This auto-ethnographic study focuses on Houston’s art car community and the grassroots movement’s 25 year relationship with the city through an art form that has created a sense of community. Art cars transform ordinary vehicles into personally conceived visions through spectacle, disrupting status quo messages of dominant culture regarding automobiles and norms of ownership and operation. An annual parade is an egalitarian space for display and performance, including art cars created by individuals who drive their personally modified vehicles every day, occasional entries by internationally renowned artists, and entries created by youth groups. A locally proactive public has created a movement has co-opted the cultural spectacle, creating a community of practice. I studied the events of the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art’s Art Car Weekend to give me insight into art and its value for people in this community. Sources of data included the creation of a participatory art car, journaling, field observation, and semi-structured interviews. The first part is my academic grounding, informed by critical pedagogy and socially reconstructive art practices. The second part narrates my experiences and understandings of the community along with the voices of others. Dominant themes of exploration include empowerment, community, and art. I examine the purposes for participation by artists, as well in the practices of audiences and organizations that provide support for this art form. My findings have significant implications community-based art education and k-12 classroom educators. Relational and dialogic approaches to making art, teaching, and researching are tied to problem-posing education as a recommendation for art education.

What constitutes an artistic community? Why do people come together and form a group to make art despite all the sacrifices that they need to make in terms of time, space, and resources? (Why) Do we need Community (and) Theatre? This paper is about an interpretive and auto-ethnographic field research about a local community theatre, The Stage Company, in Carbondale, Illinois. It aims to demonstrate how theatre can be a bridge between community and self and lead them to come closer, change and grow by challenging each other. It provides an extensive description of The Stage Company by focusing on the cultural and performative features of the community theatre and the individual experiences of the company members as well as the journey of the ethnographer in conducting the research. How might a `community theatre' function in the lives of its members within a particular socio-cultural context and why would a researcher, who is a cultural, ethnic, and lingual other in the field, choose to spend a year with that community theatre? What does she find and learn about the various definitions of the concept of the community theatre, the features of community theatre culture in US, the place of The Stage Company within the theoretical definition of community theatre, the role of The Stage Company in the lives of its members and the role of this research in the ethnographer's life in terms of finding her own future path in relation to theatre and community?

Cooking is mind, body, spirit work. What’s possible when we ‘drop in’ to our bodies when cooking? We begin noticing what we are energetically bringing to the food we make. This creative project practices a pedagogy that works with food to create healing space. Healing, as it is defined here, is not void of discomfort nor is it happiness all the time. Who haunts your domestic space? Who is at your back when you cook? This project finds information and sacred knowledge in the food we cook and eat; it reflects back to us deeply buried truths regarding our traumas, joys, and subjectivity. This pedagogy holds the potential for participants to bring “new meanings” to food, and thereby, be activated as cultural producers cooking up the next chapter in our peoples’ creation stories (Anzaldúa 103). This project is documented as an auto-ethnographic tale from the perspective of the practitioner, using erotic storytelling to keep fire in the pages and a methodology of refusal to “determine the length of the [academy’s] gaze” (Tuck and Ree 640).

As a major project, this work studies the spoken word genre as a response to, and interpretation of, oppression and examine my own spoken word performance through the lens of narratology, narrative-making and auto-ethnography. This project is composed of two parts: a full-length spoken word performance and a curatorial analysis of this performance. While attempting to re-enact the trauma of oppression, this performance dually recognizes the impossibility within the task. Maurice Blanchot writes in The Writing of the Disaster, “The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the very possibility of experience- it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de- scribes.” This project aims to perform the places of de-scription. In poems detailing experiences of trauma, racism, misogyny, and relationships, this spoken word performance will offer an account of the subject for whom the act of narration is subversive. In this, the performance is self-aware and self-reflective; it communicates experiences for which the language to describe such experiences is either unavailable or nonexistent. The continuous theme of ‘home’ is maintained throughout the performance- how its absence marks the absence of the oppressed subject, how its absence implies the absence of language for the subject, and how spoken word can begin the outlining of a narrative, a foundation, for the subject. My accompanying curatorial paper will examine similar themes. As spoken word is an art form deeply linked to activism, my paper will begin with an analysis of how this art has taken place, what its role has been in community development, and how it continues to function as a teaching tool. My paper argues that spoken word is instrumental in tying learning to voice; by offering young people a medium that both gives them a forum to voice the issues directly impacting their lives, while giving them a means of developing skills in language, presentation and communicating ideas effectively, spoken word acts as a unique and important teaching tool. / Thesis (Master, Cultural Studies) -- Queen's University, 2014-01-07 02:07:39.286

