Psychological, sociological and feminist models of understanding domestic violence have contributed to the development of interventions that seek to raise awareness, keep women safe, and help them to create new lives for themselves and their families. Research literature has extensively paid attention to the ways in which women both live with and move away from domestic violence, documenting how they employ strategies of survival and resistance. The research methods employed to investigate domestic violence includes a range of quantitative and qualitative methods with particular emphasis placed upon enabling women to tell their stories in as authentic a way as possible. This thesis adds to the literature by considering how women construct what will be referred to as transitional stories of domestic violence, within which they imagine their future selves and develop the means to become what they hope for. The methodology used is original within the study of domestic violence in its synthesis of arts-based, feminist and participatory methods. The adopted epistemology sought to value the use of embodiment and imagination in the construction of knowledge, both of which are considered to be situated. The use of an arts-based method is chosen to enable a different way for women to tell their stories about their response to living with and transitioning away from domestic violence. The evaluation of this methodology shows that it is a valid form of enabling women to have the embodied subjectivity of their experiences and imagination witnessed in a way that complements the written and spoken word, whilst better allowing the physical and metaphorical quality of their stories to come to the foreground. Following a feminist agenda, attention is paid to the influence of gender upon the researcher’s findings, and upon the participants’ and researchers’ reflexive engagement with the research process. The research shows that the home has special significance for women as they transition away from domestic violence and plan for their future. The home becomes a physical manifestation and container for women’s hopes and fears for a harmonious future that often incorporates the desire for the return to the idea of a complete family. Relationships with family, friends and services are shown to be both enablers of women’s agency and resistance. Those same relationships are also shown to be capable of acting as barriers to women’s positive transitional journeys. The findings show that attention needs to be placed upon the appearance of women’s agency within the everyday tasks of creating and maintaining a home and managing relationships as they move away from domestic violence. The findings also point to the need for services to work harder on empowering women, both by adequately listening to the stories told about their pasts and hopes for the future, and by helping them to achieve their plans through challenging the limitations imposed by policies and economics.

Liminal space serves as a metaphor in defining the in-between places I feel as an artist/teacher and the in-between places I live in because of the intermixing of images from memory and daily life. As an artist embarking on a career as an educator, I have difficulty visually portraying my identity in my art and feel my future students will find it difficult to define who they are without proper guidance and knowledge of what could define a person. I will be a teacher who will not propose a concept or lesson to students without undertaking the project myself. Identity evolves and incorporates elements of where we live and what we see every day. The liminal, in-between, blurry, and distorted perceptions that define my identity are expressed through arts-based research, autoethnography, and mapping. In this research I create and connect paths that lead to a further definition of the artist/teacher.

Drawing loosely on feminist and post-human notions of learning as an “untamed” and “more-than-multiple” experience (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 154), I play with the use of Artistic Memoir as a method to explore my affectual experiences (Braidotti, 2002; Springgay, 2008) as a British Columbian, school-based Child and Youth Counsellor working as a visitor in the context of a shanti-school in Goa, India. Well practiced in traditionally Western paradigms of education, my intention is to move beyond my familiar understandings of what it means to be educated in North America to heighten awareness of intuitive forms of learning that arise in an encounter between intra-acting bodies, materials, and the agentic spaces between (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Understanding learning experiences as relational and enigmatic events, composed of rather than in the world, I engage with an inductive, intuitive and becoming-with process, exploring the emerging themes and entanglements of my presence in this Goan classroom as they grow out of a collection of child-driven, emergent art projects (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Mazzei, 2010). As I take on the implications of methodology and “data analysis” in post-qualitative research, I think with Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) constructions of maps, expressing my interpretation of these events with my own poetic and visual assemblages and navigating curiosities through Artistic Memoir. Thinking with philosophies of immanence (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), new materiality (Braidotti, 2002; Stewart, 2007) and the autobiographical nature of a/r/tography (Irwin, Beer, Springgay, Grauer, Xiong, Bickel, 2006), Artistic Memoir has unravelled as a nomadic method, giving my experiences and understandings of the projects a temporal body – a disjointed place for my data, fragments of my affectual reverberations with Goa, to momentarily settle. A fragmented and non-linear collection of poems, images, anecdotes and short stories, this composition begins from the middle and poses no end; its process is designed to stir up questions over answers. Through this method, my intention is to look into the “events of activities and encounters” with affective, arts-based education, “evoking transformation and change” in my experience with “data” and understanding of learning, being and knowing (Hultman & Taguchi, 2010, p. 535). / Graduate / 2018-05-01 / 0273 / 0727 / 0998 / a.berry089@gmail.com

