No description available.

This auto-ethnographic study focuses on Houston’s art car community and the grassroots movement’s 25 year relationship with the city through an art form that has created a sense of community. Art cars transform ordinary vehicles into personally conceived visions through spectacle, disrupting status quo messages of dominant culture regarding automobiles and norms of ownership and operation. An annual parade is an egalitarian space for display and performance, including art cars created by individuals who drive their personally modified vehicles every day, occasional entries by internationally renowned artists, and entries created by youth groups. A locally proactive public has created a movement has co-opted the cultural spectacle, creating a community of practice. I studied the events of the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art’s Art Car Weekend to give me insight into art and its value for people in this community. Sources of data included the creation of a participatory art car, journaling, field observation, and semi-structured interviews. The first part is my academic grounding, informed by critical pedagogy and socially reconstructive art practices. The second part narrates my experiences and understandings of the community along with the voices of others. Dominant themes of exploration include empowerment, community, and art. I examine the purposes for participation by artists, as well in the practices of audiences and organizations that provide support for this art form. My findings have significant implications community-based art education and k-12 classroom educators. Relational and dialogic approaches to making art, teaching, and researching are tied to problem-posing education as a recommendation for art education.

Within popular culture we have recently witnessed a proliferation of male dancers. This has been spear-headed by the success of the BBC television program Strictly Come Dancing. The current cultural fascination with dance provides a stark contrast to traditional discourses in England that position dance as a female activity, with men’s participation frequently associated with homophobic stigma. We therefore have a context in which multiple and contradictory discourses on masculinity are available for men to make sense of themselves. This thesis explores how young men negotiate these discourses when learning to dance. The research is based upon an ethnographic study of capoeira and Latin and ballroom dance classes in South West England. The core methods included 1) four years of embodied fieldwork in the form of the researcher learning to dance, 2) writing field-notes and collecting multi-media artefacts, 3) interviewing dancers, and 4) photographing dancers in action. The researcher also drew upon a diverse range of subsidiary methods that included producing a dance wall of collected images and artefacts, cataloguing relevant dance websites and YouTube videos, and extensive use of Facebook for publishing photographs, sharing resources and negotiating ongoing informed consent. The findings of this PhD identify how learning capoeira and Latin and ballroom dance produces embodied, visual and discursive transitions in male dancers’ performances of masculine identities. The analysis focuses on three sets of practices that work to support or problematise the transitions in masculine identities in dance classes. These practices include 1) dancing with women in ballroom dancing, 2) performing awesome moves in capoeira, and 3) men’s experiences of stiff hips. In examining transitions across these three processes the thesis documents the changing possibilities and constraints on embodied masculinities in dance.

This research contributes to the discussion surrounding New Zealand’s entrepreneurial environment and Innovation Framework and addresses the research problem of whether the New Zealand government should seek to support entrepreneurship and innovation through the various knowledge-based or regulatory organisations it owns or funds, and if so, how it should go about accomplishing this. The approach taken was to use qualitative methods to examine how the government’s support for entrepreneurship and innovation was delivered to an emerging cluster of entrepreneurs from the point of view of those entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurs were involved in the innovative industry of land-based aquaculture and fieldwork was carried out in the Gisborne Region, on the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand. This study began by reviewing relevant literature from academic, industry and government sources to identify relevant sub-themes and create a framework for analysis. Fieldwork was undertaken using ethnographic methods to explore how the entrepreneurs experienced the New Zealand entrepreneurial environment and innovation framework in their interactions with knowledge-based and regulatory organisations. Data was gathered primarily by participant observation and semi-structured interviews and transcripts were coded and analysed using NVivo® software. An ethnographic narrative was produced and the interview transcripts analysed for relevance to the sub-themes from literature and to identify patterns that emerged from the data. This research reports that four of the entrepreneurs failed in their ventures due to a combination of factors both within their operations and within the entrepreneurial environment. These factors included technical difficulties maintaining livestock health and growth within an artificial marine environment, an inability to obtain assistance from knowledge-based organisations, problems in dealing with regulatory organisations, difficulty retaining trained staff, uncertainty about the market, and high energy costs. The Māori training organisation, Turanga Ararau, formed the Gisborne Aquaculture Society in an effort to establish a Gisborne aquaculture cluster however, this initiative proved unsuccessful primarily because the society failed to attract the 12 involvement of key stakeholders. This research contributes to the policy and practice of cluster facilitation by examining the extent to which best practice was followed in this attempt to establish a cluster and presents conclusions as to how the process of establishing the cluster could have been improved. This study also reports that the entrepreneurs were cut off from access to knowledge and research resources and received little advice or support from the knowledge based organisations that might have played a role in the development of their cluster. It examines how and why New Zealand’s Innovation Framework might be failing to recognise and support the vital role of entrepreneurs in economic development and suggests how this might be improved. The methodology chapters of this thesis contribute to literature regarding the use of ethnographic methods in entrepreneurship research and a further by-product of this thesis is an ethnographic account of the participant observation and semi structured interviews with the entrepreneurs. This research also provides an insight into the obstacles and challenges faced by entrepreneurs in New Zealand, in particular those involved in the emerging recirculating aquaculture industry.

