Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1936. / Vita. "Selected bibliography": p. 147-149.

Thesis (PH. D.)--University of Nebraska, 1906. / Description based on print version record. Bibliography: p. 99-103.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1950. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [565]-589).

Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

Studies on Brazilians living in Britain show that, along with loneliness, unemployment and cost of living, the lack of proficiency in English is a key problem. However, there is little qualitative information about how the host language affects their daily lives. This interdisciplinary practice-based research asks how an art practice activated by experiences of displacement and dislocation in language can become a place of enunciation for decolonial selves. To this end, this research includes not only individual practices, but also collective activities carried out with a group of Brazilian women living in London, as a research focus. The endeavour to deal with English language has engendered writing processes in my visual work, which became a place for experimenting bilingual and fragmentary voices against the initial muteness in which I found myself on arrival in London. Using photography, printmaking, drawing, postcards, and artist’s books I have explored life-writing genres of diary, language memoir, and correspondence to raise an immigrant consciousness, explore accented voices and create practices for writing life individually and collectively. Assembling words and turning their meanings became strategies for expanding limited vocabularies. Once an impassable obstacle, the host language was transformed into a territory for exploring ways to know stories about language and write life narratives through art practice. This research is informed by humanist and feminist geographical approaches to space and place, postcolonial life writing, border thinking and a context of practice ranging from transnational art, accented cinema, visual poetry, conceptual art, and socially engaged art. It provides insights about English language in the lives of Brazilian women in London and offers a view on a practice in visual arts as place of enunciation for decolonial selves.

This thesis aims to conduct a study of battle jackets using painting as a recording and analytical tool. A battle jacket is a customised garment worn in heavy metal subcultures that features decorative patches, band insignia, studs and other embellishments. Battle jackets are significant in the expression of subcultural identity for those that wear them, and constitute a global phenomenon dating back at least to the 1970s. The art practice juxtaposes and re-contextualises cultural artefacts in order to explore the narratives and traditions that they are a part of. As such, the work is situated within the genre of contemporary still life and appropriative painting. The paintings presented with the written thesis document a series of jackets and creatively explore the jacket form and related imagery. The study uses a number of interrelated critical perspectives to explore the meaning and significance of the jackets. Intertextual approaches explore the relationship of the jackets to other cultural forms. David Muggleton’s ‘distinctive individuality’ and Sarah Thornton’s ‘subcultural capital’ are used to emphasise the importance of jacket making practices for expressions of personal and corporate subcultural identity. Italo Calvino’s use of postmodern semiotic structures gives a tool for placing battle jacket practice within a shifting network of meanings, whilst Richard Sennett’s‘material consciousness’ helps to understand the importance of DIY making practices used by fans. The project refers extensively to a series of interviews conducted with battle jacket makers between 2014 and 2016. Recent art historical studies of still life painting have used a materialist critique of historic works to demonstrate the uniqueness of painting as a method of analysis. The context for my practice involves historical references such as seventeenth century Dutch still life painting. The work of contemporary artists who are exploring the themes and imagery of extreme metal music is also reviewed.

This thesis investigates the socially imagined representation of two areas of the global South, through the lens of contemporary art. It traces the historicisation of urban Latin America and the Arab world along a timeline of critical lenses, questioning their construction as imagined sites. Re-occurring tropes from exhibition spaces acting as representations of the global South on a macro-level are contrasted with observations from a local level, in an ethnographic study of nineteen artist groups of four capital cities of Latin America and the Arab world. The research draws upon sociological methodologies of research, arts methodologies and historicisation to chart the scope and function of these groups against the backdrop of the global art-institution’s so-called geographic turn and it’s romanticisation of the precarious state as the new avant-garde. Moving away from the traditional cartography of art and social history, this thesis offers an expanded concept of collectivity and social engagement through art, and the artist group as unit of social analysis in urban space. Putting these ideas into dialogue, artist-led structures are presented as counter-point to collective exhibitions and to the collectivity of national identity and citizenship. An abundance of artist groups in the art scene of each city represents an informal infrastructure in which a mirror image of inner-workings of the city and art world become visible through this zone of discourses in conflict. This unorthodox exploration of art, region, and collective expression launches into the possibility of new constellations of meaning, tools to recapture the particulars of everyday experience in the unfolding of large narratives. Examining the place of collective art practices in the socio-political history of the city, this intervention into current theory around the role of art from the global South traces the currents and counter-currents of the art-institution and its structures of representation re-enacted in places of display and public discourse -- the museum, the news, the gallery, the biennial,the street and the independent art space.

The thesis examines the case of Barrow-in-Furness through the period of the First World War. As a town dominated by one of the UK’s most important armaments firms, Vickers, Barrow experienced the full force of industrial mobilisation and government intervention. In analysing the responses to these events, the thesis provides insights into their impact on a town and population dependent on industries stimulated by war. Barrow had special problems arising from its geographical isolation and large munitions population. Vickers, the work force and the town at large were used to negotiating their own difficulties, but these were severely tested by the impact of war. Industrial relations in a heavily unionised but strategically important town were complicated by the different positions of Vickers, unions, shop stewards, rival government agencies, and the role of women, yet ultimately all parties found ways of working together. The knock-on effects of the war on industry were extensive and far reaching. The life of the town was intimately bound up with the war industry and the changes in war requirements ultimately affected its population through housing, health and welfare and the need for utilities and transport. Addressing these difficulties posed some of the greatest problems. Political implications of wartime in a working-class town led to a split in the Labour Party and ultimately the return of a Tory in 1919. While historians have considered how the nation met the demands of the war, a focus on the regionality of the home front highlights more precisely the impact on specific places and how the war effort was sustained in practice. The experience of the town of Barrow throughout the period of the First World War is therefore invaluable for demonstrating the complexity and inter-relatedness of how the war affected people, industry and infrastructure on the home front.

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