The Gaelic movement was the general term used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to refer to a range of diverse but interconnected activity in support of the Gaelic language and culture in Scotland, embracing educational, literary, musical and scholarly aspects. Accounts of the Gaelic cultural landscape at this time tend to focus on the leading male figures; the presence and participation of women has been largely overlooked and a number of women who were prominent and significant participants in the Gaelic movement have slipped into the shadows or disappeared completely. This study aims to reconfigure this view to foreground the contribution of women and to understand the complex dynamics of the Gaelic movement from the perspectives of the women involved. While the study importantly highlights certain individual women, the biographical focus is used as a means to uncover lesser-known women and the female friendships and networks in which they moved, as well as to explore their relationship and interaction with prominent male figures and other interconnected social groupings within the Gaelic movement and wider Pan-Celtic and Celtic Revival circles. The study examines and discusses the participation, contribution and influence of a number of women across a spectrum of Gaelic cultural activities, taking into account socio-historical, literary and cultural aspects and using gender as an analytical lens through which to examine the different challenges and tensions that individual women negotiated in a period of social and cultural change. The study shows that a number of women were actively involved with the Gaelic movement in the period between the passing of The Crofting Act and the start of the Great War; that they were innovative, ambitious and wide-ranging in their participation; and that they saw the accessibility of the Gaelic cultural sphere as an opportunity to progress both their individual aspirations as women as well as their support for the Gaelic language and culture.

Where Outreach Meets Outrage: Racial Equity at the Canada Council for the Arts (1989-1999), examines the early formation of racial equity policies at The Canada Council for the Arts. In this research project, I am primarily interested in understanding the ways in which ‘culture’ is employed by the state, the Canada Council for the Arts and by black artists to articulate and communicate complex issues that pertain to notions of art, citizenship, solidarity, justice, multiculturalism, belonging and nationhood. The research places culture and cultural production centrally within claims and calls by racialized artists for the ethical redistribution of societal resources and participation in societal structures. I look at questions of how community is produced and struggled over in relation to claims for cultural resources. This thesis employs an interdisciplinary approach drawn from the disciplines of sociology, anthropology and critical cultural studies to allow the complex relationships between activities of the Canadian state, racial equity policy making at the Canada Council, and grass roots social activism to emerge. I argue that state practices of management are elastic and that racial equity policies at the Canada Council emerged out of a confluence of transformational activities simultaneously taking place at the state/institutional and grassroots levels. The significance of this research project is that it fuses contemporary cultural production and art within contemporary social justice paradigms that seek to understand the processes and practices within liberalism that produce oppressions and resistance through an exclusionary politics of representation. This dissertation study will have both applied and theoretical implications in the Canadian context both within and outside of the academy in the fields of the arts, cultural policy and education.

Where Outreach Meets Outrage: Racial Equity at the Canada Council for the Arts (1989-1999), examines the early formation of racial equity policies at The Canada Council for the Arts. In this research project, I am primarily interested in understanding the ways in which ‘culture’ is employed by the state, the Canada Council for the Arts and by black artists to articulate and communicate complex issues that pertain to notions of art, citizenship, solidarity, justice, multiculturalism, belonging and nationhood. The research places culture and cultural production centrally within claims and calls by racialized artists for the ethical redistribution of societal resources and participation in societal structures. I look at questions of how community is produced and struggled over in relation to claims for cultural resources. This thesis employs an interdisciplinary approach drawn from the disciplines of sociology, anthropology and critical cultural studies to allow the complex relationships between activities of the Canadian state, racial equity policy making at the Canada Council, and grass roots social activism to emerge. I argue that state practices of management are elastic and that racial equity policies at the Canada Council emerged out of a confluence of transformational activities simultaneously taking place at the state/institutional and grassroots levels. The significance of this research project is that it fuses contemporary cultural production and art within contemporary social justice paradigms that seek to understand the processes and practices within liberalism that produce oppressions and resistance through an exclusionary politics of representation. This dissertation study will have both applied and theoretical implications in the Canadian context both within and outside of the academy in the fields of the arts, cultural policy and education.

