Abstract of Making Their Way—Making Art and Making Money: The working lives of visual artists with disabilities Susan Agatha Maley People with disabilities have marked lower rates of employment than people without disabilities in both Australia and the United States, the countries chosen for this research inquiry. That this is the case decades after the introduction of anti-discrimination laws in these developed democratic countries highlights the continuum of constraints people with disabilities still experience in securing work. Some of these constraints include socially discriminatory attitudes and perceptions, the lack of available accommodations and adaptations in work settings (and the misconception that they will be onerous and expensive to implement), lack of accessible transportation, the unavailability of work within established job markets and the restrictions of vocational rehabilitation and disability employment programs’ past focus on existing jobs in organisational settings. These constraints have a negative impact on the overall quality of life for many people with disabilities as employment is a key component to individual self-sufficiency and personal fulfilment and also crucial to inclusion in community and social settings. Among the notable initiatives to address these persistent inequities are research-informed projects focusing on self-employment as a viable alternative mode of employment to the established job market. Within the last decade, myriad research reports, model demonstration projects, and a US national research program, funded by the Office of Disability Employment Policy, have been demonstrating the success of self-employment in expanding self-determined income generation. Within this burgeoning and productive investigation on self-employment, one gap is that there has been little focused inquiry on creative work. Such a void is significant since the predominant work mode among visual artists is self-employment, albeit sometimes supplemented with other arts, and non-arts related work. This study addresses the lack of investigation of artists’ modes of work by examining the working lives of practicing professional visual artists with a range of significant physical, sensory and neurological disabilities. There are a number of reasons for this research study’s focus on the area of visual arts. Visual arts has been documented to be one of the largest groups among artistic disciplines in studies in both Australia and the US, as well as European countries. Within this sizable arts arena, there are established and emerging markets for sale of visual arts products. This discipline can also offer flexible work locations, hours and adaptations in art making. Thus, there may be numerous benefits to pursuing careers in the visual arts for creative people with disabilities. Yet, little is known about the lived work experience of practicing visual artists with disabilities and their career strategies. Thus, an exploration of visual artists with disabilities working in a range of mediums such as this research study can reveal new, and potentially useful, knowledge about their methods of art-making and marketing, adaptations in the design and execution of their work, their experiences of disability and the facilitators and obstacles they face when preparing for and pursuing their working lives as artists. This research study is based on the results of in-depth, face-to-face interviews of twenty-one visual artists, eleven in Australia and ten in the US, who used multiple artistic mediums. The conceptual lens for the analysis is intersectionality with an underlying critical realism foundation. These theories were used to explore the intersecting social positions of being a person with a disability and a practicing artist and the related interplay of agency and structure in shaping the careers of these artists. The main findings from this research focus on how the artists in this study made their way, made art and made money. These findings commence with an examination of the early shaping and continued sustaining influences in their artistic development and education. It continues with an exploration of the influence of their disability experiences on making art including their adaptive methods and conceptual process. The analysis continues with a focus on factors involving their means of making money, marketing and self-promotion methods and professional progressions. The findings conclude with an analysis of aids and obstacles these artists with disabilities experienced during interactions with a range of organisations including disability employment and vocational rehabilitation counselling and financial support agencies, arts educational institutions, art galleries and arts and disability agencies. Highlights of the findings are that the majority of the artists in the study earned their income from arts and arts related work, that they made active use of their own personal and collective agency to meet their artistic and professional goals and that their actions influenced structural change. They also positioned aspects of their social and personal identity to best suit their career progressions and some made artistic use of their conceptions of disability with innovative impact on social conceptions of disability. Implications of these findings are that artists experiencing disability developed strategic skills to negotiate difficult terrain while forging an income-producing arts practice. In addition, their creation of new options for themselves, and other artists with disabilities, has wider implications for improving equity for artists with disabilities.

