Este trabalho apresenta uma autoetnografia em diálogo com os artistas que participaram da ópera coreográfica: \"Aniversário e Morte de Queen Mary II\", no NUO-Ópera Laboratório. Portanto, o objetivo desta investigação é descrever, narrar, contextualizar e situar o processo desta obra concebida especialmente para o NUO-Ópera Lab. Faremos isso, a partir das memórias dos artistas, que participaram, e de material audiovisual, trazendo as falas dos autores integrantes do NUO-Ópera Lab. que não são narradores/depoentes/produtores de dados/interlocutores da pesquisa, mas, assinam a autoria desse trabalho conosco. Os processos práticos/reflexivos desta obra artística e deste texto nos levam a acreditar que a ópera tem várias camadas. E são nessas muitas camadas que a riqueza da ópera habita. Não é nem o texto, nem a música, nem a dança, mas sim, a ação que está nesta amálgama. A ópera é o teatro da ação, na perspectiva do transgênero. Passamos a entender o que é ópera e como se dá a direção em ópera, através do processo transdisciplinar que acontece no NUO-Ópera Lab. Esse processo como um todo, artístico reflexivo, proporcionou turning points pessoais, ou seja, cada integrante envolvido no processo achou insights pessoais, dando sentidos e significados próprios; e turning points grupais, coisas que foram mais gerais e coletivas. / This Masters work introduces an autoethnography in connection to all artists who have participated on the opera choreography entitled \"Anniversary and Death of Queen Mary II\", which was performed at NUO-Opera Laboratory. Therefore, the aim of this research is to describe, narrate, contextualize and situate the process under the aforementioned opera work especially developed to NUO-Opera Lab. Herein, we will achieve this objective by bringing artists memories who were part of the personnel in the play and all audiovisual material enlightening all the author\'s lines who belonged to NUO-Opera Lab, who were not narrators / deponents / data producers / research interlocutors, but who share the authorship of this paper with us. The practical and reflexive processes of that artistic play and also this paper lead us to believe that opera has several layers. And it is in those many layers in where the opera\'s treasure lives. It is neither in the text, nor in the music or dance, but the action that is in this amalgam instead. An opera is the action of a theatrical play from the perspective of transgender. As a result, we start understanding what opera is and how the direction of an opera occurs at NUO-Opera Lab. This process as a whole, artistic reflexive, afforded personal turning points, i.e. each member of the play involved in this process had found personal insights, opening to self senses and meanings, while the group\'s turning points resulted into a more general and shared the ones.

The aim of this dissertation is to develop and illustrate a spiritually centered narrative method for transforming disorder into agency and action. I use my own position as a second-generation Hispanic female immigrant to show how training in a spiritual practice that mirrors my ancestral traditions helped me productively move through a sense of displacement, illness, and lack of purpose. My research includes travel to Havana, Cuba, and immersion in a five-week shamanic counseling training program in Tampa, Florida, during which I learned how to narrate my experiences as I engaged in shamanic journeying. As I reflect on these experiences, I explore three questions: How can second-generation immigrants 1) overcome family histories of displacement to create a sense of home? 2) engage in self-care practices that promote healing and nourishing relationships? and 3) create healthy identities and a sense of purpose within their communities? Through the process of writing my own story, I move from individual pathology toward communal creativity and tap into the burgeoning activist movement of bruja feminism.

Gay identity is inextricably tied to the metaphor of the closet. This tie is best exemplified by the act of "coming out of the closet," an act when a person discloses a gay identity to another, an act of self-identification and confession that others can motivate but never force, an act typically thought of as necessary, dangerous, and consequential, and an act often viewed as a discrete, linear process. Gay identity is also frequently framed as a self-contained trait thus making coming out a one-sided, personal affair. In this project, I use autoethnography and narrative inquiry, life story interviews of four gay men, life writings by gay men, mass mediated accounts of the closet, and my personal experience to describe three epiphanies-interactional moments that significantly change the trajectory of a person's life-of gay identity: (1) "Learning the Closet," a moment when a person first becomes familiar with the metaphorical space; (2) "Living the Closet," a moment when a person privately acknowledges a gay identity but publicly discounts this identity by saying and acting as if it does not exist; and (3) "Leaving the Closet," a moment when a person discloses gay identity to others. I conclude by describing the "double-bind of gay identity"-the dilemma that forms when a person cannot escape the closet-and argue that once a person identifies as gay, the closet becomes a formative influence on her/his life; a gay person can never live outside of the metaphorical space again, can never live as an out gay person everywhere. I also use a relational perspective to understand how gay identity and the disclosure of this identity implicate others in a gay person's social network. A relational perspective removes gay identity it from the individualistic realm and situates it among beings-in-interaction. In so doing, the experience of the closet becomes removed from the exclusive burden of the self-contained gay person to one in which coming out becomes a shared responsibility by all individuals involved in a relationship.

