Thesis (M.A.)--University of Toronto, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 148-154).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2001. / Adviser: Barbara Freedman. Submitted to the Dept. of Drama. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 226-241). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

In predominantly White schools, a common belief exists that anti-racist education is unnecessary, despite a rise in the number of people who admit to being racially prejudiced. A colour-blind approach, which silences issues of race, tends to dominate in schools, while, fear of ‘getting it wrong’ prevents meaningful dialogue. My thesis addresses the question, in what ways do arts programmes support anti-racist education in predominantly White areas? This includes two threads. Firstly, I take a critical race theory approach, drawing on Whiteness studies, to explore White teachers' and school students’ assumptions about racism and education. Secondly, using a critical pedagogy framework, I investigate learning through anti-racist arts projects. The fieldwork is ethnographically inspired, including interviews, focus groups and observations of participants’ engagement with arts programmes that visit primary and secondary schools in Devon. I found a gap between theoretical and common understandings of racism. Participants’ conceptualisations of racism shaped their beliefs about anti-racist education and their methods of engagement, which, in the contexts studied, tended towards promoting niceness rather than tackling deep-rooted racism. Furthermore, racism was found to have embodied and aesthetic components, which lead to racist thoughts, feelings and behaviours, either willingly or unwittingly. Teachers’ tendencies to force respect through classroom control appeared ineffective, by masking rather than addressing embodied racism. My research contributes to the literature on critical race theory and Whiteness studies by offering insight into the ways that White teachers and students construct anti-racist practice. My findings add to critical pedagogy by suggesting that when dialogue has been silenced, and fears surround the subject matter, critical art pedagogies that work at the emotional and cognitive levels can offer additional methods of engagement. However, working to uncover embedded racism can challenge the notion of safe classrooms and requires teachers and students to take risks by engaging with the embodied and sensual aspects of racism, which can be both disturbing and exciting. My research offers hope through presenting new ways of thinking about and engaging with, anti-racist school practice in predominantly White areas.

Understanding “all policy is health policy,” this dissertation explores Black people’s healing and wellbeing with an abolition mindset. Through the lens of arts and culture in public health, the title denotes a pursuit of “healthful narratives” with ethical storytelling, creating, and performing that is conducive to good health. It manifests as public health dreaming in the midst of COVID-19 and state-sanctioned violence resulting from colonialism and racial capitalism—which contribute to racial hierarchies and millions of cross-generational deaths. This mixed-methods study contemplates the future of health promotion with concern for honoring Black creativity’s role in population health, and reckons with racial capitalism as foundational to health inequities and preventable, premature death. The study asks 1) What socio-cultural pathways do or can exist for theatrical and performance productions for health promotion? 2) In the face of racial, gendered capitalism, how does creativity manifest for Black women and/or gender-expansive people when creating or performing art and cultural work related to health promotion goals? Merging arts and culture into traditional public health infrastructure further exacerbates anti-Black harm, because it risks history repeating itself as our contemporary reality. As practice-based evidence, my Black Feminist Performance Auto/ethnography is research-engaged theatre, accompanied by learnings from research partners practicing contemplative arts-based research methodology. The findings are GriefLove, co-conceived with Des Bennett (director and dramaturg), and a narrative analysis of collage-based health mosaics and definitions of healthful narratives as forecasts of community-driven public health dreaming. The final chapter presents three socio-cultural pathways: “Black Embodiment,” “The Aesthetics of Health,” and “Futurity.” In the spirit of healthful narratives, it closes with a letter to Black Public Health Creatives and Cultural Workers in service of cultural and health equity—markers of “Good Health.”

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Supervisor: Stacy Wolf. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

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Advances in technologies of voice profiling shed new light on questions of listening and its entanglement with antiblackness as a structuring paradigm of modernity. To contest current conceptions of listening with regards to the question of race and antiblackness while also shining light on the potentials offered by blackness, this dissertation engages listening at three distinct sites that are entangled with this modern question of voice profiling AI. In the process, this dissertation elaborates on the ethical stakes involved in listening itself. Chapter 1 excavates the way in which the ears of enslaved Black lives were ritualized. It centers an analysis of the role of the punishment of ear cropping and how this performed both a claim over slaves’ belonging and an inhibition on their freedom. Scholarship from Hebrew law aids in uncovering the meaning of the specific form of punishment. The chapter concludes by comparing the conception of slaves’ ears to Black artistic expressions such as Harriet Jacobs’s various methods of narration in Incidents of a Slave Girl and Blind Tom Wiggins’ unique use of clusters and graphic notation in Battle of Manassas, so as to demonstrate their methods of resistance and refusal to a claimed all-encompassing regime of listening. Chapter 2 engages modern notions of sound and listening. The way in which sound is theorized and engaged in modern digital technologies is entangled with the conception of what listening is and what it entails. Hermann von Helmholtz provides an axis after which sound and listening, as well as the relation between an inner world of perceptions and an outer world of sensations, has to be engaged as a question of listening as entangled in societal questions. The chapter critically elaborates alongside questions of categorical distinction in sound, such as the use of skull shapes as referents for AI listening, instrument classification systems, and the general question of the form of sound, or sound as object. The concluding Chapter 3 discusses, alongside Sylvia Wynter’s work and Roscoe Mitchell’s piece S II Examples (date) the kinds of questions we must pose in the development of modern AI listening technologies to move past antiblackness. Immanuel Kant’s theorizing of race and his influence on Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s classification of skulls relate tomodern voice profiling AI technology directly through the question of using cranial shapes. Wynter’s work challenges both a turn to varieties that do not allow the addressing of structural antiblackness, and a continuation of claims to proper knowledge on the basis of antiblackness. Ultimately, Wynter aids us in hearing Mitchell’s continual shapeshifting practice on the saxophone as a proposal towards a refiguring of our conception of sound, listening, and us.