This thesis examines some of the ways in which phenomenology might be applied to the representation of landscape experience within contemporary art practice. In particular, the thesis examines how embodied landscape experience, informed by an understanding of phenomenology, might be articulated by contemporary art practice that uses the media of film and digital video. The thesis also questions ways in which time might contribute to an understanding of such a representation of the landscape. Based on a critical analysis of landscape experience and its representation in art practice, the thesis identifies critical omissions both within the aligned disciplines of cultural anthropology and art history, particularly in instances where art has been employed ineptly as a tool for critical enquiry. Through a conceptual analysis of phenomenology, cultural archaeology, cultural anthropology, theories of technology, art history, critical film theory and art practice, this project makes a critical examination of new ways in which art can articulate phenomenological notions of landscape experience, both in the forms of a written exegesis and in examples of my own practice. To these ends, the writing of Christopher Tilley and Tim Ingold is examined in order to draw upon some of the ways in which cultural archaeology and cultural anthropology use Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and James Gibson’s ecological theory of visual perception to understand an embodied engagement with the landscape. Following an expanded phenomenological examination of landscape the thesis identifies ways in which cultural anthropology has used painting. This examination is followed by an analysis of the work of Mike Michael and Don Ihde in order to determine the role played by technology within the mediation of experience and its representation in art. The writing of Joyce Brodsky is examined to analyse the relationship between embodied experience and art practice and, using Sobchack’s analysis, the thesis describes ways in which Merleau-Ponty’s idea of reversibility can explain moving imagery as the perception and expression of experience. As part of the method of analysis, a case study is conducted into how phenomenological ideas that have been identified in association with landscape experience might be understood within Tacita Dean’s work Disappearance at Sea. An analysis of phenomenological notions of landscape experience within my own art practice has led to the generation of a body of practice that includes film and digital video media. Key examples of my art practice have been selected that can articulate this thesis. Specifically, a 16mm film, Line, and a digital video, Length II provide evidence of contemporary art practice articulating an experience of the landscape from a phenomenological viewpoint. Within the production of moving imagery, there is a sequence of human actions and technological interventions that can be considered in phenomenological terms. Through a reflection of my own embodied experience - extended by vehicles, cameras and their associated technology - Line and Length II pay specific attention to how the placement of a camera and its associated technology mediates the mobile character of an experience of the landscape. Central to this enquiry has been the contention that through a rigorous application of phenomenology, a new mode of making moving imagery emerges, specifically one that gives particular emphasis to the placement of the camera and its associated technology in order to reveal the dynamic relationship between a perceiver and their environment in the twenty-first century.

“It’s not just about the money”: the meaning of work for people with severe and enduring mental health problems – an interpretative phenomenological analysis. Aim – to explore the meaning of work for people living with severe and enduring mental health problems. Method - Ten participants were recruited and interviewed initially; eight at six months; four at eighteen months. A longitudinal approach was chosen to facilitate capturing changes in the participants’ life worlds. The method used was interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Findings - Three overarching themes were identified. Building and maintaining an occupational identity expressed the ways in which participants used occupations as the building blocks of an evolving identity; some viewed work as a socially valued way of doing this. Most of the participants had aspirations towards work, and occupation in a broad sense was seen as an essential component of recovery from mental ill health. Work, and other ways of belonging encapsulated the need to feel connected to others. Many of the participants envisaged working as a way of achieving this. Others had experienced work as isolating and excluding, and had found leaving or changing work roles to be liberating. Work values, personal values; the need for accord reflected the attitudes that participants held about the role of work in their lives, and in society. These views reflected ambivalent feelings about working which often seemed to stem from distressing experiences of work. The longitudinal nature of the study facilitated engagement with the developing narratives and exploration of the changes and consistencies in the participants’ meaning making about work. Conclusion - work may contribute to recovery, as can other forms of occupational engagement. Attention to identity building and fostering a sense of belonging is important. Implications relate to the need for service providers to utilise a flexible approach to occupational participation.

