Liminalia is a peer-reviewed journal of arts-based research. It publishes work in which artistic practice is the method of inquiry, alongside artistic work presented as work, and reflective writing on the conduct of arts-based inquiry.
The journal exists because this kind of research is poorly served by the article form it is usually asked to occupy. Studio inquiry gets reduced to an illustration of an argument made in prose elsewhere. Intermodal and performative work arrives as a description of something the reader cannot see. Journals in the surrounding fields are not hostile to arts-based research, but most were built around a research-article template settled before arts-based inquiry existed, and the template quietly does the deciding.
Liminalia is structured the other way round. Three sections carry three kinds of work through three review pathways, so that a painting, a methodological argument, and an account of a method that partly failed are each read on terms appropriate to them. The scope holds the therapeutic, pedagogical, and community settings in which arts-based research actually gets done.
Writing is pitched at graduate level and above. Readers are assumed to be at home in the field's methodological debates, and contributors are not asked to rehearse them. The readership is faculty, practitioner-researchers, doctoral and masters candidates, clinicians, and educators working across expressive arts, art therapy, and arts-based inquiry.
Liminalia is published by the Art & Possibility Society in partnership with the Vancouver Art Therapy Institute. It is open access, free to read and free to publish in, with no article processing charges.
Liminalia follows the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Core Practices.
Authors are responsible for the originality of submitted work, for accurate attribution of sources, for securing permissions to reproduce third-party material, and for disclosing anything that could be read as a competing interest. Submission of the same work to more than one journal at a time is not permitted.
Research involving people requires ethics approval from an appropriate body, and authors are asked to name the approving institution and the approval reference. Where a study was conducted as coursework or a thesis under institutional supervision, name the supervising institution's review process.
Work involving clients, patients, students, or community participants carries a further obligation. Authors must confirm that consent covers publication at the level of detail submitted, including any reproduction of participant-made artwork. Arts-based research reproduces work that participants made, and consent to participate in a study is not the same as consent to have one's painting printed in a journal. Where participant artwork appears, authors must state how consent for reproduction was obtained.
Reviewers treat submissions as confidential, declare conflicts, and decline where they cannot review fairly or on time.
Editors decide on the basis of the work's fit and quality, without regard to the author's institution, career stage, nationality, or personal characteristics.
Corrections and retractions. The journal issues corrections for substantive errors and retractions where findings are unreliable or ethical requirements were not met. Corrections and retraction notices are linked to the original article, which remains available with its status marked.
Allegations of misconduct should be sent to [EDITOR EMAIL]. The journal follows COPE flowcharts in investigating them, and will contact an author's institution where an allegation is substantiated.
Generative AI. Authors must disclose any substantive use of generative AI tools in the making of the work or the writing of the text, in the methods or in a note. AI systems cannot be listed as authors. Reviewers must not paste submitted manuscripts into external AI services, since doing so breaks confidentiality.