Research exploring identity in the dementia context reveals that some aspects of personal and social identity persist in dementia while others evolve as persons living with dementia find ways to live with the changes in their lives. Leisure can be a space for developing and expressing identity and a space to resist stereotypical images and social expectations. Leisure may also play an important role in providing meaningful activity and engagement in life. Nonetheless, the meaning and experience of leisure in the context of dementia have received very little attention in the literature. Guided by the personhood movement, this phenomenological study aims to understand the subjective experience of dementia and the meaning and experience of leisure in the lives of persons living with early stage dementia. It explores leisure’s role in identity maintenance and/or development and leisure as a space for slowing down the process of dementia and resisting stigma associated with dementia and identity loss that could occur in dementia. Four persons living with early stage memory loss were recruited through local agencies to participate in this study. Each participant engaged in four conversational interviews following McCracken’s (1988) long interview format. Interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. Data were also collected through participant observation. The participants and I engaged in at least one of their favourite leisure activities together. Detailed field notes were recorded following each participant observation session. Using the method of photovoice, participants were given disposable cameras and asked to take photos of objects, places, and subjects that were meaningful for their leisure. These photos were discussed in Interview 2. Data were analysed in a manner consistent with phenomenology. Findings revealed that the participants experienced their journeys of memory loss within a paradox of challenge and hope. Participants juxtaposed the negative aspects of living with memory loss with the positive aspects of their lives. Essences of the experience include struggling with change, in which participants experience a wide variety of challenges as a result of being diagnosed with memory loss, including muddled thinking, fluctuating abilities, draining energy, frightening awareness, and disquieting emotions. However, participants counter these changes with the variety of ways in which they tackle life with dementia, including reconciling life as it is, battling through the changes by being proactive, living through relationships, being optimistic, and prolonging engagement in meaningful activity. Participants also experience threatening assaults on identities. Identity is threatened in terms of disappearing roles, losing independence, struggling with demeaning images and expectations, and losing confidence. However, participants juxtapose these threatening assaults by upholding identities. They do this by emphasizing abilities through leisure, changing perspectives, and engaging in life through leisure. This study deepens our current understandings of the subjective experience of dementia and leisure’s role within that experience. It helps us to understand the experience of leisure within the context of memory loss in terms of four lifeworld existentials: lived time, lived space, lived body, and lived other. The findings also contribute to our understandings of how persons living with dementia use leisure to resist a master status of dementia. Participants in this study used leisure as a space for resisting both the stigma of memory loss and the progression of memory loss. They overcome challenges in their leisure to demonstrate to themselves and others that they have many remaining abilities and are able to maintain valued aspects of their identities. The findings suggest that service providers, family members, and persons living with dementia should carefully consider the meaning of leisure and find ways to facilitate involvement in leisure that is meaningful for persons living with memory loss. In terms of future research, leisure in the context of relationships, including the importance of advocacy work for persons with dementia, should be examined. Although this study provides insight into the possibilities of alternative methods for understanding the experience of memory loss, further exploration is needed in this area.

This dissertation examines the specific forms of embodied suffering war and its refugee aftermath brings to female Sudanese refugees currently living in post-revolution Cairo, Egypt in order to illustrate the suffering and healing enacted within everyday life. These women, displaced from the Second Sudanese Civil War, are what I label Sudan's `Lost Girls.' The theoretical framework I employ in order to discuss their lives is a critical medical anthropology perspective based on the mindful body. I engage anthropological literature on the body in order to better understand the embodied suffering, sexual violence, and refugee aftermath of war. My research seeks to do this through distinctly gendered analyses and equally importantly, visual analyses. The research draws on historical news data collected through content analysis, contemporary qualitative data collected during fieldwork in the form of observation and interviews, with a particular emphasis on photovoice methodology. The work proposes that the humanizing aspect of emotions revealed by Lost Girls' photography of their everyday lives in urban Cairo allows for critical analysis of the many and varied ways in which women's `ordinary' experiences of war have been hidden, the implications of this for international responses to their suffering, and areas for exploring new, non-emergency refugee policies based on more ethnographically informed, gendered contextualizations of `extraordinary' violence.

