Our day-to-day lives consist of formal and informal settlements in the built environment. As humans, we gravitate towards successful informal settlements (public spaces) to conduct activities such as socializing and recharging. Previous research has highlighted the importance of distinct factors in determining the success of public spaces. Still, research has failed to develop the foundation that makes all public places prosper. Through examining successful and unsuccessful public places through case studies, this research analyses the success and importance of our emotional and physical safety in public spaces through the presence or absence of sound, light, nature, boundaries, and order.

This thesis concerns the practice of ‘psychogeography’ in London, England, and the ways in which psychogeographic writings provoke in city-dwellers an acute sense of disorientation, as though the everyday were otherworldly. My study is intended as a response to Guy Debord’s claim that ‘psychogeography’ investigates “the precise laws […] of the geographical environment” on “the emotions and behaviour of individuals” (Debord qtd. in Coverley 88): any revolutionary enterprise must point to the future, the very notion of which can only be imprecise and un-empirical – psychogeography is not necessarily an exception. I argue that for Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair, the psychogeographic imperative is rather to imagine the implosion of Londonscape as it is well known, since only spatial structures that thus unravel may offer mystical insights that are, as yet, unspoiled by neoliberal/Thatcherite politics and the accompanying ambition to re-vamp English history in a nostalgic light. This study presents psychogeography not simply as a strategy of political resistance but as a visceral and metaphysical experience; it draws upon SF theories of worlding and the philosophical notion of Dasein to address some concerns that have arisen in post-imperial Britain, such as the desire to define English identity, i.e., ‘Englishness.’ / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation studies Alan Moore’s and Iain Sinclair’s use of psychogeography to examine the city of London. Psychogeography is an implosive, fragmented writing style that estranges the meaning of the urban everyday. Subject to psychogeographic depiction, London becomes a city altogether foreign, if not to say fantastical. I argue that psychogeography is both a strategy of political resistance and a visceral experience – one that could influence common ways of reading English history and culture (i.e. ‘Englishness.’)

no / It's all long gone now...they've closed the shop on the corner of Athlone Street...it was a rough one with a pub on the corner...my dad ran it a long time ago...that time... Within the dominant biomedical discourse, late-life dementia is regarded as a pathological condition characterised by disorientation in time and space, word finding difficulties and 'problem behaviours' such as 'wandering' and 'repetitive questioning'. Once taken out of its biomedical straightjacket, however, dementia emerges as a condition which has much in common with the conscious projects of surrealist and situationist arts movements. This includes the subversion of the idea of time (and history) as linear, unidirectional progress. People diagnosed with dementia frequently state a desire to return (or indeed a fear of returning) to places from the past which no longer exist in physical space, but which remain real as remembered worlds and sources of nostalgia (literally 'the pain of returning'). These are also issues central to the field of psychogeography - an interdisciplinary approach to exploring the emotional and sensory impact of specific, particularly urban, locations. Informed by the work of poets such as Blake, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, as theorised by, for example, Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord, psychogeography privileges undirected 'wandering' through its emphasis on concepts such as the flaneur, and the dérive (or 'drift'). In this paper, such concepts will be used as a way of exploring the spatio-temporal experiences of people with dementia, using extracts from film and narrative life stories.

This thesis muddies the idea of singular being, tracing the footprints of nature writer and poet Edward Thomas, from the beginning of his epically creative final four years, to the site where he died in 1917, during the Battle of Arras. It is presented as a series of engagements with landscape, writing, and poetry; affective mapping, chasing memory-prompts, bookmarks and the shock of the poetic. The journeys seek to return to an ‘open’ idea of the geographical imagination, negating a negative, reductionist form of geography; shifting the focus away from sociologically determined notions of mobility. A resident of England for all his life, but with Welsh heritage, Edward Thomas believed he belonged nowhere. His texts: little time capsules, admixtures of social commentary, environmental action, and personal musings, are archaeological exercises, presenting a complicated picture of loss, demonstrating the value of artistic imagination. Loss - and subsequent estrangement from the world - would become his poetic source. This thesis is about trying to understand the relationship between poetry - indeed all ‘land writing’ - and place. How it affects in-place, what it does in-place? To understand this relationship properly it was necessary to consider why, as humans, we write? To find out what the subjective condition of the poet, or writer, emerges out of - in order to relay the experience of meeting poetry in-place. Edward Thomas began as a nature writer and became a poet after much agonizing. This made him a useful subject (object) (neither). Furthermore he suffered a long period of introspection and had a knowledge of Freud and psychoanalysis - which he underwent in 1912. This was played out in what Edna Longley (2008) terms; ‘poetic psychodrama.’ His poems often feature a split self or switch between patient and analyst (Longley, 2008). The Other Man, is his doppelganger, who he plays himself off against: the poems are, as such, multi-voiced, counterpointed, intersubjective. Deleuze and Guattari wrote in A Thousand Plateaus (1988: 3): ‘since each of us was already several, there was already quite a crowd.’ Edward Thomas knew this all too well. From the beginning of this ambulatory homage my psyche became inextricably linked with his.

