Psychological, sociological and feminist models of understanding domestic violence have contributed to the development of interventions that seek to raise awareness, keep women safe, and help them to create new lives for themselves and their families. Research literature has extensively paid attention to the ways in which women both live with and move away from domestic violence, documenting how they employ strategies of survival and resistance. The research methods employed to investigate domestic violence includes a range of quantitative and qualitative methods with particular emphasis placed upon enabling women to tell their stories in as authentic a way as possible. This thesis adds to the literature by considering how women construct what will be referred to as transitional stories of domestic violence, within which they imagine their future selves and develop the means to become what they hope for. The methodology used is original within the study of domestic violence in its synthesis of arts-based, feminist and participatory methods. The adopted epistemology sought to value the use of embodiment and imagination in the construction of knowledge, both of which are considered to be situated. The use of an arts-based method is chosen to enable a different way for women to tell their stories about their response to living with and transitioning away from domestic violence. The evaluation of this methodology shows that it is a valid form of enabling women to have the embodied subjectivity of their experiences and imagination witnessed in a way that complements the written and spoken word, whilst better allowing the physical and metaphorical quality of their stories to come to the foreground. Following a feminist agenda, attention is paid to the influence of gender upon the researcher’s findings, and upon the participants’ and researchers’ reflexive engagement with the research process. The research shows that the home has special significance for women as they transition away from domestic violence and plan for their future. The home becomes a physical manifestation and container for women’s hopes and fears for a harmonious future that often incorporates the desire for the return to the idea of a complete family. Relationships with family, friends and services are shown to be both enablers of women’s agency and resistance. Those same relationships are also shown to be capable of acting as barriers to women’s positive transitional journeys. The findings show that attention needs to be placed upon the appearance of women’s agency within the everyday tasks of creating and maintaining a home and managing relationships as they move away from domestic violence. The findings also point to the need for services to work harder on empowering women, both by adequately listening to the stories told about their pasts and hopes for the future, and by helping them to achieve their plans through challenging the limitations imposed by policies and economics.

Bodily Force and Rhetorical Function in the Afro-Brazilian Art Form of Capoeira examines how practitioners of capoeira, a dance-like martial art developed by African slaves in Brazil during the slave trade, enact forms of contestation, resistance, and accommodation through their performances, as well as how the practice of capoeira results in productions and interruptions of social and cultural hierarchies. Building upon historical research, interviews, and participant observations at a local capoeira site, I argue that the movements, gestures, and facial expressions that drive communicative performances between two or more practitioners elucidate intersections between rhetoric, performance, and the body. More specifically, I demonstrate that the capoeira body operates as a physical force that serves a variety of rhetorical functions, including intervening in social structures of dominance, performing identities, recording histories, establishing relational politics, and inviting self and communal transformation. Interrogating the art form's colonial past, I suggest that capoeira has the potential to teach anti-oppression practices and to serve as a locus of coalition building across multiple lines of difference.

Yes / This paper is about three working class women academics in their 40s, who are at different phases in their career. I take a reflexive, feminist, (Reay 2000, 2004, Ribbens and Edwards, 1998) life story approach (Plummer, 2001) in order to understand their particular narratives about identity, complicity, relationships and discomfort within the academy, and then how they inhabit care-less spaces. However unique their narratives, I am able to explore an aspect of higher education – women and their working relationships – through a lens of care-less spaces, and argue that care-less-ness in the academy, can create and reproduce animosity and collusion. Notably, this is damaging for intellectual pursuits, knowledge production and markedly, the identity of woman academics. In introducing this work, I first contextualise women in the academy and define the term care-less spaces, then move onto discuss feminist methods. I then explore and critique in some detail, the substantive findings under the headings of ‘complicity and faking it’ and ‘publishing and collaboration’. The final section concludes the paper by drawing on Herring's (2013) legal premise, in the context of care ethics, as a way to interrogate particular care-less spaces within higher education.

This research is an ethnographic case study that asks the questions “what is transformation?” and “how does art transform individuals and their communities?” The narrative describes key moments in the researcher’s journey to South Africa in search of answers to these questions. Findings describe the village of Hamburg’s developing art practice, and include the artists’ own voices and views on this topic. Hamburg is a Xhosa village in South Africa that has faced many challenges due to the spread of HIV/AIDS. One response to the impact of HIV/AIDS on family and economic structures has been the development of an extensive community-based art practice, including large communal tapestry work. To engage questions regarding how visual art transforms people, the researcher reviewed existing Western and Eastern literature on transformation, and compared this with the Southern ethnographic interviews conducted whilst living in the village of Hamburg, where she joined the women for two months as they made their art. The interviews, which were informed by feminist thinking and community based action research, are deeply moving, and form the data from which conclusions were drawn. It iii  was found that the gritty, embodied nature of this community’s experience with transformative art processes can perhaps stimulate more inquiry into transformative art practice within art education itself, that, to date, does not engage much with a deliberate practice for human transformation. Findings in this study can also broaden the existing, sometimes disembodied, academic understandings around transformation within educational, therapeutic and spiritual discourses, which, to date, include mostly linear, hierarchical models, as well as anecdotal descriptions from mostly White, male perspectives. As yet, there is not much inquiry outside of feminist discourse into women’s transformation, which tends to be more organic and community orientated. The researcher’s findings suggest that literature on transformation through art is needed within art education, which should include female, Black African experiences. The researcher’s conclusions are applied to classroom and studio practice, where she challenges educators, researchers and practitioners within art education to take the link between art and transformation much more seriously, as a powerful technology for growth, empowerment and resilience. Findings can also be applied to other disciplines such as feminism, art therapy, education, psychology and spirituality. / Graduate / 0273 / 0357 / 0621 / sadnams@uvic.ca