How do mathematics teachers present themselves? The construct of identity–the stories mathematics teachers tell about themselves and their practice–is an important and understudied construct in understanding mathematics teaching. This study investigates the use of photo-elicitation/photovoice interviews with six high school algebra teachers. Each teacher captured or chose photographs of their “world”, then presented them during a formal interview. The teachers framed their mathematics teacher identity through three connected story types: Public Stories, the stories a teacher presents about their practice within a professional register, Private Stories, the stories about personal connections to practice shared only in closed spaces, and Touchstone Stories, the important stories a teacher constantly references but rarely shares. I found these teachers’ stories contained little about mathematics content or actual classroom practice. Rather, they positioned the teachers as isolated in their profession; the themes were about pain, being “othered”, or feeling powerless. Framing the identities of these six mathematics teachers through visual stories presented them as real, struggling humans. I posit this process of eliciting mathematics teaching identity through visual narrative is important to the field of mathematics education for three reasons: framing their identities helps mathematics teachers understand the complex lives of their own students, these narratives showcase the uniqueness of each mathematics teacher as an individual, and this process of telling stories is an empowering form of reflection. / text

This study investigates the resilience of children living at Sundara, a home in North India, which serves destitute and/or orphaned youth who live and are educated on site. Despite the adversity my participants have encountered they are thriving spiritually, emotionally, physically, and mentally. My research examines this phenomenon and the holistic education practices that support the children in engaging the process of resilience. I employ two theoretical frameworks to illuminate both what is occurring (resilience) and how it is occurring (holistic education). As resilience is understood as largely an external phenomenon, it then follows that the children of Sundara do not necessarily arise from families with the correct genetic disposition to allow them to engage this process (although this can definitely be a factor). Rather, they are educated and raised in such a way to make resilience a possibility. I seek to understand the role holistic education plays in the resilience process at work in Sundara. To this effect, two questions central to my study are: What constellation of factors is present at Sundara that enables children to participate in a community of resilience? What kinds of holistic educational practices support the children’s participation in this community? To perform this research in a way that honours the relational and holistic way of life at Sundara, I utilize a method inspired by photovoice and I draw upon poetic inquiry as a part of my exploration. My findings indicate that the holistic practices of the home create abundant opportunities for resilience. The three key themes that emerged were: reciprocal relationships, the holistic curriculum (moral and spiritual), and resilience enabling space. In addition, the home fosters a certain being-ness, a mode that the children and staff abide in that allows for greater resilience in their community. My participants appeared to be distinctly rich in spirit. It may be that out of such spiritual consciousness comes a greater ability to connect and engage the relationships at the core of the resilience process. / Graduate / 0515 / 0527

The assumptions underlying the relationships between microfinance and women’s empowerment are typically rooted in a financial paradigm, wherein the prevailing belief is that increases in economic resources necessarily lead to increases in women’s empowerment. This results in a conceptual erasure of the multi-dimensionality of empowerment and disregards the influences that microfinance has on women that extend beyond the economic sphere. This study explored how 6 women in Mali perceive and experience empowerment in relation to their participation in a microfinance program using photovoice. Photovoice is a qualitative methodology wherein participants document, reflect on, and represent their community and experiences using a specific photographic technique. The photographic collection that the women generated, along with their narratives and oral testimonies, suggest that empowerment is a complex construct that includes, yet extends beyond the financial paradigm. The findings of this indicate that microfinance has positively and negatively impacted various dimensions of the women’s perceived empowerment. At the conclusion of the project, the women participated in a forum and initiated policy changes at the microfinance institution with which they are affiliated.

This thesis examines the experiences and interpretations of place of immigrant women in Kingston and Peterborough, Ontario. Immigrant women in smaller Canadian cities contend with a varied and unique set of circumstances that are specific to their geographic positioning. Kingston and Peterborough, with populations of under 150,000 residents, are cities with particular racial discourses. Racialized discourses in Kingston and Peterborough identify each of these places as white cities. As a result, racialized inhabitants who reside in these cities are subsequently rendered invisible or out of place. Participants of my research, most of whom are racialized visible minorities, have all had to contend with oppressive effects of negotiating a white, and oftentimes unwelcoming landscape. There are three main objectives to my research. First, my desire was to learn about immigrant women’s lived realities and to better understand how the experience of migration and racialization had affected their lives. Second, I wanted to facilitate opportunities for women to share their stories with each other in the hopes of perhaps creating the types of learning experiences that would empower participants. Facilitating social interactions in which women could voice their experiences and share their emotional geographies became the most meaningful aspect of this research project at the level of the individual. Finally, I wanted our collaborative research experience to reach the wider public with the intention of creating transformative social change. The voices of immigrant women in smaller cities are often ignored or overlooked, and this gap in knowledge, I believed, was in need of exploring. Previous studies with immigrant women have focused primarily on immigrant women who live in larger Canadian cities. Little research has been directed at smaller cities such as Kingston and Peterborough and my thesis seeks to begin to remedy this oversight. / Thesis (Master, Geography) -- Queen's University, 2008-11-24 16:07:56.728