<p>This essay deals with the individual collecting of four individuals with different backgrounds and lives. The essay investigates what, how and why people collect. It provides a stepping-stone in moving closer to understanding one, in human nature, deeply rooted phenomenon - collecting.</p><p>The essay is based on a list of questions made by the Nordic Museum in Stockholm. It also includes in-depth examinations of four person’s passion of collecting, in which four individuals were interviewed: a pig collector, a collector of Mickey Mouse items, a multi-collector of objects from other cultures and one collector of items related to the artist Madonna. All of the collectors were driven by different factors, of which some were rooted far back in their childhood, and for some the urge to collect had increased because of difficulties in adult life.</p><p>The investigation is based on the thesis that the market and the personal emotional feelings are the two main driving factors when it comes to collecting. This study and the people who participated in it, makes it clear that no market is strong enough to overcome the human mind and its will to decide what and how to collect. Although the market to some extent affect, for example by creating the availability or not, it is ultimately the emotional sense that decides how the collection would look like.</p><p>This essay is meant to fill a gap of knowledge in the area of the individual collecting, and provide a better understanding of the driving forces that are deeply embedded in the soul of a collector.</p>

Through empirical, qualitative research and theorisation of the associated findings, this thesis investigates how certain children's homes may operate, making specific reference to sexuality and sexual abuse issues. Two children's homes in two different local authorities were researched via ethnographic research over a two year period. This involved utilising participant observation techniques in conjunction with formal interviews and documentary analysis. The documentary analysis entailed analysing logbooks, care plans and policy or practice documents around residential care and sexuality. The number of interviews conducted as part of the ethnographic fieldwork totalled 39 and the interviewees were comprised of residential workers, managers, social workers and children. This fieldwork was supplemented by 64 non-ethnographic interviews with residential staff, ex residents and other relevant personnel such as HIV workers. Both contemporaneous and historical practices and perspectives were evaluated, information about historical practices being drawn from interviews with some workers and ex-residents and from analysis of past documents in the ethnographic studies. Overall information was gained about over 100 different settings and 14 different local authorities. The empirical work commenced in 1994 and was concluded in 1997. Additionally media documents relating to scandals surrounding the sexual abuse of children in these settings were analysed. Children's homes are 'last resort' residential settings that children, predominantly abused teenagers, or those with behavioural problems are placed in by local authorities. Although the monolithic Victorian poorhouses and asylums were their historical predecessors, contemporary children's homes are now becoming increasingly smaller and many are intra community located. Despite assumptions by some commentators that these settings are no longer institutionalised this research showed the converse; many typically incorporating most of the characteristics delineated by Goffman (1961) as defining 'total institutions'. These features included isolation, uniform treatment of residents, rigid regimes, an emphasis on surveillance and control, and divisive child and staff cultures. These institutionalised settings intensified both the potential for, and the actual occurrence of, sexual and other forms of abuse of children by peers, staff and outsiders. Local authorities perpetuated the abuse not only by inadequate training, policies and support but often by failing to investigate allegations or follow them through thorough! y. The social construction of childhood induding child and adolescent, gendered sexuality, affected how children were perceived both generally and with regard to sexuality in these settings. This led to a protectionist, paternalist stance towards children in care which allowed them little voice and few rights. 11 The sexual beliefs, behaviour and responses of both children and staff were also examined in a deconstructionist manner which revealed the impossibility of separating sexuality from notions of either sex or gender. Sexed, sexualised and gendered behaviour was therefore shown to be performative and also subject to interiorisation, although simultaneously incorporating massive anomalies and instabilities. Both the notions of performative gender and institutionalisation were then broadened and evaluated in terms of a wider analysis of power. The institutionalisation and stigmatisation of children in children's homes was shown to be linked at micro, meza and macro levels with concepts of class, dangerousness and deviance. The sexual beliefs and behaviour of staff, children and the organisations they are embedded within was also found not only to be influenced by the settings and organisations themselves but by wider, gendered, legal, social and psychological structures, laws and discourses.