My project is centered around a community garden in Upland, California called the People and Their Plants garden. This garden represents a five hundred year living history designed to show the changes in the ecological landscape of Southern California caused by colonization. This autoethnographic thesis works towards personal, interpersonal, and community-wide decolonization through building reciprocal relationships with Indigenous Elders. I explore, critique and problematize research and ethnography by examining the politics of knowledge, language, history, and ecology. I interrogate my own learned knowledge systems as well as colonial/capitalist food systems—and recognize how those systems/relations have worked to render Indigenous ways of knowing as invisible. Furthermore, I examine the connection between colonialism, gender, and capitalist food systems. I explain how the People and Their Plants garden is an act of resistance to colonial/capitalist food systems as it creates space for alternative economic practices and decolonial food practices. As part of this project, I co-authored a brochure about the garden with a Tongva Elder.

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 autoethnography uses narrative inquiry within an anticolonial theoretical framework. As a White Italian male settler living on Turtle Island, I bring survivor experience to psychiatric definitions of “psychosis,” or what I call psychosic narrative, and to broader literatures for the purpose of decolonizing “mental” relations. Using reflexive critiques, including feminist antiracism, I question my own privileges as I consider the possibilities of Mad culture to disturb authorizations of practices like forced electroshock and drugging. Using journals, salient themes of experience are identified, including “delusion,” “psychosis,” “madness,” and “illness,” especially as they appear in texts about politics, culture, and theory. A temporally rigorous narrative approach to my readings allows for a self-reflexive writing on such themes in relation with antiracist anticolonial resistance. Thus a White psychiatric survivor resistance to psychiatry and its social (local) history is related to the problematic of global Western neoliberal heteropatriarchy in psychological institutional texts. Survivor testimonies bring critical madness and disability theories as they pertain to racialization and constructions of sex/uality and gender. Rather than present a comprehensive analysis, this narrative inquiry is generated from the process of research as it was experienced in order to represent and question its epistemological grounds.

A reliance on a teacher-centered model of instruction presented the foundation for my research. I chose to investigate constructivist theory and to implement constructivist teaching practices within my art education classroom to determine if constructivist teaching practices would facilitate a shift to a more student-centered learning environment, and to determine if constructivist strategies positively impact student learning. I collected my raw data using autoethnographic recording, documenting my results over a two month period in January and February of 2007 from my experiences as an art educator at a public, Metro-Atlanta elementary school. A positive impact on student learning was observed and the constructivist teaching strategies did produce student-centered learning environments. Based on my experiences constructivist teaching strategies may be beneficial to the creation of student-centered learning environments and assist in broadening student inquiry and investment with lessons.

This is an autoethnographic account of my 1000km journey across The Camino Via de la Plata, framed within transpersonal theory. From my personal account of a peak experience on The Way, this spiritual inquiry attempts to connect myself and the reader to insights into transformation and living through embodied writing while contributing to the exploration of personal flourishing and growth in leisure studies. This process involved moving into and through Romanyshyn’s (2007) six orphic moments found in re-search processes with soul in mind. I then unfold my journey along the Camino and deepen this inquiry by engaging literature that help to explore spiritual aspects of my journey on the Camino. Leisure inquiry frames this transpersonal peak experience in a number of ways: it is an act of empowerment (Arai, 1997), focal practice (Arai & Pedlar, 2000), resistance (Shaw, 2001, 2007), and an experience of liminality (Cody, 2012) with transformation occurring at the flux of it all.

The mention of the term “summer camp” often brings to mind cabins nestled in the woods, cool lakes, warm campfires and children having fun as they swim, paddle and play. At traditional residential camps children are imagined to revel in their freedom, overcome challenges, make long lasting friendships and develop into skilled and competent young people. How much of this imagery, however, is based upon a societal discourse constructed by adult values? How often do the actual experiences match these ideals? This study explores the issue of adult driven discourses surrounding the experience of camp by comparing the perspective of camp directors with the description of one of the author’s own childhood experiences. Using narrative techniques, the author composed two distinct descriptions of the camp experience including programmatic, social and emotional elements. The comparison of these two narratives revealed the possibility for distinct differences between the adult perception of the experience and how it may actually be experienced by a child. The areas of difference centred around both social and programming elements of camp participation which, when considered together, suggest the need for children to adjust to a distinctly different social setting in order to achieve the positive experiences reflected in our cultural conceptualization of summer camp.

The mention of the term “summer camp” often brings to mind cabins nestled in the woods, cool lakes, warm campfires and children having fun as they swim, paddle and play. At traditional residential camps children are imagined to revel in their freedom, overcome challenges, make long lasting friendships and develop into skilled and competent young people. How much of this imagery, however, is based upon a societal discourse constructed by adult values? How often do the actual experiences match these ideals? This study explores the issue of adult driven discourses surrounding the experience of camp by comparing the perspective of camp directors with the description of one of the author’s own childhood experiences. Using narrative techniques, the author composed two distinct descriptions of the camp experience including programmatic, social and emotional elements. The comparison of these two narratives revealed the possibility for distinct differences between the adult perception of the experience and how it may actually be experienced by a child. The areas of difference centred around both social and programming elements of camp participation which, when considered together, suggest the need for children to adjust to a distinctly different social setting in order to achieve the positive experiences reflected in our cultural conceptualization of summer camp.