<p>John, it is October, 2001. The U.S. has just occupied Afghanistan, and you’re happy about that, but you’re only twelve years old, too young to act on any nationalistic impulses. In your eighth grade yearbook at age fourteen, you’ll write in your third person biography that someday you hope to be an author and a U.S. Marine. When you’re nineteen, you’ll enlist in the Marines, and then join the occupation of Afghanistan at age twenty-one, from which you’ll return home safely. Now you’re twenty-three and you’re going back to school, mature enough to understand the complicit nature of your involvement in Operation Enduring Freedom. By the time you reach grad school at age twenty-seven, you’ll begin to feel a nagging guilt, and you’ll bear the full impact of this guilt by the time you turn thirty and begin writing your thesis. You’ll want to write a book reflecting your experience in a real-life war, describing what it was like to be there, and what it was like to be a part of something that people had forgotten about before you were even old enough to participate. Instead of reporting the facts, which you will do on many occasions throughout your book-length project entitled <i>The Militia House</i>, you’ll write about the experience as a haunting. John, if this manuscript reaches your hands in 2001 via some means of time travel, I want you to know that you’ll have accomplished your goals, but at a significant cost. Even though you will survive the war, you’ll leave a part of yourself in Afghanistan forever. But perhaps even worse, a piece of Afghanistan will come back with you to live inside of your body and your mind, and it will haunt you for the rest of your life.</p>

This doctoral project challenges the conventions of academic enquiry that, by default, still largely shape the procedures of practice-based PhDs. It has been submitted in the form of a ‘thesis by performance’ - a thesis that can only be realized through live readings that present knowledge production as something done in and around bodies and their contexts. The aim has been to reposition institutional and educational knowledge in an intimate, subjective relationship with the body, particularly the researchers own body. The ideas gathered together in this ‘thesis by performance’ address the body and its context using material that was sometimes appropriated, sometimes invented and sometimes autobiographically constructed. From the start, these approaches and sources were used to directly address those listening in the present, the ‘now’ in which words were spoken. An approach influenced by feminist thinkers in the arts, Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, Katrina Palmer and Linda Stupart. The methodological development of the research has been entirely iterative – developed through the making and presenting of performance texts. Each text was presented live as part of mixed-media installations, experimenting with how language and voice can be visualised and choreographed. Consequently, the resulting ‘thesis by performance’ is a doctoral submission unimpeded by a printed script - only an introductory statement and two appendices are available outside of a live reading. In this way the process of performance can inspire new terms of reference in the field of postgraduate practice-led research entirely on its own terms.

This thesis interrogates the various constructions of the gendered body within the rebooted Doctor Who (1963- ). To do this, this thesis contends that Doctor Who occupies something of a contradictory position with regard to gender and the body, seemingly acknowledging the need for equality and feminism as ‘common sense’ whilst simultaneously denying true realisation of these aims by retreat to universal (patriarchal) concepts of goodness, humanity, and benevolence. In addition to this, whilst, at present, our definitions of the gendered body appear to be becoming ever more fluid and abstract, something that is aided by the increasing encroachment of technology in our everyday lives, there remains a limit to this bodily fluidity, a limit heavily informed by recourse to the ‘natural’ and, therefore, the ‘acceptable’. Science fiction’s interest in the body is clear and well documented; science fiction landscapes are frequently populated by bodies that have been mutated, enhanced and cloned. Hence, there is scope for a mutually beneficial discourse between theoretical constructions of the body, evolving technology and science fiction narratives, a discourse that this thesis will ground within the narrative of Doctor Who. In doing this, this thesis will intervene within these debates by deconstructing representations of the gendered body within the rebooted Doctor Who, constructing a continuum of ‘acceptable’ bodily expressions that will offer insight into the limits of our apparent gendered bodily fluidity. Using a methodological approach that involves textual analysis informed by social, cultural, and technological theory, this thesis begins by foregrounding the mutual areas of interest between the various theoretical concepts. From this, the thesis contains three broad thematic chapters discussing the topics of reproduction, monstrosity and technology with the selection of these topics being attributable to them representing convergence points of interest for the given theoretical areas. These themes are then grounded and discussed within Doctor Who, with the programme’s popularity, longevity, long form narrative structure, and political reflexivity all making it an appropriate lens for analysis. This thesis argues that these debates are ones Doctor Who both acknowledges and embodies, yet Who appears to remain hamstrung by a resort to tradition that prevents true radicalism and subversion. By using Doctor Who as an accessible point of reference for these potentially abstract and emotive debates, this thesis aims to question the extent to which we are now, or may ever consider ourselves, truly ‘postgender’; whether our ‘choices’ are as freely made as they appear, or whether we remain constricted by residual patriarchal mores.