This dissertation is a nine-month ethnographic study of migrant families' literacies and corresponding value systems. Specifically, while I found that formal education is strongly valued among Mexican migrant groups, it is considered more a marker of prestige than a means to self-realization or economic improvement. In turn, socially transmitted skills and consejos (advice) are more important to migrant communities' survival and personal and material advancement. In order to demonstrate the role of social literacies and the irony that schooled literacy takes in the lives of many rural Mexicans, I trace the historical development of my field site, the town of Villachuato in the state of Michoacán, from its inception as a Spanish-owned hacienda, through its liberation and subsequent small-scale farming initiatives following the Mexican Revolution, and on into the current history of those farms' failure as a result of transnational economic influences like NAFTA. While more and more members of the Villachuato community are being pushed across the Mexico-U.S. border in search of work, public school teachers in rural Mexico are frustrated by rising drop-out rates and perceived student apathy. However, while teachers advocate formal education as the best means of self-improvement, students in Villachuato schools do not find the curriculum relevant to their lives. Rather, they adopt those schooled lessons that they find helpful (i.e., reading and writing skills that help them read street signs and navigate government and commercial bureaucracies); but they actively resist the value systems of meritocracy and personal identity development implicit in public education. By considering the ways in which local communities interface with dominant institutional literacies, this study supports efforts within the New Literacy Studies to unpack the complexities of globalized literacy practices. Further, the discrepancies between Villachuato citizens' priorities and those of their schools suggest important implications for educational policy on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Sleep matters for adolescents. It matters for physical and mental health, for success in the classroom and in extracurricular activities, for safety while driving and for protection against potential future psychological problems and substance abuse. Although the recommended nightly amount of sleep for adolescents is over nine hours, many factors interact to preclude teens from getting the sleep they need. This study uses a biocultural, multi-method approach to examine how biological, cultural, and environmental factors interact to affect adolescent sleep behavior in a cohort of 50 high school freshmen in the United States. High school is a place where adolescents learn social and academic skills that will carry them into adult life, but it also provides a space where they are socialized into "how to sleep." By exploring sleep and related behaviors, including ways to cope with inadequate sleep, in a group of teens who were 14 or 15 years old and evenly divided between White and Hispanic and male and female participants, this research explores how sleep is embedded within webs of individual, household-level, school-specific and societal factors. Beyond examining how advice about sleep and teens' experience of sleep behavior is internalized and embodied by adolescents, special attention is paid to the relationships between personal technology use and sleep, and also to the relationships among sleep and food and caffeine intake.