The purpose of this auto-ethnographic and art-based study is to examine how the experiences throughout my life have influenced my practice as an artist. It is within the context of a socially constructed past and present place that I will explore my own process in terms of collaboration and the implications for an artist-teacher, or teaching artist. I reflect upon how my values and philosophy as an art educator have been formed from the synthesis of my experiences. My relationships with a gallery, its clients, and a fellow artist provide the context for reflecting about my process and gaining insights into my potential role as a model and influence on my future students.

M. Phil. (Personal, Interpersonal and Professional Leadership) / Orientation: Personal experience of the phenomenon of transcendence and a preliminary literature review indicates that the phenomenon of transcendence can be better integrated within the Personal, Interpersonal and Professional Leadership (PPL) framework as well as within other leadership theories. Research purpose: The aim of the study is to conceptualise transcendence within PPL and leadership in general using auto-ethnography research methodology. Motivation for the study: Current leadership literature within PPL does not include the integration of the phenomenon of transcendence as a model towards spirituality and leadership. This gap can contextualise spirituality and leadership through transcendence. Research design: The research approach within this study was based a postmodernist qualitative philosophy. Auto-ethnography was used as methodology and also included a life history of another person to verify the auto-ethnographic data. Main findings: The study yielded an auto-ethnographic story with a rich and varied description of how a person can experience transcendence within the personal leadership field. The analysis of the collected data has revealed themes that can possibly contribute towards spirituality and leadership. Practical implications: The findings of this study might bring insight into the human ability of transcendence despite difficulty or suffering, and that can contribute to spirituality and leadership. Anticipated contribution: The study provides some understanding of how a person can still develop into a leader despite difficulties or hardship. This understanding can contribute to leadership development interventions, which can also be explored further in future.

This thesis examines the relationship between art gallery postcards, subjectivities and domestic spaces. Feminist post-structuralist debates on memory, subjectivity and domestic spaces provide the theoretical framework for this research into taken-for-granted objects of the everyday. Empirical data came from interviewing nine women who buy, use and keep postcards and two New Zealand Art Gallery store managers. Some of the participants were interviewed more than once, while others extended their views by e-mail. Auto-ethnographic narrative is used to explore further the symbolic significance of an individual's postcard consumption. This research focuses attention on the production of gendered subjectivities and domestic spaces through an aesthetic artefact. There are three points to my analysis. Firstly, I argue paradoxically the under-noticed seemingly trivial gallery postcard becomes a memory holder and therefore a significant artefact of symbolic value. Memories are potent, elusive fragments that become attached to a sound, smell, touch or sight. Catching sight of a postcard can trigger a chain of memory associations, which in turn constructs a sense of self through the remembering. Secondly, I contend that subjectivity is understood as fluid and multiple, evolving out of experience and interpretation. Memories formed from experience and connections made with people, place and things become associated with gallery postcards and serve as a catalyst for personal narratives which in turn can operate as tools for constructing subjectivities. Finally I suggest that domestic spaces are a product of relations that can be understood as existing within and beyond the home. Stretched domestic space can be produced by the display of gallery postcards in office spaces. The exploration of the art gallery postcard adds to the knowledges of everyday objects and their role and significance in constructing gendered subjectivities and spaces.