This research seeks to better understand how Black artists experience the mainstream art museum. The thesis makes an original contribution to scholarship on curating contemporary art through qualitative analysis of subjective approaches to art museum space. It makes evident responses to institutionalised systems of address. Foundational in establishing this action research methodology (Lewin 1946; Carr & Kemmis 1986) are the dialogic frameworks provided by the theories of Mikhail Bahktin (1975), Edouard Glissant (1997), and chiefly the writing of Zora Neale Hurston (1929). It concludes that art museums can become sites of dialogic exchange (Bennett, 2006) for those who have been traditionally excluded from such spaces, though the means may be other than those formally sanctioned by the institution. Examining racial difference in museological and curatorial spheres potentially allows for multiple dialogues, referred to by Bakhtin as ‘polyphony.’ Interviews with fourteen international artists and curators suggest that critical debate around the racialisation of museum space has progressed relatively little since the 1990s, with identity politics and institutional critique having fallen out of favour in contemporary museum discourse (Bishop 2012, Haq 2014). Indeed, recent academic research into race and the art museum tends to focus on the past (Cooks 2011, Cahan 2016) or artists’ continued lack of visibility (Chambers 2015). While museum-centred research interrogates the relationship between audience and museum space (McClellan 2003; Karp et al. 2006; Bourriaud 1998; Kester 2011), little consideration has been dedicated to Black contemporary artists’ physical presence in art museums. As a critical paratext to curatorial projectsThe Shadows Took Shape and In Black and White which I co-authored, this study examines Black artists’ roles as uniquely informed generators of address (speakers) and respondents within the art museum. Given the insular and highly specialised body of curatorial writing (Hoffmann 2013; Lind 2010; Obrist 2008; Martinon & Rogoff 2015), it is therefore proposed that studying modes of Black curatorial and artistic address can ultimately yield new translations for contemporary museum-going publics.

Creative arts can make vital contributions to both economies and communities. Moreover, these impacts can be keenly felt by smaller, regional communities, where shifts away from traditional rural industries are apparent, and in the context of the Inew economy' which emphasises the importance of knowledge industries and creative industries. This research investigates creative arts supply and demand in regional Victoria, Australia through the collection and analysis of qualitative and quantitative data in three target communities. Fundamentally, this thesis presents a detailed analysis of the current supply and demand environment, including the impacts of regional arts festivals, and determines the conditions, events and characteristics which could strengthen regional Victorian supply and demand of creative arts. This thesis analyses focus group data to investigate current levels of supply of creative arts in regional Victoria. Qualitative analysis of the data shows that the supply of creative arts in the target areas is limited by scarce resources, isolation, negative community attitudes towards creative arts, and a small audience or sales market and an over-reliance on volunteers. Small and micro-businesses in the regional Victorian arts sector are seen as having motivations for operating beyond making money, limited business acumen, and have difficulty in marketing themselves effectively. Best-practice strategies to strengthen the operations of small and micro-businesses include adopting a more entrepreneurial attitude towards arts business, using an agent to source new audiences or sales markets and to maximise the promotion of their product, creating art which is accessible to the local community, and to engage in skills development and business training. Using attitudes towards creative arts, participation in creative arts and expenditure on creative arts as a measure of current demand levels, this thesis applies a range of statistical and econometric tests to the data collected from the three target communities. Contrary to the view emergent from the supply data, this thesis shows that regional Victorians have strong levels of demand for creative arts. Results show higher than average levels of overall monthly arts expenditure, and strong demand for cinema, craft fairs or exhibitions, books, CDs and other music formats. Low levels of demand were noted for classical music, opera or ballet. Chi-Squared analysis and ordered probit results show that gender, age, festival attendance, education, and individual levels of overall arts expenditure are all determinants of creative arts demand. Analysis regarding impacts and key aspects of two regional arts festivals found that regional festival patrons are more likely to be female, local to the host region, have a middle income, and hold a high school or equivalent qualification. An econometric model, including two versions of an Ordinary Least Squares regression in addition to Tobit and probit estimations, was used to more accurately estimate individual expenditure characteristics, notably accounting for the zero-expenditure of attendees who are local to the host region. This thesis provides valuable contributions to knowledge regarding the supply and demand of creative arts in regional areas. It also provides practical insights for policy makers, festival organisers, and the regional arts industry.

