This thesis will discuss how museums and historic sites can use videos from the costuming community on YouTube to share their collections and interpretation to a larger audience. The tactics employed by these creators create engaging works that will bring in a younger audience to a museum or historic site. The process of making often employed by these creators is a methodology that facilitates the learning experience as well as creates embodied knowledge for the creator. This knowledge allows the creator to explain historic practices with nuance only available to makers. The process represented in this paper is a combination of interviewing YouTube creators, making a dress inspired by an extant garment, and the creation of a video series to share information about the 1910s garment worker’s strike through academic research and making. / English

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abstract: This thesis document encapsulates the findings of my research process in which I studied my self, my artistic process, and the interconnectivity among the various aspects of my life. Those findings are two-fold as they relate to the creation of three original works and my personal transformation through the process. This document encapsulates the three works, swimminginthepsyche, applecede and The 21st Century Adventures of Wonder Woman, chronologically from their performance dates. My personal growth and transformation is expressed throughout the paper and presented in the explanation of the emergent philosophical approach for self-study as creative practice that I followed. This creative-centered framework for embodied transformation weaves spiritual philosophy with my artistic process to sustain a holistic life practice, where the self, seen as an integrated whole, is also a direct reflection of the greater, singular and holistic existence. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.F.A. Dance 2013

There have been monumental advances in the study of the social dimensions of knowledge in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. But it has been common within a wide variety of fields--including social philosophy, cognitive science, epistemology, and the philosophy of science--to approach the social dimensions of knowledge as simply another resource to be utilized or controlled. I call this view, in which other people's epistemic significance are only of instrumental value, manipulationism. I identify manipulationism, trace its manifestations in the aforementioned fields, and explain how to move beyond it. The principal strategy that I employ for moving beyond manipulationism consists of synthesizing enactivism and neo-Kuhnian social epistemology. Specifically, I expand the enactivist concept of participatory sense-making by linking it to recent conceptual innovations in social epistemology, such as the concept of immanent cogent argumentation.

abstract: To understand the visual culture and art education practices within three ideologically distinct kindergartens, I employed an interdisciplinary approach, utilizing tools from the fields of art, education, anthropology, literary theory, visual studies and critical social theory. Each of the three schools was considered to be the "best" of its kind for the community in which it resided; TBS was the original bilingual school, and the most Westernized. It was set in the heart of a major city. The second school, OBS, operated from an Islamic framework located in an under-developed small transitioning suburb; and the last school, NBS, was situated in Al-Jahra, an "outlying area" populated by those labeled as bedouins (Longva, 2006). The participants' attitudes towards art education unfolded as I analyzed my visual observations of the participants' daily practices. I have produced a counter-hegemonic visual narrative by negotiating my many subjectivities and methods to gain new knowledge and insights. This approach has provided a holistic understanding of the environment in each site, in which attitudes and practices relating to art education have been acquired by the community. Operating from three different educational paradigms, each school applied a different approach to art education. The more Westernized school viewed art as an individual act which promoted creativity and expression. In the Islamic school art was viewed as an activity that required patterning (Stokrocki, 1986), and that the child needed to be guided and exposed to the appropriate images to follow. In the bedouin school, drawing activities were viewed as an opportunity for representing one's individual story as well as a skill for emergent literacy. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Curriculum and Instruction 2012

The photographer Rodney Smith shows us images of real things and people, but real things and people that aren’t positioned in real ways and places people would actually be. Instead, he uses something very familiar to each of us–the human body–and consistently puts it in very unfamiliar situations. By using something so intimately familiar to each of us as the body in weird ways, he automatically jars our own experienced sensations. And this jarring of familiar sensations, this defamiliarization of something so familiar to us, is what typically results in what literary critics term the feeling of the uncanny. What the uncanny does, in its defamiliarizing of the familiar, is to jar viewers from their sense of the familiar. It displaces them from where they normally are. In Rodney Smith’s photographs, our bodies, unfamiliar with the bodily experiences of his subjects, are dislodged from where they are. Yet the feeling produced by Smith’s photography is not uncanny; rather, it has a sort of reverent, almost sacred, effect. His background as a graduate of the Yale School of Divinity makes him deeply interested in truth beneath the surface, and so he uses photography to get at that sort of truth through his use of the body in ways that would typically produce an uncanny effect, yet don’t. The settings in which he places bodies, as well as the way he uses the bodies themselves, help to shift the feeling of the uncanny into the feeling of the divine or sacred. His ability to do so is highly contingent upon his use of bodies: because we, the viewers, all have bodies, our bodies resonate with those we see in his photography. We are connected to the subjects of his works in a fundamental and profound way because of our embodiedness. And using this connection, Rodney Smith takes our now displaced bodies and transports them with his bodies to somewhere beyond the surface, somewhere sacred. Through his use of techniques typical of the uncanny, he shifts the effects of the uncanny from simple displacement of the self to meaningful replacement of the self within the greater context of our unique and, in his eyes, beautiful world we live in.

