This research seeks to understand the relationship between arts-based assessments and perception of self through exploration of participants’ interpretations of their own animal drawings. Subjects’ experiences with projective tests, personality assessments and tools, and art assessments were also examined for contextual understanding and comparison. To conduct this mixed methods pilot study, a survey was administered to alumni of the Loyola Marymount University Marital and Family Therapy Department. The findings suggest evidence of self- projection within arts-based assessment interpretation by way of metaphor, and highlight the potential for interpretation bias in therapeutic assessment, both in administration and perception. This pilot study has provided foundational information for future research, and suggests the following to be considered for continued exploration: styles of interpretation, framework of questions, usefulness of assessments, consistency of assessment interpretation, and how demographics plays a role in each of these elements.

Working with an organization outside the public school system that was creating schoolyard gardens, I began to think about culture and cultivation inside and outside of schooling practices. The liveliness of the schoolyard gardens presented possibilities for enlivening educational discourses. With two participants I planted a container box schoolyard garden outside Lamoureux Hall, which houses the Faculty of Education. Utilizing aspects of place-based pedagogy, ecoliteracy, ecopedagogy and a metissage of a/r/tography, eco-art and writing as a method of inquiry, we tended the garden and dwelled upon ideas of nature, culture, and their intersection in a particular place. Our garden experiences left cyber footprints in virtual space as blog spots on a thesis blog site. The garden and the inquiry it generated outside,is brought back inside the education building as a Master's thesis. The garden grew in different and unpredictable ways due to intense construction on site, entwining the planter boxes with unseen variables.

Working with an organization outside the public school system that was creating schoolyard gardens, I began to think about culture and cultivation inside and outside of schooling practices. The liveliness of the schoolyard gardens presented possibilities for enlivening educational discourses. With two participants I planted a container box schoolyard garden outside Lamoureux Hall, which houses the Faculty of Education. Utilizing aspects of place-based pedagogy, ecoliteracy, ecopedagogy and a metissage of a/r/tography, eco-art and writing as a method of inquiry, we tended the garden and dwelled upon ideas of nature, culture, and their intersection in a particular place. Our garden experiences left cyber footprints in virtual space as blog spots on a thesis blog site. The garden and the inquiry it generated outside,is brought back inside the education building as a Master's thesis. The garden grew in different and unpredictable ways due to intense construction on site, entwining the planter boxes with unseen variables.

Working with an organization outside the public school system that was creating schoolyard gardens, I began to think about culture and cultivation inside and outside of schooling practices. The liveliness of the schoolyard gardens presented possibilities for enlivening educational discourses. With two participants I planted a container box schoolyard garden outside Lamoureux Hall, which houses the Faculty of Education. Utilizing aspects of place-based pedagogy, ecoliteracy, ecopedagogy and a metissage of a/r/tography, eco-art and writing as a method of inquiry, we tended the garden and dwelled upon ideas of nature, culture, and their intersection in a particular place. Our garden experiences left cyber footprints in virtual space as blog spots on a thesis blog site. The garden and the inquiry it generated outside,is brought back inside the education building as a Master's thesis. The garden grew in different and unpredictable ways due to intense construction on site, entwining the planter boxes with unseen variables.

Working with an organization outside the public school system that was creating schoolyard gardens, I began to think about culture and cultivation inside and outside of schooling practices. The liveliness of the schoolyard gardens presented possibilities for enlivening educational discourses. With two participants I planted a container box schoolyard garden outside Lamoureux Hall, which houses the Faculty of Education. Utilizing aspects of place-based pedagogy, ecoliteracy, ecopedagogy and a metissage of a/r/tography, eco-art and writing as a method of inquiry, we tended the garden and dwelled upon ideas of nature, culture, and their intersection in a particular place. Our garden experiences left cyber footprints in virtual space as blog spots on a thesis blog site. The garden and the inquiry it generated outside,is brought back inside the education building as a Master's thesis. The garden grew in different and unpredictable ways due to intense construction on site, entwining the planter boxes with unseen variables.

This dissertation conducts in-depth inquiries into the practices, nature and theory of post-industrial cultural work and the humanities- and arts-based civic dialogues which cultural work promotes. Given the broad neglect of utopian thinking in the mainstream of critical social science and in an attempt to sketch out a vision of an alternative future, the aim of this thesis is to outline an “epistemology” for post-industrial cultural work as well as to reflect upon the outlook for educational cultural work practices and their function as a catalyst for civic dialogue and cultural change. The main concerns are the signification, interests and aims embodied in cultural production touching on issues of cultural and scientific learning, alternative modes of democratic governance of science and technology (Felt, Wynne et al. 2007), industrial society’s logic of accumulation and market rationality, the primacy of contemporary instrumental and capitalist values, neoliberalism, globalization and cosmopolitanism. With a view to addressing elementary questions regarding the future of cultural work, which are explored and theorised alongside future perspectives of a new form of knowledge work for the humanities and the arts, the actual challenges of cultural work are considered from within the wider context of the risk society (Beck 1986) and the threats which affect everybody today. In relying on Beck’s (2009) conceptualization of the world risk society as a “non-knowledge society” characterised by the global existence of incalculable risks/threats and non-knowing, the thesis addresses the problem of non-knowledge and unrecognised contingencies as a challenge for cultural work to design processes of (un)learning in civic dialogues. In exploring the social, cultural and political relevance of three empirical case studies, the thesis ventures into the prospects of a new socio-epistemological perspective for cultural work and workspaces for knowledge. The studies investigate three different (techno-)socio-cultural spaces of knowledge: a public exhibition about the new Gotthard Base Tunnel currently under construction in the Swiss Alps, Jennifer Baichwal’s film Manufactured Landscapes (2006) about the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky and China’s industrial revolution, and the living intervention Fairytale at Documenta 12, 2007, which brought 1,001 Chinese citizens to Kassel, Germany. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is employed as a tool for the analysis of the material-semiotic properties of differing knowledges, the heterogeneous relations of socio-economic networks, and the global and uncertain conditions of the post-industrial world in which cultural work is embedded. What is colloquially referred to as post-industrial cultural knowledge work in this thesis is elaborated in the context of a propositional socio-epistemological second-order framework (Von Foerster 1984; Pakman 2003) for cultural work and its entanglements with ethics, aesthetics, pragmatics, politics—and biopolitical production (Hardt and Negri 2000; 2009). In order to build “third spaces” of knowledge (Turnbull 2000) and to nurture uncertainty-oriented approaches and contingencies, the findings propose the development of more open, (self-)reflexive and anticipating forms of thinking and acting in cultural production fields with the aim to catalyse societal developments, to foster intrinsic values and to create cultural workplace identities with a moral-ecological-political awareness (cf. Banks 2006; 2007) invoking new interactions between viewers, audiences and the environment.