Technoetic and media arts are environments of mediated interaction and emergence, where meaning is negotiated by individuals through a personal examination and experience—or becoming—within the mediated space. This thesis examines these environments from a musical perspective and considers how sound functions as an analog to this becoming. Five distinct, original musical works explore the possibilities as to how the emergent dynamics of mediated, interactive exchange can be leveraged towards the construction of musical sound. In the context of this research, becoming can be understood relative to Henri Bergson’s description of the appearance of reality—something that is making or unmaking but is never made. Music conceived of a linear model is essentially fixed in time. It is unable to recognize or respond to the becoming of interactive exchange, which is marked by frequent and unpredictable transformation. This research abandons linear musical approaches and looks to generative music as a way to reconcile the dynamics of mediated interaction with a musical listening experience. The specifics of this relationship are conceptualized in the structaural coupling model, which borrows from Maturana & Varela’s “structural coupling.” The person interacting and the generative musical system are compared to autopoietic unities, with each responding to mutual perturbations while maintaining independence and autonomy. Musical autonomy is sustained through generative techniques and organized within a psychogeographical framework. In the way that cities invite use and communicate boundaries, the individual sounds of a musical work create an aural context that is legible to the listener, rendering the consequences or implications of any choice audible. This arrangement of sound, as it relates to human presence in a technoetic environment, challenges many existing assumptions, including the idea “the sound changes.” Change can be viewed as a movement predicated by behavior. Amergent music is brought forth through kinds of change or sonic movement more robustly explored as a dimension of musical behavior. Listeners hear change, but it is the result of behavior that arises from within an autonomous musical system relative to the perturbations sensed within its environment. Amergence propagates through the effects of emergent dynamics coupled to the affective experience of continuous sonic transformation.

This is a qualitative, mixed-methods study that focuses on the experiences of pre-service teachers in an art methods for non-majors class. The purpose of this study is to describe the process of transforming pre-service elementary teachers’ apprehensive feelings and experiences about creating art. An examination of play, Thirdspace pedagogy, and contextual exploration within a humanistic approach all inform this study. The dataset exposed themes of apprehension and reluctance to art-making, community building, preconceptions about art and art-making, exploration, non-prescribed outcomes, learning from mistakes, and identity. The results of this study show evidence that explorative methods can alter the conceptions and approaches to art of pre-service teachers in an art methods for non-majors course. As a researcher, it is my hope that this study will impact art educators’ views of teaching art methods courses to non-majors.

PEDESTRIAN is inspired by my daily walking routines and my relationship to the spaces in which I walk. Through additional instruction-guided walks with volunteers, this project examines the seemingly mundane travels of walkers and their relationship to and absorption of the space around them, and encourages a reconsideration of the environmental everyday into a venue for play and discovery.

