This art project examines aspects of New Zealand rural culture through the experience of a fictional performer, Mrs Gallagher. She questions the instrumental approach of agribusiness production, both as it enframes her domestic/farm helper role and the farming of animals. She uses the practices of everyday life, domestic crafts and appropriated materials of agribusiness to draw attention to the traditional ideological boundaries between the human/animal and assigned gender roles.Employing the tactics of 'making do', Mrs Gallagher uses inventive play to produce new forms that cross the domestic/agribusiness boundary. It is her aim that her acts of intervention and these hybrid forms will promote a more mindful use of technology and greater recognition of the continuity and difference that exists between humans and nature.All objects will be presented in site-orientated installation. Evidence of Mrs Gallagher's intervening acts is witnessed and documented using time-based media by a collaborative performer, the cultural theorist K. Joules Faraday.This thesis is constituted as 80% practice based work and 20% written exegesis.

This thesis explores the relation between two interpretations of chôra, drawn from a reading of Plato’s Timaeus. The first I label the elemental chôra. The second, I call the social chôra. The first chapter addresses the elements in Ionian philosophy, with an eye toward the political and social backdrop of the important cosmological notion of isonomia, law of equals. Here social and elemental are continuous. Chapter two looks at the next phase of Presocratic thought, Elea, specifically Parmenides and his influence on later thought, then turns to Heidegger’s reading of Parmenides’ through the key word of alêtheia. Finally, I offer a reading of Parmenides through a different key word— trust. The third chapter examines Plato’s cosmology in the Timaeus, focusing on the way the beginning of this dialogue inflects the dialogue in a political/social direction, putting the social chôra in tension with the elemental chôra that the body of the Timaeus’ discusses. In the fourth chapter, which examines the Phaedrus, this tension is inverted, since this dialogue on writing and justice set in what proves to be the mesmerizing and erotic elemental milieu of the world outside the walls of the polis. The second half of the dissertation turns to some modern thinkers within the phenomenological tradition or its wake who write about elementals. Chapter five examines Gaston Bachelard’s reveries on imagination which dream the natural world of fire, air, water, and earth from the standpoint of what he calls material and dynamic imagination, concepts that imply a strong sense of embodiment. Chapter six treats Levinas’ description of the elemental and fixes it in a stark relation to the human. I will suggest some possible points of contact between the elemental and the social in Levinas. Chapter seven turns to John Sallis’ analysis of the imagination as the means of access proper to the elemental in ways that differ from Bachelard. He position the earth as a fundamental other. I will suggest that in the end his position inherits Heidegger’s lack of emphasis on embodied and needy humanity. Alphonso Lingis offers his own unique reading of the elemental in a more Levinasian and Merleau-Pontian vein, speaking of the directives the world, both human and natural, puts to us, and returning to a philosophy of substance that puts the body in the picture. Chapter eight uses his thought to focus the issue of the dissertation.

Thesis (Ph. D. - Renewable Natural Resources)--University of Arizona, 1989. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 57-62).

Thesis (MEd)--University of Stellenbosch, 2007. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2007. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 43).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 1996. / Adviser: Frances S. Chew. Submitted to the Dept. of Biology. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 173-184). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2005. / Supervisor: Barry Allen. Includes bibliographical references (p. 188-200). Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Toronto, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-06, Section: A, page: 2092. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 241-253).

Thesis (M. Env. St.)--University of Adelaide, Mawson Graduate Centre for Environmental Studies, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 60-64).

Diss. (sammanfattning) Uppsala : Univ., 2007. / Härtill 4 uppsatser. Med sammanfattning på svenska.