U.S. American literary and creative artists perform the work of developing a discursive response to two critical moments in Haitian history: the Revolution (1791-1804) and the U.S. Marine Occupation (1915 to 1934), inspiring imaginations and imaginary concepts. Revolutionary images of Toussaint Louverture proliferated beyond the boundaries of Haiti illuminating the complicity of colonial powers in maintaining notions of a particularized racial discourse. Frank J. Webb, a free black Philadelphian, engages a scathing critique of Thomas Carlyle’s sage prose “On the Negro Question” (1849) through the fictional depiction of a painted image of Louverture in Webb’s novel The Garies and their Friends (1857). Travel writing and ethnographies of the Occupation provide platforms for new forms of artistic production involving Vodou. Following James Weldon Johnson’s critique of U.S. policy (1920), others members of the Harlem Renaissance provide a counter narrative that reengages particular U.S. readers with Haiti’s problematic Revolution through the visual and literary lens of the Occupation experience. The pseudo journalism of William Seabrook's The Magic Island (1929) serves as the poto mitan (center point) around which other creative works produced after the Occupation appear. Katherine Dunham, Zora Neale Hurston, and Maya Deren followed in Seabrook’s wake. Literature, performances, and film, as well as complementary ethnographic records for each follow from Dunham (Dances of Haiti, 1983), Hurston (Tell My Horse, 1938), and Deren (Divine Horsemen, 1953). The artistic production of these significant cultural producers may better represent their experience of fieldwork in Haiti following the Occupation. Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Dunham’s exposure of Haitian dances across the world stage, and Deren’s experimental films better capture the reciprocal effect of the ethnographic process on each in their continued presentation to contemporary audiences. Literature directly related to their production appears later in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Arthur Flowers’s Another Good Loving Blues (1993), Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), and Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads (2005). These productive literatures and art forms actively engage in creating the transnational ideal of diaspora as we understand it today. All dance delicately with spirit.

ABSTRACT Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) is considered the primary service-delivery vehicle for integrating individuals with severe mental illness into the community. Research on the model suggests that it has been helpful in aiding service users to achieve basic levels of integration including stabilized housing and maintaining financial and social security (Bond, Drake, Mueser & Latimer, 2001; Mueser, Bond, & Drake, 2001). However, critics of the model emphasize its limited success in enabling higher-order aspects of integration such as mainstream employment, recreation and socialization (Estroff, 1981; Gomory, 1998, 2001, 2002a, 2002b). These are fundamental criticisms given the significant investment in the model by policy makers. The rationale for the failure to promote higher-order integration typically rests on two central assumptions: a) service users are incapable of realizing full integration; and b) practitioners lack the training, skills, and philosophical base required to foster full integration. By focusing on the personal and professional characteristics of practitioners and service users, these views serve to obscure organizing structures operating at organizational, systemic, and social levels that encourage common ways of thinking about and carrying out community integration practice. The concern of this thesis is to explicate the impact of these organizing structures on the everyday practices engaged in by individual practitioners. In particular this thesis focuses on how practice becomes shaped by external structures that overrule both personal and professional values and intentions. The current study used the method of institutional ethnography to examine the impact of organizing structures of ACT in shaping how community integration practice is conceptualized, carried out, and accounted for on an everyday basis. The study findings are threefold. First, they suggest that organizing structures foster goals associated with protection as opposed to empowerment. Second, they reveal that organizing structures advance an individual-level focus over a social-level focus, prohibiting the community capacity building and environmental change necessary for fostering social autonomy and empowerment. Third, they show that organizing structures encourage practices discordant with integration, resulting in contradictory and therefore inconsistent attempts to facilitate higher-order aspects of integration. The power of these organizing structures is such that the personal and professional intentions of providers to facilitate broad community integration are consistently overruled within the context of everyday practice. The results of this study highlight the powerful role played by organizing structures in shaping community integration practice and provide an important theoretical model for planning, implementing, and evaluating models of service delivery for individuals with severe mental illness. / Thesis (Ph.D, Rehabilitation Science) -- Queen's University, 2007-09-27 15:10:26.391