Eldora, Neethi and Seraphina are three young women who work as science interpreters at a large metropolitan museum. Each woman began her tenure at the age of 15, as part of an employment program for low-income and minority youth, and have since grown to become leaders within the program. Using autoethnography (Ellis, 2004) and portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot and Hoffman Davis, 1997), I explore the rich cultures and histories that each woman brings to her work, present stories that counter the dominant deficit narratives around diversity in informal science education, and reflect on connections to my own practice. Through a critical pedagogy framework (McLaren, 2009; Kincheloe, 2008), I analyze power and privilege within the institution, and the roles that race, language, and culture play in the dynamics of the workplace. This includes examination of workplace microaggressions, physical barriers to cross-cultural interaction, and technocratic ideologies that limit advancement and sense of belonging. From facing subtle acts of racism to taking on life-changing opportunities for growth, I examine the complex relationships that the women have with the institution, and explore ways that they are becoming agents of change. / Ph. D.

This study explores teacher retention and teacher resilience in the United States through the stories of five teachers. The researcher presents the research in two manuscripts. Finding My Way through Teaching: A Critical Autoethnographic Play combines critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970) with autoethnography (Ellis, 2004) to examine the author's personal journey as a teacher in a private school, a public school, and a public school in Central America. The research is presented as a one-act play with scenes focusing on conversations with parents, principals, and students, along with scenes examining each situation that take the audience through the internal monologue of the researcher's decision making process to move schools, stay in a school, leave a school, and question their ability or willingness to return to K-12 schooling. Building Relationships: The Stories of Four Small Urban School Teachers shares the stories of four veteran elementary school teachers, teachers who have taught for more than five years, from Parker City Public Schools. This study uses a case study approach with recorded dialogic interviews as data (e.g., Kvale, 1996; Marshall and Rossman, 2011). The stories the teachers tell point to the importance of building and maintaining relationships with students, other teachers, and administration, as one of the key factors for overcoming the challenges of working in a small urban school division and one of the key factors for changing schools or remaining in a school throughout their careers. / Ph. D.

This dissertation seeks to examine the obstacles and experiences of a Black female charter school leader using an Africentric approach to educating Black children, and ways in which social and material inequalities may have shaped her journey. A conceptual framework that blends African-centered pedagogy, African womanism, and transformational leadership is used to guide this qualitative autoethnographic study. Use of the autoethnographic method provides an opportunity to examine the relational dynamics of the experiences of this Black female charter school leader in the cultural context of the Black community and neoliberal education. Data analysis is captured from autobiographical storytelling within three key time periods or epochs of her 17-year experience starting, operating, and closing a charter school. Data analysis includes coding based on themes that emerged from the data collection process. Findings indicate how attempts to implement an African-centered approach to educating Black children in a DC charter school in the U.S. Eurocentric education model in the neoliberal era was compromised by neoliberal policies, particularly high-stakes testing, a history of separate and unequal education, the lack of support for African-centered education, and the lack of access to facilities. These findings also support the need to continue to examine how non-European children can be educated, not just schooled, in a manner that places them at the center of their learning, builds agency, and develops them into creative and critical thinkers and future builders.

Master of Arts / Department of Communications Studies / Sarah E. Riforgiate / At 47 years old, Lori is a high-functioning businesswoman, matriarch, and contributing member of society. Lori is also diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). From age 3, Lori was violently raped and assaulted by several perpetrators, yet views her multiple personalities as strength, as survival mechanisms, and wants to share her story to help prevent child sexual abuse. Utilizing methods drawn from communication studies, ethnodrama, and autoethnography, this study aims to tell a person’s story in her own words and in a format that can easily be shared with both academic and non-academic audiences. Lori’s story is woven together as an ethnodramatic play that includes original interview transcripts along with an autoethnographic monologue describing the experience of writing someone’s truth when it challenges the hegemonic views of society, and instead embraces the feminist ideals of equality and deconstruction of power. Academic research needs to reach further than academic journals to make a true impact. Through the non-conventional venues of autoethnography and ethnodrama, we can breathe life into our research and provide accessibility to innovative information for those who may need it most.