Evidence suggests that people with mental illness experience discrimination by being stigmatised both by the general public and by healthcare professionals. The experience of stigma may result in a delay in seeking professional help, loss of self-esteem and is a serious inhibitor to recovery and social inclusion. Stigma and discrimination are pervasive and despite a number of UK based campaigns, there appears to be no reduction in prevalence. This research compared public attitudes towards mental illness and the mentally ill with mental health service users' perceptions of stigma, identified perceptions of stigma by mental health service users, quantified and qualified these perceptions alongside reported accounts of being stigmatised and made recommendation for strategies to reduce the stigma experienced by people with mental illness. A cross-sectional survey was undertaken and involved the use of a 35-item attitude scale, employed with 132 members of the public and 132 self-selecting service users. Semi-structured interviews and Personal Construct Psychology Repertory Grid techniques were employed with subsets of the sample. Qualitative data was subjected to Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Quantitative data was analysed using inferential statistical tests and Principal Component Analysis. The perception of stigma amongst service users was relatively high and appeared to be pervasive. Male service users reported higher perceptions of stigma than females. The combination of being stigmatised by mental health professionals and the general public appeared to result in self stigma and social exclusion. Recommendations include addressing the causes and mechanism of stigmatisation, the inclusion of service users' perspectives in research and raising awareness, amongst mental health professionals, on how their practice may impact on service users. Further research should address why there is a higher perception of stigma amongst male service users.

This thesis -- originally entitled “Reckoning the Unnamed Fabric”, both a cultural study of the poetics of ecological consciousness and the ecology of poetic consciousness -- investigates the post-Romantic legacy informing John Burnside’s (b. 1955) poetry from The hoop (1988) to The Light Trap (2002) as a case study. The thesis argues that a developing aesthetic form and movement in subject derive from Burnside’s increasing involvement with ecological thought and practice. This move to the poetry of the oikos begins with an investigation of the self through the reconciliation of subject with object (or human with nature), and latterly has moved into a sustained reflection upon the idea of dwelling. This thesis relates the chronological development across Burnside’s nature poetry to an aesthetic infused with religious iconography and language, which via an evolving motif-poem of ‘world-soul’ or ‘communal fabric’ increases in its secular and empirical inflection. I read Burnside’s elevation of historical materialism s a progression in Wordsworthian craft and as a result of the poet’s pragmatic reflection on dwelling; I argue that the poetic consolidation of the intrinsic value of nature as an active and guiding spirit promotes nature less as a place for inhabitants than as the site and point of relation. The argument responds to Burnside’s transatlantic perspective from which he questions what it means to live as a spirit, and what a poetics of ecology can achieve in respect to the human subjective lyric and the need to transcend the human into the collective. To address these questions, which are implicit in Burnside's oeuvre, I draw upon Heideggerian poetics and American post-Transcendentalist Romanticism. I locate Burnside’s poetics within philosophical, aesthetic, and ecological frameworks. First, Burnside’s poetry is primarily a poetics of ontology that understands the ‘I’ within the midst of things yet underpinned by epistemology/hermeneutics; second, Burnside exhibits neo-Romantic poetry that has engaged with Modern American poetry -- it is this fusion that I call post-Romantic; third, the ecological constitutes both Burnside’s political stance and his aesthetic-poetic stance. I read the latter as a reflection of Jonathan Bate’s notion of the ecopoem as the “post-phenomenological inflection of high Romantic poetics”, an idea which is most apposite when read in relationship with Burnside’s path towards the metaphysical inscribed in the historical.

Driven by research studies and national targets, sedation practices in Intensive care Units (ICU) are undergoing change. Traditionally, ventilated patients in ICUs were kept deeply sedated and only gradually ‘weaned off’ sedation. However, current evidence supports a more ‘wakeful’ patient with the introduction of ‘sedation holds’ encouraging them to regain consciousness (Kress et al. 2000). There is little research exploring ICU nurses’ assessment and management of sedation. Employing a Heideggerian, hermeneutic phenomenological approach to enquiry, the study sought to provide insights into the world of the critical care nurse, nursing with technology, and specifically their beliefs surrounding sedation practices and how organisational factors, knowledge and personal experiences influence their clinical decisions in the care of the ventilated patient. The setting was the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, ICU and the purposive sample consisted of 16 ICU nurses with diverse critical care nursing experience. Bedside interviews, utilising an aide memoir, elicited narratives about the nurses’ experiences of sedation practice and a novel sedation monitor (responsiveness). The phenomenological analysis drew upon a number of existing frameworks to guide enquiry. The researcher engaged with the ‘hermeneutic circle’, acknowledging her pre-understandings and using these as a platform to move between the whole of the research and the parts, the descriptions and narratives offered, to develop new knowledge. Themes emerged that demonstrated patients’ sedation status directly impacted upon the nurses’ ICU lived experiences and left them in a state of disequilibrium regarding the requirement to deliver research based care, the desire to deliver holistic care and the duty to deliver safe care. The nurses perceived sedation holds and ‘wakefulness’ as resulting in patient agitation and distress which affected patient safety and comfort. However, the nurses equally felt a pressure of obligation to the doctors to perform such evidence based sedation holds. They described the struggling to maintain patient safety and manage their own fears and anxieties and organisational constraints, whilst experiencing guilt, blame and failure associated with their behavioural discordance with the prescribed decisions and their own clinical decision making processes and strategies. Team work between the two professions and effective leadership is evidently less than ideal. Consequently the implementation of changes in sedation practice is failing to meet either the national targets or to respond to the nurses’ concerns regarding their patient’s short term wellbeing. On both counts this potentially impairs the pursuit of best practice.