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This study used Arts-based research and Narrative Inquiry to explore the rural-urban transition experiences of three high-achieving millennial gay men. Using Clandinin’s (2013) narrative commonplaces of temporality, sociality, and place as frames for understanding each participant’s individual story, the study utilized The Listening Guide (Gilligan, 2015) to illuminate participants’ experiences related to identity development, sense of community, queer migration, and authentic leadership development. In addition to the individual narratives, story threads or themes present in one, two, or all three narrative portraits were analyzed and discussed. The data also included found poetry and original poems written in the style of George Ella Lyon’s (1999) I Am From poem. The study examined the authentic leadership development of the participants and advanced arts-based research through a discussion of the personal, practical, and social justifications of the methodology broadly, and this study in particular. The significance of this study is directly related to the social justifications of theoretical contributions and a social justice orientation. By engaging in the research, the participants told their stories in this way for the first time and gave voice to their past experiences and illuminated the implications of these experiences on their current roles as junior faculty members and administrators in higher education. The narrative portraits and poetry serve as counter-narratives to those of white, straight men which are most often privileged in the academy and beyond. This study demonstrates the usefulness and rigor of using narrative methods to gather and share stories about 1) transitioning between rural and urban places, 2) the experiences of a subset of the millennial cohort and life-course development, 3) and the development of authentic leadership. Each participant expressed a passion and purpose for more socially just classrooms, campus environments, and community spaces, and each participant incorporated this purpose in his teaching, research, and practice in his own way. As more millennial gay men assume leadership positions in universities, board rooms, and city halls, ABR creates the potential capacity for a new generation of public leaderships to usher in societal shifts reflecting a changing America.

This is a study about how I produced a graphic novel to introduce a model of the self that is informed by complexity theory to an audience of comic book and graphic novel enthusiasts. Because this model of the self has the potential to preserve, extend, and/or reinforce character strengths that are operationalized as virtuous behavior, and that also function as inner resources in times of adversity, my study explores storytelling by sequential art as a communication method that some counselors and educators might use to counsel and educate large segments of popular culture. Also, more generally, I explore the possibility that productions combining entertainment and preventive information might have commercial value on their own and also improve wellbeing and increase embodied social capital without the need of traditional institutional funding. Under the theoretical frameworks of Complexity Theory and Poetic Logic, I combined Active Imagination, Narrative, Writing, Poetic, and Arts-based methods of inquiry, to research the literary and artistic forms by which I could create a compelling mythopoeic story to indirectly educate about the potential of the self. The results of this investigation show that the production of an instrument aiming at these goals can be completed, however, future studies are needed to assess the effectiveness of this production as a prevention tool and as a commercially viable product in the entertainment marketplace. While the results of this investigation are not generalizable, they may inspire other counselors and educators to communicate with larger audiences their expert knowledge of human nature as a form of preventive public counseling.

In this arts-based thesis for a Masters degree in art education, I explored the meaning of my artwork through a constructivist investigation. During the process of artist research and making artwork, I was able to push boundaries for my art and myself and I was able to discover what kind of artist I was and what meaning was behind my artwork. This process of research,questioning, reflective documentation, and discovery has provided new tools and styles for teaching my students how to find their own personal voice in their artwork.

The Hockney - Falco Thesis (THFT) refers to findings published by the artist, David Hockney, and his fellow collaborator, Dr. Charles M. Falco, University of Arizona Professor of Optical Sciences. THFT builds upon Hockney's theories first published in his book, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (2001, 2006), by further demonstrating how some Renaissance artists including, van Eyck, Lotto, and Caravaggio, used optics as tools for creating works of art.This arts-based case study reveals that Hockney and Falco's discoveries were significantly informed by their respective practices of art and imaging, and demonstrates why Falco's experiences with Hockney, specifically, has and continues to influence his scientific research practice. These findings support Sullivan's (2004, 2005, 2006) theory of art-practice as research and demonstrate that THFT has significant implications for research and instruction of art and visual culture education.

The Delphi method was used to investigate the use of dance and movement in knowledge dissemination by systematically accessing and synthesizing the knowledge of researchers and dancers who have used this particular artistic method. The expert panel included three researchers (two also identifying as dancers) who had used dance as a tool to disseminate research findings in formal research. Two rounds of online Delphi questionnaires were used to generate data. The study’s findings included several categories of consensus reached amongst participants: (a) using dance for the purposes of knowledge dissemination is complex, time-consuming, and requires expertise, (b) dance is a useful and valid means for disseminating research findings both in qualitative and quantitative projects, (c) movement and dance are common to all humans, provide a common base or means for interaction, and provide a legitimate way of knowing, expressing knowledge and concepts either differently or sometimes better than language, (d) dance is not appropriate to use in all research projects and there is no singular procedure, (e) dance evokes emotional, visceral, and embodied responses that cannot be predicted, and (f) researchers ethical care and responsibility exceeds typical considerations and extends to others members such as the dancers and audience members. Differences of opinion arose about researchers’ ethical responsibilities associated with level of care for audience members when using dance as a knowledge dissemination strategy. The current study’s findings extend knowledge and understanding about the use of dance in research dissemination, and have implications for future research and research practice.

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