Every weekend in the Society for Creative Anachronism, people from the far reaches of the globe leave behind the structures of their everyday lives, dress themselves in clothing from the Middle Ages, and construct medieval personae. Within a pastiche of fantastical and historical influences, participants create the “Middle Ages as they should have been,” a liminal space where they experience a temporary communitas. Through their participation in informal rituals and formal ceremonies, they celebrate each other’s successes and create a community—a utopia—in which courtesy and honor are the shared core values. In addition, through their performances, people access their creative potential and explore issues of identity. When the weekend is over, the participants return to their modern lives, and—for many—a residue of their temporary creative adaptation persists and contributes to a transformation of their person. Using my insight as a participant observer, this dissertation focuses on some of the elements that contribute to the process of community creation and personal transformation.

Thesis (MA (VA)(Visual Arts))--Stellenbosch University, 2008. / This thesis investigates social aspects of the production and distribution of artworks, approaching these from the context of the every-day life of the artist. Its main aim is to form a theoretical framework and personalised application of auto/ ethnography to enable the artist to study her own practice within a specific context. The thesis serves as a counterpart to the practical work that is expected of a Master of arts student at this particular university and in this department, the University of Stellenbosch, Department of Visual Arts. As such, it works in tandem with the practical component to posit an understanding of the artworks as they have been formed in a complex postmodern society. I, as the artist and writer, discuss my work by drawing from autobiographical experiences and theoretical frameworks as texts. Auto/ethnography, the chosen methodology, is informed by post-structuralism, Marxist and neo-Marxist theories and feminist discourses, among others. It calls for researchers to apply self-reflexivity in their practice and, hence, must include the situated position of the ‘I’ of the researcher, as this inevitably impacts on research findings. My writing on my art-making process becomes a form of ‘emergent’ research that studies the relationship between the self and the social. This takes place through the use of autobiographical texts and the above-mentioned theoretical frameworks, combined with relational and dialogical theories of art, and frameworks that study art production and distribution from sociological perspectives. I write myself as constituted within ideology and subject to societal structure, but also possessing agency. I write on my art as a product determined by my position in society; my intentions and aims for the artwork and considerations on how its distribution might affect me; and its function as a text that carries meanings that differ from those which I, at any given time, might ascribe to it. The framework in which I write on my art-making process also draws on complexity theory. Within this framework I approach the self as relational, society and the environment as a complex self-structuring process, and the meaning of text as created and re-created in a web of interactions, between the self (of the writer/artist and reader/viewer) and the society (as built up of different interrelating subsystems). Writing auto/ethnographically to produce an academic dissertation within this specific academic community can, I believe, serve as a means through which I can question my own objectivising claims, or claims that lie in theoretical and personal frameworks that I draw from. Implicit in this thesis is the question: how can an artist, working within the confines of an academic framework, ensure that an ethical component exists between the self and other in her working practice?

This research study explores how future educational and occupational aspirations are constructed by young Sikh adults. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten young Sikh adults, both their parents, and their teachers at one school in West London to investigate how future aspirations are constructed, which resources are employed, and why certain resources are used over others. In some previous research on aspirations and future choices, Sikhs have either been ignored or, instead, subsumed under the umbrella category of 'Asian' and this study seeks to address this. Furthermore, the study seeks to shed light on how British-Sikh identities are constructed and intersected by social class, caste and gender. This is important to explore since it can have an impact upon how young adults are structured by educational policy. A 'syncretic' social constructionist framework which predominantly draws upon Pierre Bourdieu's notions of habitus, capital and field, along with the cultural identity theories of Avtar Brah and Stuart Hall, is employed to investigate the construction of identities and aspirations. In addition, the study contains ethnographical elements as it is conducted on my 'own' Sikh group and at my former secondary school. Consequently, I brought a set of assumptions to the research which, rather than disregard, I acknowledge since they highlight how I come to form certain interpretations of phenomena over others.