While much is known about the long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) on women in adulthood, little is currently known about their self-care efforts. Given the paucity of research on self-care for survivors, particularly those who are also mothers, and the potential importance of self-care for both themselves and their children, the main goal of the present study was to explore these women’s perceptions and practices of self-care. A grounded theory approach was chosen for this exploration as it provided a sensitive and open-ended methodology which garnered an in-depth understanding of self-care for survivor mothers. The current study combined classic grounded theory (GT) research methods with photovoice methods to explore self-care from the perspective of CSA survivor mothers. Analyses of interview and photograph data from 14 survivor mothers resulted in an original basic social process for understanding how these women care for themselves, feel better, and engage in healing in the context of past violence and trauma. Complex interactive behavioural patterns were identified that recreated a whole self out of damaged fragments; these were conceptualized as “reconstituting a damaged self”. This basic social process was comprised of three main stages, including: emotional de-paining, safetying, and authenticating and returning to self. Several substages within each of these main stages were also identified. Findings were discussed in relation to four theoretical frameworks. Future research directions and clinical implications for this neglected population were suggested. Reconstituting a damaged self can be a long process for sexual abuse survivor mothers involving taking small safe steps, for the most part, on one’s own.

The purpose of this study was to understand why there is such lack of citizen participation among Asian Americans, despite the exponential growth of Asian American population in the state. Based on the literature on sense of community, citizen participation, and psychological empowerment, it was speculated that how individuals experience community may influence their motivation to participate. With the goal to understand and document how Asian Americans define community and experience sense of community, a sample of Asian Americans were interviewed. These individuals were participants of the Photovoice project conducted by a local community-based organization. The second aim of the study was to explore if and how a project like Photovoice enhanced the sense of community among participants. The findings suggested that Asian Americans defined various types and multiple communities. Also, it was suggested that because Asian American community is an imposed community of people of diverse Asian background, Asian Americans may not necessarily define it as a community or experience sense of community within the community. Based on the experiences of the participants, Photovoice seem to have great potential in bringing such diverse group as Asian Americans together as a community. Limitations of the study and future directions are discussed.

Evidence indicates that regular physical activity (e.g., aerobic physical activity for 30 minutes most days of the week) reduces recurrent cardiac events and death rates in women with coronary heart disease (CHD). However, study findings consistently report higher rates of physical inactivity among rural versus urban women. In addition, rural women experience significant geographic disparities, health inequities, and limited access to health care services and providers, creating further self-care challenges such as engaging in recommended physical activity behaviors post-MI. To understand how rural Nova Scotia (NS) women engage in physical activity behaviors post MI, and factors that affect their physical activity in the post-MI period, constructivist grounded theory (CGT) and photovoice methodologies and methods were used in this research. Eighteen NS women from rural settings participated in two interviews and in the taking of personal photographs using provided disposable cameras. Findings from the narrative and visual data culminated in a substantive theory, “Seeking-Self Worth: A Theory of How Rural Women Engage in Physical Activity Behavior Post-MI.” What was most problematic for study participants was questioning self-worth as a rural woman post-MI. To manage this problem, study participants engaged in the process of seeking self-worth as a rural woman post-MI. The theory of seeking self-worth also involved the processes of assessing MI damage and physical activity, testing physical activity limits, and choosing physical activity priorities. All of these processes played out within a rural context where gender and contextual factors encouraged or hindered study participants’ seeking of self-worth post-MI and, subsequently, their engagement in physical activity behavior post-MI. This substantive theory has implications for nursing, particularly rural public health nurses and nurse practitioners, in the areas of practice, education, research, and policy development.

While much is known about the long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) on women in adulthood, little is currently known about their self-care efforts. Given the paucity of research on self-care for survivors, particularly those who are also mothers, and the potential importance of self-care for both themselves and their children, the main goal of the present study was to explore these women’s perceptions and practices of self-care. A grounded theory approach was chosen for this exploration as it provided a sensitive and open-ended methodology which garnered an in-depth understanding of self-care for survivor mothers. The current study combined classic grounded theory (GT) research methods with photovoice methods to explore self-care from the perspective of CSA survivor mothers. Analyses of interview and photograph data from 14 survivor mothers resulted in an original basic social process for understanding how these women care for themselves, feel better, and engage in healing in the context of past violence and trauma. Complex interactive behavioural patterns were identified that recreated a whole self out of damaged fragments; these were conceptualized as “reconstituting a damaged self”. This basic social process was comprised of three main stages, including: emotional de-paining, safetying, and authenticating and returning to self. Several substages within each of these main stages were also identified. Findings were discussed in relation to four theoretical frameworks. Future research directions and clinical implications for this neglected population were suggested. Reconstituting a damaged self can be a long process for sexual abuse survivor mothers involving taking small safe steps, for the most part, on one’s own.