LINES OF INQUIRY

A groundbreaking international collection that redefines drawing as a powerful tool for thinking, feeling, and connecting across disciplines, cultures, and experiences.

Bringing together essays by researchers, scholars, and artists from nine countries, including teachers, architects, psychotherapists, museum educators, and curators, this book draws on each contributor’s unique position and practice to showcase diverse perspectives on the collaborative and interpretive power of drawing. The collection unfolds as a journey through the many forms and functions of drawing, exploring practices as varied as mapping a daily route, marking territory, expressing personal experience, diagramming problems through arrows and lines, creating comics, or imagining abstract boundaries of power. These diverse approaches invite readers to reconsider what drawing is and what it can do.

Whether capturing lived experience, conveying emotion, constructing knowledge, or challenging systems of authority, the contributions reveal drawing’s unique capacity to generate meaning beyond words. Through engaging and compelling case studies, the book encourages both scholars and practitioners to see drawing as a tool for empathy, critical inquiry, and alternative ways of knowing—especially when navigating what lies beyond the limits of our own perspectives.
 

Tessa Berg is a researcher and educator at in Computing Science at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland specializing in system design using visual methods of inquiry.
 

Tracey Bowen is an educational researcher at the University of Toronto Mississauga.