This commentary reconsiders emerging standards for evaluation of the field of practice of qualitative inquiry and arts-based approaches. Specifically, this is a review of the dialogue around issues of standards that has continued through the first seven volumes of Qualitative Inquiry (QI), from March 1995 through June 2001, and is inclusive of this special issue of QI devoted to arts-based inquiry. What has emerged in QI is an actionoriented worldview among qualitative researchers who value inquiry for its usefulness within the community where it originates. In this way, QI has contributed greatly to the construction of still emerging practices within a newly formed tradition of participatory, critical action research based on an ethics of human relationships. Arts-based inquiry is one aspect of this emerging tradition.The newly formed discourse community of arts-based researchers is the focus in this current theme-oriented issue of Qualitative Inquiry (QI). To this end, co-guest editors Carol Mullen and I have assembled manuscripts that provide both theoretical discussions about arts-based research methodologies and examples of arts-based inquiries. Our contributing authors are enthusiastic coparticipants in the QI call for reinterpretation of the methods and ethics of human social research. Mullen introduces this reflexive exhibit of art-as-research with an overview of three predominant themes in this current collection of manuscripts-quality-based criteria for arts-based research, performance in arts-based research, and cultural politics in arts-based research.In my review of emerging epistemological and methodological concerns about the use of arts in research, I reconsidered the same issues Mullen has highlighted-quality, performance, and cultural politics in arts-based inquiry-but in this instance, I review discussions of standards for nontraditional methods and experimental, arts-based manuscripts that have appeared in QI during its 7-year publication history. Within the framework of

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This is a postmodern article that is nontraditional in its form, content, and mode of representation. Upon recognizing that we share interests and common experiences as artists, we decided to collect life history information from each other about our artistic experiences. Thus we have become, simultaneously, "the researched" and "the researcher. " In these conversations, we explore the ways in which we were each guided by our past, very strong aesthetic and artistic experiences. We also include the voices of other researchers and artists in our conversations as we explore the influences of art in the formation of our worldviews.The transcribed narratives in this text-representing portions of our conversations-are intensely personal accounts of how we (Susan and Gary) have each experienced similar kinds of feelings (affective knowing) as part of both research and artistic activity. As collaborators in a life history research project exploring the experiences of untenured university teacher educators, we are engaged in framing and reframing concepts appropriate for uncovering personal history influences on professional lives-ours included. Thus, in the process of reflecting on our joint, separate, and emerging research projects, we discovered that we were each guided in our research by our past, very strong aesthetic and artistic experiences. Upon recognizing that we share interests and common experiences as artists, we decided to collect life history information from each other about our artistic experiences. We would each become, simultaneously, &dquo;the researched&dquo; and &dquo;the researcher&dquo; (Cole, 1994). Our dual, reciprocal, and reflective roles would give us, we anticipated, insights into our practice as researchers and into other elements of our professional and personal selves. We were especially interested to discover and make more explicit how artistic and aesthetic experiences and events have shaped our thinking about research. We attempt to draw parallels between elements of our lives-between our artist and our researcher selves.

The authors use a storied representation to highlight the aesthetic and feeling qualities of their research about homeless youth. The authors also include a description of their mother/son research collaboration and the impact of that relationship on the research process. Names of youth are pseudonyms or street names, and all dialogues and reflections with participants were taken from audiotaped conversations. The following several themes are developed in this research story: the formation by homeless youth of familylike structures, the use of cocaine and heroin, early use of alcohol and primacy of alcohol as the drug of choice, and attitudes toward government, economic structures, and work. The problem of youth homelessness reflects the shortcomings of national youth policy and the failures of practices that concern youth. It is the authors' purpose to provide an opportunity for homeless youth to tell their stories and to contribute their own voices to conversations among educators and policy makers who make decisions that influence the life histories of youth, homeless or otherwise. THE RESEARCHERSThe telephone rang shortly after midnight. My 19-year-old son was calling collect, "Hi, Mom?" I could hear breathless excitement in his voice; excitement, not fear, or anger, no hint of trouble, just excitement. Why was he calling collect? When was he due home?"Mack, where are you?" I asked, a sense of foreboding creeping over me as I awakened."I'm in New Orleans!" was his joyous reply. Macklin was always a very good student in school, but he also always loved to challenge the system, to stay just this side of respectable (maybe sometimes he crossed over the line). A good kid, and always a challenge, his successes were plenty. As a ninth grader, he interviewed Bill Clinton and his aides George Stephanopoulous and James Carville for the school paper. A readers theater Mack wrote for his junior year project was presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA)-he had interviewed each, Holocaust survivors and high school students; 313

The experience (as opposed to the concept) of homelessness is hardly part of the academic discourse in education, cultural studies, or human development. One of the central goals of our special issue is to create a bridge between homelessness as a personal experience and homelessness as a public issue. Along with the personal experience that breaks free from the deficit-model informing dominant notions of homelessness, we also want to bring attention to the politics in the construction of knowledge about homelessness. Starting from street folk's textual representations of their visceral knowledge of homelessness, we offer a reading of current dominant narratives of homelessness: narratives of poverty as individual trouble (as opposed to systemic expression of ideologies of domination), narratives of personal choice (as in "choose the right" movements), and narratives of charity (as in "feel good about yourself for spending a week of your spring break vacation helping clean and build around Katrina").