This dissertation offers my personal exploration of the loss of my father through the eyes of multiple selves. Utilizing an arts-inspired autoethnographic narrative case study approach, I detail my journey of meaning making as I explore my personal transitions and self-discovery in the face of my bereavement, while also uncovering the potential for growth and development within my relationship with my dad. Throughout this dissertation, I incorporate a variety of mediums to capture the essence of the experience of my filial bereavement. Through this synthesis of form, it is my goal to invite witnesses to enter my experience, to have the opportunity to explore a different way of knowing by being able to look through the eyes of my multiple experiencing selves and their presentation of emotion, thought, and behaviour. Through blending of genre, this study provides a unique way of exploring a lived experience. It is meant to provide a specific view of a broad topic from multiple angles. Though it is situated within my personal bereavement, a daughter’s loss of her father, and inevitably my story will demonstrate the cultural influence of my Canadian background, it also aims to touch on aspects of the universality of loss, of bereavement, and what it means to be alive.

Thesis (MBA)--Stellenbosch University, 2014. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The author is an Afrikaans-speaking, white male person, who was previously an extreme, selfdeclared racist. The author was also a member of an elite unit in one of the right-wing political organisations, which resulted in being author arrested during the 1994 National South African elections. The author transformed from being an extreme self-declared racist to become a person who respects and appreciate racial diversity. The author conducted a reflective autoethnographic study from his personal life experiences, which is complemented with critical feedback from people whom the author holds in high esteem. Feedback was gathered in order to identify the transformation process, which the author experienced in the quest of becoming an authentic leader. The aspects identified in the transformation process enabled the author to understand what is required in the future to become a truly authentic, value-based leader. This research study could assist white Afrikaans-speaking people and the broader community of South African people to transform towards acceptance and appreciation of racial diversity.

The following autoethnographic study highlights the perceptions of a Southern, White male teacher, at times experiencing bouts of depression and anxiety, in the predominantly White rural high school community he both lives and works. The researcher- teacher utilizes critical reflection, self-imposed transportation theory, and arts-based research to unravel these perceptions and to enhance his autobiographical findings. The intent of this research was to uncover one predominantly White Southern High School community’s actions and thoughts through the eyes of someone not born and established in the community. Another intent was to give a White male further perspectives into his biography, his attitudes of racism, prejudice, and inequality, and further understanding into the underlying causes of depression that bound his experiences in one place. The findings exposed and confirmed hegemonic control of the predominantly White rural high school community and attitudes towards new residents without established ties to the community. It also revealed evidence of isolated acts of racism and inequities within the rural high school community. Furthermore, the study revealed that critical reflection and self-imposed transportation theory, while at times dangerous for the teacher-researcher experiencing depression or anxiety, none-the-less, is effective for unleashing possible ties that bind both depression and anxiety to original perceptions made within the community.

Canada has distinct contemporary faith communities that differ from western and European counterparts. Unfortunately statistics tracking denominational allegiances give little insight into the daily intricacies of collective religious practice. The purpose of this study is to contribute towards filling a gap within scholarly research on the lived culture and experiences of contemporary religious communities within Canada. This study examines the pattern of culture-sharing within a non-denominational faith community as lived and practiced in Ottawa. Through autoethnography, this study asks why members attend and how members view the use of popular culture video clips within church. Individual and collective religious identities are constructed through observations, interviews and material artifacts gleaned through participant observation from January 2011 to December 2011. The results show that within the church, a community of practice is built around shared parenthood and spiritual journey. Members place importance on children, on providing support of all kinds for one another, and on keeping religion relevant. Reasons for attending are echoes of the patterns of culture-sharing: members enjoy the feeling of community, the support, the friendships, the play dates. Participants view popular culture video clips played within church as one aspect of an overall importance placed upon relevance. Mutuality of engagement results in members experiencing their lives as meaningful, it validates their worth through belonging, and it creates personal histories of becoming within the context of a community of practice. Future research recommendations include further study of other contemporary faith communities within Canada, with investigation into the possibility that communities of practice may be what the churched and unchurched are seeking.