Este trabalho investiga os processos constitutivos, as condições de atuação e o sentido político do que chama de novo engajamento cultural. Desde os anos 1990 surge na cidade de São Paulo um novo conjunto de experiências associativas informais, autodenominadas coletivos, que atualizam as formas de relacionamento entre o fazer cultural e a militância política. Essa nova configuração político-cultural notabiliza-se por se aliar a temáticas cotidianas que emanam do meio social dos públicos ou territórios com que estão envolvidos ao mesmo tempo em que direciona seus esforços para fazer do coletivo um espaço de experimentação de novas relações produtivas. Do mesmo modo, o fenômeno parece desenvolver-se nos termos de novas modalidades laborais, já que a formação de coletivos aparece também como via alternativa de acesso a subvenções públicas propiciadas pelas novas políticas culturais estruturadas por sistemas de financiamento direto a projetos selecionados através de editais públicos. A hipótese é de que a emergência do novo engajamento cultural é estreitamente vinculada com o paradigma antropológico de política cultural que se firmou no país ao longo dos anos 2000, favorecendo-se das modulações políticas operadas pela era de hegemonia dos governos progressistas. Para tanto, privilegia como arco histórico de análise os debates, formulações e impasses enfrentados pelas instâncias organizativas de dois movimentos culturais que se formaram ao redor de dois programas públicos municipais: o Fomento ao Teatro para a Cidade de São Paulo, de 2002, e a breve experiência do Fomento à Cultura da Periferia de São Paulo, de 2016. Isso é feito através de observação direta participante (no período 2011-2017) em espaços organizativos dos movimentos; análise de dados secundários compostos por atas, legislações, projetos e outros documentos atinentes à relação entre coletivos e poder público; e pesquisa bibliográfica que permitiu pensar, por diferentes perspectivas, o atual papel da cultura frente às transformações mais recentes do sistema capitalista. Em seus resultados, a pesquisa sugere que a agenda cultural antropológica, forjada em sintonia com as novas estratégias de gerenciamento político global e com a centralidade assumida pela cultura na nova etapa de acumulação, degenera o sentido político destas pequenas experiências ao instrumentalizar a capacidade mobilizadora e auto-organizativa demonstrada por elas. Intrínsecos ao novo paradigma, os sistemas de financiamento baseado na forma-edital serviram a que a norma competitiva neoliberal se infiltrasse nestes pequenos ensaios organizativos informais, o que reduziu o potencial emancipador aí presente a uma forma subordinada de trabalho e transformou os processos interativos por eles produzidos em novas espécies de mercadoria. / This work researches the constitutive processes, the conditions of action and the political sense of what it calls a new cultural engagement. Since the 1990s a new set of informal associative experiences, self-described collectives, has emerged in the city of São Paulo and updated the forms of relationship between cultural making and political activism. This new political-cultural composition is notable for its alliance with the everyday themes emanating from the social milieu of the public or territory with which they are involved. At the same time, there are direct efforts to experiment new productive relations inside the collectives. Likewise, the phenomenon seems to develop in terms of new forms of labor, since constituting collectives also appears as an alternative way to access public subsidies through new cultural policies that fund projects which are selected in open calls. The hypothesis is that the emergence of the new cultural engagement is closely linked to the anthropological paradigm of cultural policy that was established in the country during the years 2000, favored by political modulations operated by an era of hegemony of progressive governments. In order to do so, it analises the historical arc of debates, formulations and impasses faced by the organizational instances of two cultural movements that were formed around two municipal public plans: Fomento ao Teatro para a Cidade de São Paulo, established in 2002, and the brief experience of Fomento à Cultura da Periferia, established in 2016. This is done through participant direct observation in organizational spaces of the movements (during the period of 2011-2017); analysis of secondary data composed by minutes, laws, projects and other documents concerning the relationship between collectives and public power; and bibliographical research as subsidy to reflect, from different perspectives, on the current role of culture in face of the most recent transformations of the capitalist system. In its conclusions, this research suggests that the anthropological cultural agenda, forged in tune with the new global political management strategies and with the centrality assumed by culture in the new stage of accumulation, degenerates the political meaning of those small experiences by instrumentalizing their demonstrated mobilizing and self-organization capacity. The funding systems based on the open call form, intrinsic to the new paradigm, served to the infiltration of the neoliberal competitive norm into these small informal organizational experiments; reducing thus the emancipatory potential present there to a subordinate form of work and transforming the interactive processes they produced into new types of commodity.