This thesis shows that participation is an important and comprehensive concept for young people. The aim of the thesis is to explore young people’s perspectives on and experiences of participation in school. Young people are in this research project understood as competent participants and as valuable contributors in research. Young people (aged 13–19 years) are involved as both research partners and research respondents. The design is explorative and mixed methods are used. Study 1 describes an interactive research circle with young people as research partners. Participation and asymmetric responsibility are identified as integral to research with young people. Study 2 describes a youth survey about young people’s participation that was conducted by the research partners in the research circle. This study shows that young people’s opportunities and abilities to communicate are crucial to their participation.  Supportive relations are an important aspect and the young people describe that they want adults to support them in taking responsibility themselves. Study 3 is based on the results of the youth survey and describes a model of young people’s perspectives on participation. Viewed from young people’s perspectives, participation is shown to include social, educational and decision-making dimensions. Communication is identified as a central participatory dimension. This study describes how participation in school is created in both horizontal and vertical relations. Study 4 is about participation and exposure to bullying and threats in school and is informed by the results of the youth survey. This study shows how students with disabilities and especially students with multiple disabilities are in a vulnerable situation. They face greater risks of being excluded from participatory dimensions in school or of being more exposed to degrading treatment if they do participate. Girls with multiple disabilities seem to be in an extra vulnerable situation. Overall, this research project shows that young people’s perspectives are an important complement to adults’ perspectives on participation in school.

Submitted by Viviane Lima da Cunha (viviane@biblioteca.ufpb.br) on 2018-02-02T13:18:05Z No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 1031979 bytes, checksum: 49889da6b7f9f772fa097a152db58656 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-02-02T13:18:05Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 1031979 bytes, checksum: 49889da6b7f9f772fa097a152db58656 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-06-30 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / As the historical process started to promote the different waves of feminism, other aspects also emerged based on the need for representation of a multiplicity of identities that began to be defended within the feminist movement. Black women who did not feel represented by traditional feminism, make up their own mobilization space, black feminism. Including in this movement the topic of racism, beyond sexism and class issue. This paper focuses on the emancipation of black women, we will develop the research in order to understand and critically analyze the conception of women's emancipation and the role of the black feminism for the emancipation of black women. The research will be conducted with the Bamidele organization - Black Women's Organization of Paraiba, carrying out the characterization of the organization, the profiles of members and women participating in the projects carried out by Bamidele, in order to analyze how the organization understands and carry out the emancipation of black women. / Conforme o processo histórico foi promovendo as diferentes ondas do feminismo, outras vertentes também surgiram com base na necessidade de representação de uma multiplicidade de identidades que começaram a ser defendidas dentro do movimento feminista. As mulheres negras que não se sentiam representadas pelo feminismo tradicional, compõem seu próprio espaço de mobilização, o feminismo negro. Inserindo nesse movimento a pauta do racismo, além do sexismo e da questão de classe. O presente trabalho propõe o direcionamento do olhar para emancipação da mulher negra, desenvolveremos a pesquisa na perspectiva de compreender e analisar criticamente a concepção da emancipação feminina e a atuação do feminismo negro para a emancipação das mulheres negras. Com isso, realizaremos a pesquisa com a organização Bamidelê – Organização de Mulheres Negras da Paraíba, realizando a caracterização da organização, os perfis da militantes e das mulheres que participam dos projetos realizados pela Bamidelê, a fim de analisar como essa organização compreende e efetiva a emancipação das mulheres negras.

There are several studies regarding immigrants in Sweden with focus on integration and their situation in the labour market. However, few studies have focused on people with immigrant background and their view on identity, and even fewer have focused on women. In this paper, the aim is to highlight how young women with immigrant background in Sweden choose to identify, explained through an intersectional perspective. The research is conducted through qualitative semi-structured interviews, containing a small group of eight women. The results were presented through four different themes: identify factors, society’s impact on identity, “Swedishness” and experiences and challenges. The results were analysed by using previous research and using intersectionality as the theoretical framework. The results showed that aspects such as family, culture and social environment were some of the factors that affected their identity. Furthermore, the majority of the respondents felt that society had a large impact on them and that society’s view of “Swedishness” plays a big role in their identity perception. Lastly, the respondents shared experiences and challenges that they encounter in the Swedish society, such as exotification and racism. Concluding this, it was found that societal structures contribute to the women’s experiences of discrimination and the challenges they face because of their multiple identities.

