Putting Things Together: To Interviewing as Creative Practice

This introduction sets out the theme of the special issue, which, via various essays and interviews with practitioners, explores the concept of interviewing as a creative practice. In the field of literary studies and art history, interviews are increasingly recognized as a valid object of research—and even a literary genre in their own right. At the same time, in the social sciences, questions are being raised concerning the usefulness of interviewing methods in an era of big data. Within the domain of qualitative research, there has been a turn toward using interviews as the starting point for innovative—collaborative and creative—research practices. This introduction reflects on the implications of such shifts from the vantage point of various literary and cultural perspectives to consider the ways in which interviewing has been used to create new ways of thinking and seeing.