epistemic self-trust, and embodied knowledge, are applicable across any graduate programme in which students are asked to generate original research, including education, public health, psychology, anthropology, and the humanities.

The framework this practice produces is also transferable in a deeper sense: it offers

educators across disciplines a conceptual vocabulary for naming and responding to the epistemic barriers their students carry. Rather than treating student uncertainty as a deficit of preparation or confidence, this approach repositions it as a pedagogically addressable response to structural conditions. That reframing is available to any educator willing to work within explicit commitments to epistemic justice.

These practices demonstrate how arts-based methods can be integrated into graduate research training as rigorous epistemological interventions that expand students’ capacity to produce knowledge that is both methodologically sound and intellectually honest.