This thesis attends to recent calls and decades of demands to de-whiten and de-colonise the discipline of Geography and higher education more broadly. This manuscript contributes unique empirical research and analysis on race, gender, sexuality and everyday life to geographies of intersectionality, visceral geographies of (micro)aggressions, and toxic geographies. Intersectionality is a Black Feminist framework that centres the entanglement of race and gender, (micro)aggressions are often unconscious and subtle insults experienced at the scale of the body by marginalized people, and toxic geographies are spaces with high concentrations of (micro)aggressions. The main objectives are to explore the co-constitutive nature of (micro)aggressions and space, engage intersectionality in practice through Participatory Action Research (PAR), and to centre the lives and promote the agency of students of colour, women, queer, transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) students in US higher education. The empirical research of this thesis is a PAR project and team composed of eleven people, myself included, on race, gender, and sexuality based (micro)aggressions at an elite US residential institution of higher education. The PAR team collectively curated a public art event where the university community was invited to share stories of (micro)aggressions experienced, witnessed, and produced. The PAR team’s efforts resulted in a powerful encounter that led to changes in policy and practice to mitigate toxicity in one particular place. The analysis of the empirical research involves an exploration of the fluidity, fixity, and spatiality of toxic geographies along the axes of race, gender and sexuality and within the context of the academic-military-prison industrial complex (AMPIC), a framework of structural violence. In addition, this thesis applies the higher-level analytic of intersectionality to the empirical research, connecting the micro level of (micro)aggressions, the meso level of the PAR team, and the macro level of the AMPIC to provide an empirical example of the complexity of toxic geographies, and an avenue for future research, by highlighting the material impact of the neoliberal university on the mental health of students of colour, women, queer, and TGNC students.

abstract: California's Proposition 8 revoked the right to marriage for that state's gay and lesbian population. Proposition 8 was a devastating defeat for gay marriage movements across the nation. The primary rhetorical strategy of the No on 8 campaign was a reliance on a Civil Rights analogy that constructed the gay and lesbian movement for marriage as a civil right akin to those fought for by African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. Analogizing the gay and lesbian struggle for gay marriage with the racial struggles of the Civil Rights Movement exposed a complicated relationship between communities of color and gay and lesbian communities. This project reads critical rhetoric and intersectionality together to craft a critical intersectional rhetoric to better understand the potentialities and pitfalls of analogizing the gay rights with Civil Rights. I analyze television ads, communiques of No on 8 leadership, as well as state level and national court decisions related to gay marriage to argue alternative frameworks that move away from analogizing and move towards coalition building. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Communication 2011

Le mouvement punk a souvent été considéré comme le premier au sein de la musique populaire américaine à inclure un message féministe. Cette thèse vise cependant à démontrer qu’un tel message existait déjà entre 1967 et 1976 dans différentes musiques populaires car nombre de chanteuses et musiciennes s’inspirèrent de la seconde vague féministe ou y prirent activement part. L’étude porte sur la carrière de différentes artistes, notamment de Nina Simone Yoko Ono, Betty Davis, Buffy Sainte-Marie et Janis Joplin, et analyse leurs albums de musiques populaires et leurs pochettes, leurs concerts et leurs affiches ou encore différents entretiens qu’elles ont eu.La thèse met d’abord en lumière l’implication directe des chanteuses et musiciennes au sein de la seconde vague féministe américaine. Elle analyse les dynamiques complexes entre un mouvement régulièrement accusé de racisme et de classisme, et des artistes qui lièrent leur carrière musicale et leur participation au bouillonnement social de la période. Le rapport qu’elles entretenaient à l’industrie musicale, à la presse et aux fans est une autre facette de leur démarche féministe. L’image que ces femmes renvoyaient constitue alors un terrain de luttes central et l’acceptation de leur mise à l’écart de la société mainstream leur permit d’utiliser la figure féministe de la sorcière pour s’affirmer et espérer atteindre une forme d’émancipation personnelle ou professionnelle. / The punk movement has often been considered the first in American popular music to include a feminist message. However, this dissertation aims at demonstrating that such a message already existed in popular music between 1967 and 1976, as many female singers and musicians took inspiration from the second-wave feminist movement or actively participated in it. This study focuses in particular on the musical careers of Nina Simone, Yoko Ono, Betty Davis and Janis Joplin, and analyses their albums and covers, their concerts and their posters, or interviews given by artists.This work first sheds light on the direct involvement of female singers and musicians in the American second-wave feminist movement. It analyzes the complex dynamics between a movement that has regularly been accused of racism and classism, and artists who linked their career with an involvement in the social movements of their time. The way they dealt with the music industry, the press, and fans is another aspect of their feminist approach. The artists’ image then constitutes a key source of struggles, and these women managed to utilize the feminist figure of the witch to empower themselves by claiming their otherness in the public and private spheres.