Le terme "Queer" ne résonne pas de la même façon en version originale - le contexte anglo-saxon d'émergence - qu'en version française. L'objectif principal de cette recherche est de questionner les phénomènes de transferts culturels dans le contexte français du féminisme queer, à la fois mouvement de pensée critique, activisme et subculture apparus au milieu des années 1980 aux Etats-Unis. De cette traduction culturelle du mouvement queer en France est né un activisme rose qui à l'inverse du contexte anglo-saxon a développé une politique basée sur une forte affirmation identitaire, à la fois collective et individuelle, afin de déjouer le modèle d'intégration français largement imprégné d'idéaux républicains et où les dérives d'un universalisme abstrait conduisent à l'aveuglement face aux inégalités entre les individus. Ainsi la question centrale qui anime cette recherche est d'examiner comment cet activisme rose fait irruption dans le contexte français réfractaire aux politiques identitaires.Et, au-delà de la seule traduction linguistique, les phénomènes de réception et d'appropriation dans le contexte français du féminisme "queer" sont à comprendre dans toutes leurs dimensions : culturelle, politique, théorique, artistique, etc. Ainsi, cette recherche cherche à comprendre les spécificités de cet activisme, de son inscription parfois mouvementée au sein des mouvements féministes et des mouvements dits LGBT, à ses applications particulières en terme de pratiques culturelles et artistiques, afin d'interroger le phénomène d'esthétisation des techniques de lutte. / The term queer, when used in the French language, does not echo the same way as in English –then referring to the anglo-saxon context of emergence. The main purpose of this study is to question the phenomena of cultural transfers of queer feminism – which appeared in the mid 1980s in the United States as both a subculture and a movement of critical thinking and activism- into the French context. This cultural translation resulted in pink activism which unlike its anglo saxon original model developed a policy based on strong identity affirmation, on both a collective and individual level. The goal was to beat the French integration system deeply imbued with republican ideals, where the drifts of an abstract universalism had produced blindness towards inequalities therefore the central issue investigated in this research is how this pink activism arose in a French context of opposition to identity-based politics.Moreover, the phenomena of reception and appropriation of queer feminism into the French context must be understood beyond the sole linguistic translation – in all their dimensions, cultural political, theoritical, artistic, etc. This study aims to understand the special features of this activism, from its sometimes uneasy integration among feminist and LGBT movements to its specific applications in terms of cultural and artistic practices, thus questioning the phenomenon of aestheticism of resistance techniques.