The thesis deals with the lived everyday practice of patients with epileptic seizures and the types of knowledge they are working with in relation to seizures. Particular attention is paid to patients' embodied knowledge as the practical knowledge based on the experience of epileptic seizures and their bodies in general. The thesis shows how the types of knowledge (such as triggers, auras, forms of seizures or their management) are based on, created and learnt through the embodiment. Lifestyle regimens associated with seizure management are introduced as a link between general recommendations and individual regimens, with seizure management being negotiated with regard to other aspects of patient life. While adhering to management, there is some communication, cooperation and negotiation between the patient and his body. Finally, other forms of knowledge about seizures are outlined, such as those created by people close to the patient and those created by assistance dogs. (Furthermore), it is also explained what these forms of knowledge mean to the patient and how to work with them.

In the pursuit of planning for inclusive public space, this thesis addresses feelings of unsafety as a hindering aspect of equal access. The aim of this thesis is to explore the role of embodied knowledge within urban planning for understanding feelings of safety in public space. Due to the complexity of socio-spatial relations, I suggest a feminist approach to knowledge creation. The study is based on semi-structured interviews including a visual elicitation with urban planners in Sweden (n=16). My findings show that planners’ conceptualisations of safety relate to an overall focus on social sustainability and a problematic relationship between safety and crime prevention. While multiple methods are being used to understand feelings of safety, such as site audits and citizen dialogues, embodied methods are not (actively) used. There is therefore a need to recognise our bodies as helpful tools for understanding feelings of safety. Furthermore, who we are affects the way we perceive our surroundings as well as our feelings. Thus, urban planning practitioners need to (continue to) be reflexive about their positionalities, as well as to include experiences and perspectives of peoples’ situated, embodied knowledge to create inclusive public space for all.

In recent years, there has been a significant amount of new attention to white dominance and privilege (or whiteness) as the often unmarked inverse of racial oppression. This interest has spawned the academic domain called Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS). While the critical investigation of whiteness is not new, and has been pioneered by Black scholars beginning at least since the early 1900s in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, what is notable about this new interest in whiteness is its advancement almost exclusively by white scholars. The paucity of literature centering the Black voice in the study of whiteness both suggests the lack of appreciation for the importance of this perspective when researching the phenomenon of racial dominance, and raises questions about the manner in which racial equity work is approached by some Whites who do work that is intended to advance racial equity. This study investigates the context of racial equity collaborations between Blacks and Whites, responding to this knowledge deficit in two ways: a) it centers the Black voice, specifically and intentionally seeking the perspectives of Blacks about racial equity collaborations b) it investigates the nature and effects of the relationships between Blacks and Whites in these collaborative endeavours. This qualitative research study uses in-depth interview data collected from ten Black racial equity workers who collaborate with Whites in doing racial equity work. The data makes evident that the Black participants find these collaborations to be necessary and strategic while at the same time having the potential to undermine their own agency. The study examines this contradiction, discussing several manifestations of it in the lives of these Black racial equity workers. It outlines the importance of Black embodied knowledge to racial equity work and to these collaborations, and outlines an epistemology of unknowing and a politics of humility that these Blacks seek in their white colleagues. The study also outlines the collective and individual strategies used by these Black racial equity workers to navigate and resist the contradictory terrain of their collaborations with Whites in racial equity work.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.