Honouring the artistry in qualitative social work research

It is with great gratitude that I have accepted an Associate Editor position at Qualitative Social Work thanks to the belief the other Editors have in me, a non-traditional academic and writer. I currently work part-time as a teaching focussed academic at Curtin University in the isolated city of Perth,Western Australia. The rest of my time I run a counselling centre where I work in private practice as a child and family therapist, specialising in Family Court referred families. As a joyful contrast, I also engage in gender diversity counselling with children, young people, and their families. My journey into social work research has been a convoluted one, as I previously sawmyself as a creative writer first, however once I realised that creativity could be encapsulated within qualitative research, I was hooked! If I think back to the pathway to my love affair with words, it probably began in a much more simplistic form. That of the note thrown across the room in class where short, coded sentiments were secretly passed backwards in forwards in a type of exchange, not that dissimilar to a semi-structured interview, where a topic (usually a love interest) was examined and explored, and thoughts, feelings, and beliefs were sought and offered. I have kept somany of those notes, and perhaps one day I’ll consider coding and analysing them to consider how adolescent identities have shifted (or not). This is only one of many ideas that stem from awell of late-night thoughts! After all, qualitative research asks or even demands, that we innovate and expand the ‘known’ way of doing research. My first attempt at research was in my first year of my social work degree, where we had to choose a specific cohort of people to conduct an ethnography with. My nineteen-year-old self chose ‘boys who lived at boarding school’ as the subjects for my ethnography. I have no idea how that passed any form of ethics, but in all honesty, I found it fascinating. Conducting the interview in situ was eye-opening, as I sat with male students and asked them to open up about their boarding school experiences. To my amazement, they divulged and shared secrets, joys, pain, heartache, and some very entrenched patriarchal views. That was the beginning of my desire to challenge, expose, reveal, or unfurl ideas that may otherwise remain hidden. It felt as though interviewing those boys allowed them to see alternatives to