Este trabalho investiga os processos constitutivos, as condições de atuação e o sentido político do que chama de novo engajamento cultural. Desde os anos 1990 surge na cidade de São Paulo um novo conjunto de experiências associativas informais, autodenominadas coletivos, que atualizam as formas de relacionamento entre o fazer cultural e a militância política. Essa nova configuração político-cultural notabiliza-se por se aliar a temáticas cotidianas que emanam do meio social dos públicos ou territórios com que estão envolvidos ao mesmo tempo em que direciona seus esforços para fazer do coletivo um espaço de experimentação de novas relações produtivas. Do mesmo modo, o fenômeno parece desenvolver-se nos termos de novas modalidades laborais, já que a formação de coletivos aparece também como via alternativa de acesso a subvenções públicas propiciadas pelas novas políticas culturais estruturadas por sistemas de financiamento direto a projetos selecionados através de editais públicos. A hipótese é de que a emergência do novo engajamento cultural é estreitamente vinculada com o paradigma antropológico de política cultural que se firmou no país ao longo dos anos 2000, favorecendo-se das modulações políticas operadas pela era de hegemonia dos governos progressistas. Para tanto, privilegia como arco histórico de análise os debates, formulações e impasses enfrentados pelas instâncias organizativas de dois movimentos culturais que se formaram ao redor de dois programas públicos municipais: o Fomento ao Teatro para a Cidade de São Paulo, de 2002, e a breve experiência do Fomento à Cultura da Periferia de São Paulo, de 2016. Isso é feito através de observação direta participante (no período 2011-2017) em espaços organizativos dos movimentos; análise de dados secundários compostos por atas, legislações, projetos e outros documentos atinentes à relação entre coletivos e poder público; e pesquisa bibliográfica que permitiu pensar, por diferentes perspectivas, o atual papel da cultura frente às transformações mais recentes do sistema capitalista. Em seus resultados, a pesquisa sugere que a agenda cultural antropológica, forjada em sintonia com as novas estratégias de gerenciamento político global e com a centralidade assumida pela cultura na nova etapa de acumulação, degenera o sentido político destas pequenas experiências ao instrumentalizar a capacidade mobilizadora e auto-organizativa demonstrada por elas. Intrínsecos ao novo paradigma, os sistemas de financiamento baseado na forma-edital serviram a que a norma competitiva neoliberal se infiltrasse nestes pequenos ensaios organizativos informais, o que reduziu o potencial emancipador aí presente a uma forma subordinada de trabalho e transformou os processos interativos por eles produzidos em novas espécies de mercadoria. / This work researches the constitutive processes, the conditions of action and the political sense of what it calls a new cultural engagement. Since the 1990s a new set of informal associative experiences, self-described collectives, has emerged in the city of São Paulo and updated the forms of relationship between cultural making and political activism. This new political-cultural composition is notable for its alliance with the everyday themes emanating from the social milieu of the public or territory with which they are involved. At the same time, there are direct efforts to experiment new productive relations inside the collectives. Likewise, the phenomenon seems to develop in terms of new forms of labor, since constituting collectives also appears as an alternative way to access public subsidies through new cultural policies that fund projects which are selected in open calls. The hypothesis is that the emergence of the new cultural engagement is closely linked to the anthropological paradigm of cultural policy that was established in the country during the years 2000, favored by political modulations operated by an era of hegemony of progressive governments. In order to do so, it analises the historical arc of debates, formulations and impasses faced by the organizational instances of two cultural movements that were formed around two municipal public plans: Fomento ao Teatro para a Cidade de São Paulo, established in 2002, and the brief experience of Fomento à Cultura da Periferia, established in 2016. This is done through participant direct observation in organizational spaces of the movements (during the period of 2011-2017); analysis of secondary data composed by minutes, laws, projects and other documents concerning the relationship between collectives and public power; and bibliographical research as subsidy to reflect, from different perspectives, on the current role of culture in face of the most recent transformations of the capitalist system. In its conclusions, this research suggests that the anthropological cultural agenda, forged in tune with the new global political management strategies and with the centrality assumed by culture in the new stage of accumulation, degenerates the political meaning of those small experiences by instrumentalizing their demonstrated mobilizing and self-organization capacity. The funding systems based on the open call form, intrinsic to the new paradigm, served to the infiltration of the neoliberal competitive norm into these small informal organizational experiments; reducing thus the emancipatory potential present there to a subordinate form of work and transforming the interactive processes they produced into new types of commodity.

Augusto Boal developed Theatre of the Oppressed as a way of using the symbolic language of the dramatic arts in the examination of power relations in both the personal and social contexts. Boal understood that symbolic realities directly influence empirical reality and that drama, as an art form that employs the narrative and the event, serves as a powerful interface between symbols and actuality. In the dramatic process, the creation and the environment from which it emerges are inevitably transformed in the process of enactment. These transformations manifest in the context of power relations - in the context of the receptors ability to make decisions and to engage in actions, and the communicators ability to influence the receptors opinions and behaviour. This thesis will examine two different practices in which symbolic realities have been utilised in the context of human relations of power. Primarily, this thesis examines the theory and practice of Theatre of the Oppressed as it has developed.