Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education July 2019. Vol 18 (2): 1–24. doi:10.22176/act18.2.1 © Peter Gouzouasis. 2019. The content of this article is the sole responsibility of the author. The ACT Journal and the Mayday Group are not liable for any legal actions that may arise involving the article's content, including, but not limited to, copyright infringement. What are ABER and CAP? Peter Gouzouasis, Guest Editor The introduction to this special issue is written in a storied manner to ready the reader for the unique, storied forms of research that follow. I wholeheartedly suggest that readers not read the abstracts of the each paper first, but delve directly into the stories and engage with the music and media. These papers are not intended as a definitive collection of arts based educational research and creative analytical practices in music and music education. Ra- ther, this special issue is a beginning—an opening—that represents where we are in 2019, as a profession, in our understandings and applications of contemporary forms of qualita- tive research. Keywords: arts based educational research (ABER), creative analytical practices (CAP), au- toethnography, creative non-fiction, life stories, music, a/r/tography This turn toward practical philosophy takes up several ideas. It means (a) that conceptions of the aim of social inquiry are now being shaped not by the demand for a “neutral, objectifying science of human life and action” (Taylor 1987, 472) or for episteme but by the search for a better understanding of praxis; (b) that the kind of investigation required here must attend to both ethical and political concerns (ethical because praxis [action] is defined by habits, modes of thought, customs, and mores and political because action is public and is concerned with our lives in the polis; Bernstein 1991)… (Schwandt 1996, 62) n 1978, William Pinar began his landmark paper “What is the Reconceptual- ization?” in the first issue of the Journal of Curriculum Theory with the com- ment, “I’m not going to answer that question.” Like my colleague, who has an office down the hall from mine, I’m not going to answer the question posed in the title of this introduction. But I can guide readers to literature that can help them develop understandings and facilitate their own journeys into these forms of in- quiry. The three years prior to the turn of the new millennium, Barone and Eisner (1997) wrote a landmark paper in which they theorized and demonstrated a new way of thinking about using artistically shaped lenses in empirical forms of I