abstract: This study explores experiences of women as they pursue post-secondary computing education in various contexts. Using in-depth interviews, the current study employs qualitative methods and draws from an intersectional approach to focus on how the various barriers emerge for women in different types of computing cultures. In-depth interviews with ten participants were conducted over the course of eight months. Analytical frameworks drawn from the digital divide and explorations of the role of hidden curricula in higher education contexts were used to analyze computing experiences in earlier k-12, informal, workplace, and post-secondary educational contexts to understand how barriers to computing emerge for women. Findings suggest several key themes. First, early experiences in formal education contexts are alienating women who develop an interest in computing. Opportunities for self-guided exploration, play, and tinkering help sustain interest in computing for women of color to engage in computing at the post-secondary level. Second, post-secondary computing climates remain hostile places for women, and in particular, for women of color. Thirdly, women employ a combination of different strategies to navigate these post-secondary computing cultures. Some women internalized existing dominant cultures of computing programs. Others chose exclusively online programs in computing to avoid negative interactions based on assumptions about their identity categories. Some women chose to forge their own pathways through computing to help diversify the culture via teaching, creating their own businesses, and through social programs. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Justice Studies 2012

The purpose of this study was to discover what impact, if any, personal social networks have on an individual’s snowboarding skill progression, and whether any differences emerge based on gender, class, race, or age. Interviews with 10 demographically diverse snowboarders in Washington State, USA, were conducted and analyzed. The study revealed that personal social networks are highly important to snowboarding skill progression, with nine progression benefits noted. It was also found that the type of relationship was important, with the roles of gatekeepers, “godfathers,” and crews as the most critical for progression. Lastly, respondents indicated a variety of methods to access social networks, including social media, events, organizations, industry employment and through existing social networks. To further analyze the findings, an intersectional feminist reading of Castells networking theory was applied, with investigations into gender, race, class, and age patterns. The analysis revealed two overlapping values systems, one based on snowboarding ability and commitment, and one based on alignment of demographics with those who are most valued in the snowboarding world--mainly young, white, middle class men. The research closes with potential solution ideas to improve equitability and inclusion, which can be applied from the grassroots level to large-scale implementation.

This thesis addresses the confluence of the issues of drug use and migration. Using data that explores the needs of new communities, it argues that members of new minority communities who use drugs suffer double discrimination as migrants and as drug users. In failing to address this intersection of need, drug policy and practice compound this discrimination. The data for this submission was drawn from three empirical research projects undertaken for Peterborough Drug Action Team and the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse. These research projects addressed previously unreached communities and gathered new data. I published my work among peer-reviewed literature in the form of two journal articles and a book chapter. The research reports and published works inform my thesis. This submission reanalyses the research, using an intersectional lens to understand problems emanating from drug use in the context of migration. Black and minority ethnic people form a small proportion of problem drug users and their needs were under-researched until the late 1990s. A growing body of research has focused on established minority communities, while the drug treatment needs of members of new groups of migrants, whether economic migrants or refugees, remain hidden. My research addresses the impact of policy and practice on new communities. Engaging with members of hard-to-reach groups via community-based researchers, I gathered views about the attitudes and needs of new minority groups and developed a fresh perspective. My work demonstrates that while drug misusers suffer very real discrimination and stigma they also have strengths that could be assets for their recovery. I offer an analysis of the reasons why these strengths are underutilised by a policy agenda that perceives drug misuse as the main feature of the lives of service users in new minority communities. This perception dates back to the first phase of modern drug policy. During the 1980s drug use spread throughout the country, driven by the availability of cheap heroin. The demography of drug users shifted towards white, younger unemployed men and the drugs/crime nexus became the focus of attention. This determined policy development. The context and profile of drug use has changed since 1980; however the decisions of the past affect those taken in the present, and I argue that policy continues to view other issues in individuals' lives as subsidiary to drug use and its treatment. My work has had an impact in practice and in the academic literature and presents significant new knowledge. In order to respond effectively to drug use in new minority communities, policy and practice must employ an intersectional viewpoint, sharing power and developing coalitions of interest.