This thesis presents a study of innovation that focuses on the promotion of art as a force of genuine invention and the unfolding of a much-desired ability to profit from this development. Innovation lies at the heart of contested and divergent views on the role of artistic critique and the creation of value so pervasive in recent economic development, not least in the light of the financial crisis that erupted in 2007. This research connects to and builds upon an increasing engagement within economic sociology and social theory with the intermingling between art and business, or how art has come into view as a source of change. It takes experimental filmmaking and design methods associated with the European artistic avant-garde and anti-capitalistic critique as empirical examples. In doing so, this thesis explores an inclusive logic of differentiation centring on how ‘anti- capitalist’ critique feeds into processes of valuation, and explores how innovation practice benefits from the realities that it also excludes. The thesis draws together insights from two ethnographic studies of innovation in which artistic critique is translated into tools of innovation. In doing so, it explores the way in which artistic critique suspends, provokes and tests ‘realities’ that might stand as sources of knowledge for the purpose of business innovation. It makes the key argument that art and business exist in differential relations in which the principles and values associated with art and business coexist in multiple combinations, which are intimately bound up with new sites of action, such as the formation of camps, labs and studio workshops. Drawing attention to how such differential relations between art and business are becoming central to the construction of contemporary economies, this thesis makes a critical contribution to innovation studies expanding its vocabulary and, at the same time, its empirical field.

This PhD uses a queer reading strategy to explore the performative sites of lucha libre (wrestling in Mexico). My research inhabits the space behind the scene, the space between the ring and the audience, and the space of being part of the audience itself. My reading of the luchas takes place through the camera, the interview, printed works, theoretical investigation, and through the work of artists who draw on lucha libre – including myself. As lucha libre itself cannot be narrowed down to one specific medium, my subject matter allows me to utilize an interdisciplinary perspective to examine its various encounters, spaces, subjectivities and gestures. As well as attending live events in the arenas, watching lucha libre on television, exploring its circulation in artistic and filmic productions and its appropriation in advertisements and political discourse, I have carried out an intervention in a regular lucha libre programme by inventing a character, promoting, constructing and staging a match in an arena in the north of Mexico City. My methodology therefore makes use of a whole range of strategies including those borrowed from the discipline of anthropology and from practices of documentary making. Through my writing and my practice, I attempt to query and complicate these disciplinary conventions and my own use of them. I place particular emphasis in this PhD upon the possibility and use of a queer reading strategy in relation to lucha libre. Drawing on the works of Gloria Anzaldúa, Judith Butler, Judith ʻJackʼ Halberstam, José Javier Maristany, and José Esteban Muñoz, the thesis argues that a queer reading strategy has the potential to complicate ways of seeing gender and sexuality as well as race, ethnicity, class, time and space in this context. I identify the rich queer legacies within lucha libre, film and popular culture, and focus on the multiple and often conflicting readings made possible by adopting queer theory and reading practices. In doing so, the thesis interrogates the different ways in which popular cultures can go beyond accepted notions of what it means to be Mexican, a woman, macho, gay and so on. Throughout this work, I pay close attention to forms of audience participation, their verbal and gestural acts and how key these are in to the event of the lucha. These verbal and gestural acts, I argue, produce a unique complicity in the arena manifesting a transient trace of queer histories, and suggesting potential utopias.

The goal of this thesis is to look at the critical and dissenting value of exhibitions through the examination of four cases studies, based on six exhibitions taking place between 1968 and 1998 in Latin and North America. The exhibitions belong to the history of modern and contemporary exhibitions and curating, a field of research and study that has only started to be written about in the last two decades. This investigation contributes to it, in its creation of new genealogies by connecting previously overlooked antecedents, or by proposing new relations within established lineages, at the intersection of a specific historiography; to address exhibitions, a tradition of artists acting as curators and an emerging history of curating. The examined exhibitions were put together by artists or artist collectives and were placed in a liminal position between artistic and curatorial practice. All the cases presented a distinct proposal in relation to art and social change, a fact that connects them, in their aims and modus operandi, to a Marxist and neo-Marxist critical and transformative legacy. The cases address the following connections: exhibition as political site (Tucumán Arde, 1968); exhibition as social space (The People’s Choice (Arroz con Mango), 1981); exhibition as encounter (Rooms with a view, We the People, Art/Artifact, 1987-88); and exhibition as an exchange situation (El Museo de la Calle, 1998-2001). Key to their analysis is the concept of dissensus, as put forward by Jacques Rancière. Within this theoretical framework, these exhibitions put into practice particular cases of dissensus in a given distribution of the sensible. All of them tried to deal with their thematic concerns by performing them as a praxis. They dissent with the way in which reality was formatted in their historical moment and challenge the exhibition medium itself opening new ways of doing and making in the exhibition field. Therefore, in this thesis the dissenting value of exhibitions is closely related to its main features as a medium, namely their temporality, heterogeneity and flexibility, which contribute to their potential for creative analysis and propositioning. In the case of these exhibitions, this capability is brought into play for institutional interrogation, for offering alternative cultural narratives and also for inspiring new imaginary realms.