This thesis develops a new way of engaging emotion in a large organisation and develops a new form of organisational practice entitled “Reflective Emotional Practitioning.” The thesis argues that the concept of emotional intelligence as accepted in organisations represses rather than embraces emotion. The conceptual framework centres the inquiry on the problem of organisational power as an obstacle to the creative harnessing of emotion at work. The thesis reverses the organisations’ centralised power by placing the individual at the centre so that the individual learns to reflect upon and embrace emotion in collective and self inquiry, and demonstrates how this may lead to creative and ethical work. The thesis is divided into two parts: in the first, the author carried out action research workshops on emotional intelligence and performance management, but it became clear that power was an issue, repressing emotions. But through reflection this became a turning point after the author engaged in deep self-reflection in meditative supervisions, writing and reflective practice. This enabled the author to process experience into a methodological shift towards a self-ethnography and research action applied to the work situation in what became called Reflective Emotional Practitioning (REP). The REP model was used as a tool to venture further on a visceral pathway, uncovering the author’s relationship with emotion. The author began to recognise that the self and the other could be held in reflexive practice and writing. In the second part evidence comes through further vignettes representing the author’s pathway and shone a light on a dialogical process between the self and others. Freedom and space were revealed and the research began to demonstrate the inner- and outer-selves working through emotion. Through this process emotion became conceptualised as “felt energy”. Felt energy was triggered by the outer world, but also a place of knowing from which further action could be taken, and then further reflected upon. The reflexive writing process used vignettes to illustrate how emotion was engaged, fed back and stored as a “return to the self” in a continual learning process. Through illuminating a new way of both conceptualising and working with emotions, the author shows how, over several years of reflective practice, the method underpinned some major innovative and sustainable work projects. The thesis concludes by defining the contribution of this research as a transferable approach that can engage emotion in self-empowered actions within an organisation’s power regime. The contribution is to both methodology and knowledge about the way emotion is experienced, used and conceptualised, although the author acknowledges and discusses the difficulty of producing knowledge through writing the self, particularly within the confines of a large public sector organisation. However, the struggle to write the self has produced a rich text that conveys the possibilities of transferring the approach for other organisational researchers and reflective practitioners engaging emotion in their different personal and organisational contexts.

By exploring how my/a tattooed body functions as becoming through the concept of bodies without organs (BwO), this work pushes the edges of qualitative inquiry. Following St. Pierre’s call to deconstruct the concepts on which qualitative research is built, this inquiry troubles the I/we of authorship and linear meaning making as it examines the tattooed body functioning as becoming a BwO. The nodal ethnography is a Deleuzo-Guattarian-based methodological inquiry in which interruptions and layers of narrative are used to create spaces for conversation between my multinodes. The tattoos on my semipermeable corporeal flesh tell multilayered stories that are constantly moving and shifting, and I (re)make meaning of these stories within, amongst, and between the nodes that constitute this disorganized body while approaching the limits of a BwO, always in progress, becoming. There is no beginning or end, only a middle, made up of lines that can be read in any order, as linearity does not live here. The Laminar Express iPhone/iPad photography application allowed for the layering of images, text, and color to rupture and even to distort the lines of ink on my body as a plane of representation adds yet another collaborative space to have dialogue(s); thus offering endless possibilities for the nodes of my ethnography to be (re)connected and (re)produced. My tattooed body evokes response from my multiselves as well as from others; ergo, I invite the reader to become a co-collaborator of this nodal ethnography, and to take lines of flight with/in this experimental space of what may appear when tattoos/images/multinodes/selves and storied lines of inked/textured text collide with Deleuzo-Guattarian theory in exploring my tattooed skin as becoming a BwO.