Since the preservation campaigns at Lee Tung Street, the Star Ferry Pier and the Queen's Pier that erupted in early to mid-2000s, Hong Kong participatory art has undertaken an increasingly proactive role in local spatial movements, which marks the organizational and strategical evolvements of this artistic category that differentiate it from earlier public and community art. While research initiatives after 2010 have identified regional geospatial politics as one major concern for local participatory art today, existing studies tend to take a contextual approach with main emphases on why art becomes involved in urban spatial struggles while rarely proceeding to investigate what strategies or modes of spatial practices have emerged from relevant projects and what implications they have on the material-social spaces of the city. This hesitation to forward an interpretive evaluation of the focused phenomenon stems from the absence of epistemological concreteness in participatory art theories and criticisms, which necessitates the introduction of new analytical tools in research on the subject. To answer the pending questions, this research employs Henry Lefebvre's theories of the social production of space to examine three representative projects selected from a preliminary survey of local participatory art programs/groups which involve spatial practices. In exploring the contents, strategies, and socio-spatial implications of these cases, it presents three models of spatially oriented participatory art. On this basis, a cross-case analysis is conducted to explore how participatory art in general offers counterforces against the neoliberalist social-material and aesthetic reprogramming of the city while laying the social foundation for the anticipated production of differential spaces. As more urban renewal and land resumption plans are anticipated to storm through the city in the coming decades, this research hopes to provide for practitioners, researchers, and local communities the discursive and conceptual tools to understand the role of art in preceding and future spatial contestations

This thesis is a sociological exploration of emergent social relations at art exhibition venues. It focuses on the experience of art which the dominant “decoding” metaphor fails to describe conceptually and empirically. To grasp the interactional and emergent character of interaction with art, I constructed a framework that defined audiences as sets of emerging social relations. Building on the concepts of experience (Merleau-Ponty), enchantment (Gell), multiplicity and enactment (Latour, Mol and others), I emphasise the situated and embodied nature of art experience. The study draws on a series of ethnographic observations at the exhibition sites of a number of Moscow art institutions. It is supplemented with unstructured interviews with visitors and art professionals at these venues (artists, curators, wardens etc.). Conceptually, I have suggested a dual social ontology that art establishes in the events of perception. Bringing uncertainty into visitors’ actions, art enables interactions in which visitors establish meanings, and leads to practices that make their art experience organized and less problematic. The thesis examines the ways art experience becomes stable through meaning-making events supported by socio-material relations. These relations enable participants to produce recognizable actions. The process of meaning-making at the exhibitions is seen not as a direct communication of pre-given aesthetic meanings (as the decoding perspective would assume), but rather is understood as consisting of multiple instances of micro-level discoveries which mediate an “enchanting” form of art experience. Enchantment engenders the social relations of expertise which visitors practically achieve in their interaction with material objects and through performances of meaningfully recognizable actions. T Though the study mainly focuses on the experience of interactive art installations, I argue that the conceptual considerations and empirical results are relevant to the experience of other forms of art. The thesis is intended to make a contribution to the so-called “new sociology of art”, not just by subjecting the dominant Bourdieu-inspired assumptions about “decoding” to critique, but also by pointing out the conceptual limits of much of the new sociology of art, and pointing towards new conceptual horizons for sociology’s ongoing encounter with matters artistic.

Thesis (Ed.D)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 1991. / Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Ellen Condliffe Lagemann. Dissertation Committee: Rene Arcilla. Includes bibliographical references (p. 201-204).

Thesis (Ed. D.)--Illinois State University, 1978. / Title from title page screen, viewed Jan. 20, 2005. Dissertation Committee: Harold Gregor (chair), Jonathan Reyman, Ken Holder, Harold Boyd, Fred Mills. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 167-170) and abstract. Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 1987. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 347-353).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, May, 2009. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 1987. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 347-353).

Thesis (Ed. D.)--Illinois State University, 1998. / Title from title page screen, viewed July 3, 2006. Dissertation Committee: Jack Hobbs (chair), Marilyn P. Newby, Robert L. Fisher, Linda M. Willis Fisher, Richard A. Salome. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 132-136) and abstract. Also available in print.

Texte remanié de: Th.--Philosophie et lettres--Université libre de Bruxelles, 2002. / Bibliogr. p. 297-340. Notes bibliogr. Index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 146-153).