Through this research, I examine how new, natural, socially and environmentally sustainable materials for western couture millinery may be sourced from a group of marginalized women in south-eastern Uganda, underlining the continued relevance of craft as a mode of production that is both flexible and inclusive. Post-colonial, western perceptions of ‘African’ aesthetics are deconstructed and reconstructed through plaited, palm leaf braids that reflect the irregular surface texture found in traditional African artefacts. These create both a metaphorical and visual ‘pidgin’ language that holds meaning for craftspeople in the developed world as well as for the makers. In the process, questions have been asked about western requirements for product uniformity and how the ‘hand of the maker’ - as signified by irregularity – may be positioned in the markets of industrialized and post-industrialized societies. By creating a product with the potential for longevity and versatility, I have attempted to minimize some problems inherent in sourcing from small-scale craft development projects. The research has been practice-led and is supported by this written dissertation. My own craft practice as a millinery designer and field trips to Uganda - in order to establish a working relationship with the makers, understand their circumstances and to develop the Pidgin Plaits - has been at the core of a process of exchange. Cultural and industrial networks have also been developed in Uganda that may support the longer-term sustainability of the project. Through my research, I identify the considerations confronting the designer seeking to establish such a project and explore the multiple social, cultural and economic factors that impact upon the makers in Uganda,in a project with the potential to transform lives and cultures.

This study presents a pedagogic framework that offers a new approach, structure and content for the teaching, understanding and application of typography in cross-media communication environments. Current theory and vocabulary used to describe typographic practice and scholarship are based on a historically print-derived framework. As yet, no new paradigm has emerged to address the divergent path that screen-based typography has taken from its traditional print medium. This study argues that the current model of typographic education is unable to provide design students with appropriate models, concepts and grammar to explore the potential of typography in screen-based media. Hence, a re-evaluation of the current framework is proposed in order to develop new approaches that will reduce misappropriation of typographic principles and aesthetic values in screen-based media. This study is composed of three research stages. Stage One (consisting of a literature and design application review) was used to develop an understanding of the current typographic application in screen-based media. Stage Two (consisting of a questionnaire survey and in-depth interviews) was used to investigate the relevance of current typographic knowledge in relation to screen- based media. Additionally, this stage helped identify critical issues surrounding current and future typographic practice. Findings from Stages One and Two were used as a basis to develop a new framework. This framework was subsequently tested and refined in Stage Three through action research projects (with Graphic and New Media design students) and peer reviews (with design educators and professional practitioners). The final framework consists of six key attributes: an integrated model of knowledge, cross-media skills, cross-disciplinary influences, it is communication-focused, flexible and adaptable. It reflects a future model of a convergent media, not a continued separation of print and screen. This framework consists of two distinct areas of knowledge: Global Skills (Form, Content, Expression and Context) and Specialist Skills (Hyper-textuality, Interactivity, Temporality and Usability). It is concluded that the approach and knowledge-base used to teach typography must be modified to reflect the challenges posed by media convergence, where transferable global skills are emphasised across a range of media. Typography's knowledge base has to be expanded to include specialist skills derived from technological and social changes in communication technologies. The principal contributions of the study are: the identification of transferable global typographic skills; the introduction of specialist design skills required for effective cross-media type application; presentation of an integrated model of typographic knowledge and practice; a curriculum guide aimed at helping design educators plan and deliver typography in graphic and multimedia programmes; strategies and approaches to help designers remediate their print- derived knowledge and lastly, as a subject reference guide for visual communication design students. The framework is not offered as an absolute representation of western-based typographic knowledge for cross-media application but instead should be considered as a signpost to help understand the current transition of knowledge between print and screen. Additionally, this framework has been developed and tested within a single educational environment. As a result, variations in teaching and learning styles were not taken into account. Audiences are urged to treat the framework as a 'work-in-progress' model that can be refined through additional field- testing in other educational environments. And finally, the application of the framework within a professional practice environment would require a comprehensive review of practice-based concerns and a further simplification of the framework.