Humans naturally communicate, but choose to use tools. They use them to make sense of things, even to their own detriment and the detriment of others. These tools often receive the attention, instead of the human interaction. Aristotle's notion of humans as social animals has been carried into media ecology scholarship by Arendt, Burke, Ellul, Mumford, Postman, and Ricoeur. Social media scholarship has often focused on the tool and how it affects humanity. However, a phenomenological approach is necessary, as humans communicate with or without these tools. This approach will follow multiple steps. The first is through an understanding of the historical lens of civic discourse from antiquity to contemporary society. The second step is to examine why Aristotle's concept of ethos still matters in social media. The third step warns how social media could be shaped into a “knack” environment and lead to a synthetic ethos. The fourth step analyzes how interpersonal communication interacts with social media, as well as how a noble friendship can be established in social media. The fifth step exposes how humanity is unfortunately using technology to revise modernism in a postmodern age. The sixth step details how humans can reconcile social media-in-itself with social media-for-itself. This multi-step approach seeks to understand how social media fit in humanity, and also how humans fit in social media. These steps puts a focus on humans having choice and free will, and thus, responsibility. The approach in this document is more concerned with understanding the medium and then understanding how choice affects human action and direction. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts; / Communication and Rhetorical Studies / PhD; / Dissertation;

This project engages the Existential Phenomenology of Hazel E. Barnes to demonstrate that in being-in-the-world, the world and engagement with others are prior to being. Barnes makes a significant contribution to Existential Phenomenology with her idea of good faith where, not naïve to human suffering, situatedness provides meaning and human relations offer opportunity for learning. After providing a biographical and philosophical background of Barnes, discussion turns to the idea of mythodology posited as an interpretive approach for studying the human condition. Myth continues as a cultural element for Existential dwellings, where group-in-fusion praxis is situated within organizations. Discussion then moves from group to Existential interpersonal relations with looking-at-the-world-together, which involves love, imagination, and communicative learning to fulfill projects and find meaning in organizations. Dwelling places and engagement with others provide a meeting of horizons where Existential leaders emerge. Ideas are put into practice with Existential education, an alternative to Humanistic education, where universities may be dwelling places for the Existential engagement of ideas. Existential education does not provide answers or prescription, but offers hope for enlarging students' existence with others in the life world. The works of Barnes demonstrate a necessity of a `communicative turn' in business ethics and leadership studies to be responsive to the demands of the historical moment. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts; / Communication and Rhetorical Studies / PhD; / Dissertation;

This thesis seeks to explore, problematize and critique the violence of norms—normative violence, especially gender norms and heteronormativity-- in contemporary political life. It focuses on the interaction and engagement between norms and the body, and demonstrates that normative violence manifests itself in a twofold way: norms not only regulate, normalize and manage bodies that are already intelligible into reified forms, but also through their exclusionary logic produce unintelligible bodies that are unlivable. Situated within contemporary feminist and queer movements, this thesis bridges between aporias and problems emergent from them and critical readings of Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This thesis identifies and indicates normative violence and erasures inherited in the popular rhetoric of the movements and diverse theoretical accounts of the body. Finally, the argument is made that feminist and queer readings of Foucault and Merleau-Ponty provide possibilities for undoing normative violence by resignifying norms temporally and performatively via collective action. / Graduate / janicefe@uvic.ca