Submitted by Fabio Sobreira Campos da Costa (fabio.sobreira@ufpe.br) on 2016-07-14T13:31:01Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) DISSERT FINAL LUIZ DO MONTE (DERIVA).pdf: 10122837 bytes, checksum: 6db0540667955b021d4d419d18966252 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-07-14T13:31:01Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) DISSERT FINAL LUIZ DO MONTE (DERIVA).pdf: 10122837 bytes, checksum: 6db0540667955b021d4d419d18966252 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-07-31 / CNPq / Este trabalho tem como objetivo experimentar a deriva e a psicogeografia, técnicas provenientes do movimento artístico intitulado Internacional Situacionista, no centro expandido do Recife. A deriva e a psicogeografia foram conceitos criados pelos situacionistas por volta da década de 1950. Enquanto a psicogeografia se apresenta como uma ciência de apreensão das afetividades urbanas, a deriva é compreendida pelo movimento como uma técnica de passagem por ambientes da cidade que compõe um desdobramento prático dessa apreensão psicogeográfica. A pesquisa pretende verificar a validade das técnicas em relação às suas propostas de aplicação e as possíveis contribuições dessa revisitação de ideias situacionistas numa cidade contemporânea. Para aplicação das técnicas foi elaborada uma metodologia baseada primordialmente nos preceitos situacionistas, mas que também agregou questões relativas à fenomenologia, à psicologia e ao estudo de mapas e diagramas. A partir dessa metodologia foram realizadas pesquisas de campo de cunho experimental que geraram documentos, relatos e ilustrações referentes ao resultado desse processo. As conclusões expostas posteriormente apontam para a validação de algumas das hipóteses situacionistas relativas à aplicação das técnicas e discutem em grande parte o papel das novas tecnologias além de outros fatores que tornam a experiência da deriva e da psicogeografia singulares na contemporaneidade. / This work intents to experience the dérive and the psychogeography, techniques of the artistic movement called Situationist International in the expanded center of Recife. The derive and the psychogeography were concepts created by the situationists in the 1950’s. While the psychogeography presents itself as a seizure science of urban affections, the drift is understood by the movement as a technique of passage through city environments, which makes up a practical unfolding of psychogeographic apprehension. The research aims to verify the validity of the techniques in relation to their proposals and the possible contributions of revisiting situationist ideas in a contemporary city. For the application of the techniques a methodology based primarily in Situationists precepts was created, but also with the addition of questions related to phenomenology, psychology and the study of maps and diagrams. Based on this methodology were performed experimental nature field researchs that generated documents, reports and illustrations for the result of this process. The conclusions later exposed point to the validation of some of the Situationists assumptions related to the application of techniques and discuss mostly the role of new technologies and other factors that make the experience of drift and psychogeography unique in contemporaneity.

The presented Diploma Thesis deals with the phenomenon of city cipher games. Research was performed by the researcher participation in four city cipher games in Prague, by semi- structured and informal interviews and by cipher games web sites analysis It considers cipher games postmodern enjoyment which is characteristic for emphasizing an experience. The thesis is focused on two task groups: game and city. It examines city cipher games attributes, asks how players take the game and tries to realize the motivation for their participation. It shows that players undergo physical and intellectual exhaustion, discomfort and little hazard. Very strong experience connected with own limits' overcoming is the reason why they join the game again. Other essential reason is the unusual connection between a type of summer camp game and the city world. City is a coulisse with atmosphere for the game. Players experience the city in an unusual way. They learn to know it differently. They are undergoing a type of psychogeographic method. So the game not only takes benefits from the city but also creates players' relationships to the city. Players learn to know the city. It is important to mention that city and game are paramount arenas for freedom exerting.

This thesis develops an argument that psychogeography can provide alternative, yet familiar, approaches to social work research and pedagogy. Psychogeography refers to studies of how our psychological experiences, such as our thoughts and feelings, are connected to our being in places. The present study was designed to be a novel application of a psychogeographic exercise in a social work learning context. For this research project, I met with five undergraduate students and interviewed them as we walked through the neighbourhoods surrounding their field practicum placement settings. My interviews with these students focused on the thoughts, feelings, memories, and experiences that they associated with these places. This exercise inspired critical reflection of diverse themes; including the impacts that places of placement environments had on the participants' development of their existential identity and critical consciousness. I argue that psychogeography evokes such reflection because its conception is rooted in efforts to develop creative and participatory engagement in place-based reflection for inspiring social justice activism. As such, the philosophical work of phenomenology and the action-seeking work of critical theorists can orient psychogeographic place studies to be congruent with social work research that aims to develop holistic and critical social justice-oriented education and practice. / Thesis / Master of Social Work (MSW)