« Nous ? ». Interroger l’apparition diffuse du phénomène collectif, à-plusieurs, « nous ». Utiliser les parenthèses de la méthode (epoché) pour entrevoir le soi du phénomène collectif et échapper aux guillemets métaphysiques, « nous », et à la rature ontologique, nous. Penser le Nous ! depuis l’évolution des différentes réductions phénoménologiques, retracer une histoire de la méthode au travers le phénomène de l’inter-subjectivité. D’abord, par la tentative de la réduction transcendantale à l’objectité d’un « nous transcendantal » obtenu par « analogie accouplante » : envers l’autre comme moi (Husserl). Heidegger et la réduction ontologique à l’étantité comme déploiement de la question d’un Dasein avec des autres (Mitdasein). Lévinas et la réduction éthique au visage de l’autre, pour l’autre. Socialité première, au-delà de l’essence, autrement qu’être, ancrée dans la dissymétrie originaire d’un « nous responsable : Je-Vous, vous-Je ». Enfin, la réduction érotique (Marion) au visage de l’autre aimé, détaché du visage universel de l’éthique car individué par son amour ; lui aussi aimant comme moi : « nous amoureux : Je-Tu, Tu-Je ». Mais pas encore Nous ! Le « nous » transcendantal en reste aux vécus de conscience du sujet constituant. Le Mitdasein n’atteint pas l’autre en tant que tel, nous. L’universel de l’éthique se perd dans l’anonymat et l’érotique comporte la déception du tiers en départ. Pouvons nous penser le Nous ! en phénoménologie ? Tout « Je » est un « nous », tout « Vous » est un « nous », mais Nous !? Qu’en est-il de Nous !? Serait-ce un « nos-otros », un Nos-otros des-plazados ? / “We?”. To question the confusing appearance of the collective phenomenon, ‘by-many’, “we”. Utilize the method’s brackets (epoché) in order to investigate the self of the collective phenomenon and escape thus the metaphysical quotation marks “we”, and the ontological deletion, we. To think the “we” throughout the evolution of the different phenomenological reductions, retrace a history of its method focusing on the inter-subjective phenomenon. First of all, through the endeavor of the transcendental reduction to objectity of a “transcendental we” obtained by “analogical pairing”: towards the other as me (Husserl). Heidegger and his ontological reduction to being-ness as the deployment of the questioning of a Dasein with others (Mitdasein). Lévinas and the ethical reduction to the face of the other, for the other. The initial sociability, beyond essence, otherwise than being, anchored in the original dissymmetry of a “responsible we: I-Thou, Thou-I”. Finally, the erotic reduction (Marion) to the face of the loved one, detached from the universal face of ethics thus individuated by its love ; him loving as me : “enamored we: I-You, You-I”. But not yet We! The transcendental “we” rests in the conscience of the constituting subject. The Mitdasein does not reach the other as such, we. The ethical universal losses itself in the anonymity and the erotic entails the deception of the departing third person. Can we think the We! In phenomenology? Every “I” is a “we”, every “You” is a “we”, but We!? What about We!? Could it be a “nos-otros”, a Nos-otros des-plazados?

As computing technology has become a vital part of everyday life, studies have increasingly scrutinized the underlying meaning of computational things. As different devices become interwoven with daily practices and routines, there is a growing interest in understanding not only their functional meaning in computational terms but also their meaning in relation to other non-computation artefacts. This thesis investigates how people relate to artefacts and how their individual values and attitudes affect this relationship.  The analysis is based on four ethnographic studies, which look at the richness of ordinary interactions with technology to understand the impact of technology upon practice and experience. The process through which humans develop a relationship to artefacts is framed as a continuous series of encounters, through which the individual constantly reshapes their relationship to things.  Artefacts are seen as lines in the mesh of everyday life, and the encounters are the intersections between lines. This approach–grounded in phenomenology and paired with an anthropological understanding of everyday life–reconceptualises understanding of the processes of adaption, meaning-making, disposing and recycling. The work reveals how human relations to all kinds of things–in the form of meaning–is continually transforming. Core to this understanding is the cultural relative essence that becomes perceived of the artefacts themselves. This essence deeply affects the way we encounter and thus interact with technology, as well as objects more broadly. In the daily interaction with computing devices we can observe that computing technology alters the mesh on a different level than non-computational artefacts: digital interfaces pull our lines together, bundle experiences an affect how we encounter the material and the social world. This enables computing devices to have meanings distinct from non-computing technology. To go further, computing is itself a mode of existence – a crucial difference in things that helps us understand the complexity of the material world.