This research is an ethnographic case study that asks the questions “what is transformation?” and “how does art transform individuals and their communities?” The narrative describes key moments in the researcher’s journey to South Africa in search of answers to these questions. Findings describe the village of Hamburg’s developing art practice, and include the artists’ own voices and views on this topic. Hamburg is a Xhosa village in South Africa that has faced many challenges due to the spread of HIV/AIDS. One response to the impact of HIV/AIDS on family and economic structures has been the development of an extensive community-based art practice, including large communal tapestry work. To engage questions regarding how visual art transforms people, the researcher reviewed existing Western and Eastern literature on transformation, and compared this with the Southern ethnographic interviews conducted whilst living in the village of Hamburg, where she joined the women for two months as they made their art. The interviews, which were informed by feminist thinking and community based action research, are deeply moving, and form the data from which conclusions were drawn. It iii  was found that the gritty, embodied nature of this community’s experience with transformative art processes can perhaps stimulate more inquiry into transformative art practice within art education itself, that, to date, does not engage much with a deliberate practice for human transformation. Findings in this study can also broaden the existing, sometimes disembodied, academic understandings around transformation within educational, therapeutic and spiritual discourses, which, to date, include mostly linear, hierarchical models, as well as anecdotal descriptions from mostly White, male perspectives. As yet, there is not much inquiry outside of feminist discourse into women’s transformation, which tends to be more organic and community orientated. The researcher’s findings suggest that literature on transformation through art is needed within art education, which should include female, Black African experiences. The researcher’s conclusions are applied to classroom and studio practice, where she challenges educators, researchers and practitioners within art education to take the link between art and transformation much more seriously, as a powerful technology for growth, empowerment and resilience. Findings can also be applied to other disciplines such as feminism, art therapy, education, psychology and spirituality. / Graduate / 0273 / 0357 / 0621 / sadnams@uvic.ca

By 2019, the Syrian civil war has lasted for nearly eight years and it has created the largest humanitarian crisis since WWII (Achlume, 2015). Using the siege of Aleppo in 2016 as a case study, the author applied a Marxist-humanist theoretical framework and incorporated arts-based research methodology to examine how US news media supports capitalist social relations. The research question for this study was: how do the US media depictions of the siege of Aleppo, Syria in 2016 reflect capitalist social relations? There were three sub-questions that followed: (1) Which elements of the siege of Aleppo in 2016 get the most attention in the specific outlets examined? In what ways do these depictions support the US government and/or corporate interests? (2) What are some of the ways in which Syrian refugees are depicted in the various outlets examined? How and in what ways is US humanitarian policy reflected? How are Syrian’s racialized through these depictions? and (3) How are corporate and government interests tied to these media outlets? This study used narrative inquiry, visual analysis, and critical discourse analysis as research methods to discover five major themes found in US news media’s reporting on the siege of Aleppo in 2016. The author then examined these five main themes through a Marxist-humanist lens to discover how the US news media, the supposed “gatekeeper” for the public, establishes, maintains, and reinforces an ideology that supported hegemony for the dominant class.

This thesis is a narrative case study that examined the studio art practice of Lead Pencil Studio, a Seattle-based artist collaborative that explore our spatial relationships with architecture through site-specific installations. The case study specifically focused on the work of Daniel Mihalyo and Annie Han (Lead Pencil Studio) while they were at the Visual Arts Center in The University of Texas at Austin for a spring 2013 artist-in-residence program. The research focused specifically on the artists’ day-to-day process, examining the thoughts and actions that went into creating their work, Diffuse Reflection Lab, a two-story plywood structure that examined reflection’s effect on architecture through various vignettes. Through concentrated observations of the Lead Pencil Studio’s work and three semi-structured interviews, this thesis examined how traditional research practices are integrated into the studio art process. By examining the art/research relationship the author also situates this work in the field of practice-based research. While this work specifically focused on the research conducted by a pair of professional artists, it also extends to a broader argument about the role of research in art lessons. Since this thesis is based in art education, it connects the themes observed in the artists’ studio practice to interdisciplinary learning and arts integration. The author ultimately argues that Lead Pencil Studio’s art/research practice can be used in the classroom as an example of transdisciplinary learning and that it models a rigorous approach to creativity within other disciplines. / text

This thesis document presents a case study of a professional development playbuilding process at a public elementary school located in Austin, Texas. The study argues that playbuilding is a form of participatory action arts-based research particularly when positioned within the professional development setting. This qualitative study uses a narrative thematic analysis of the playbuilding process and workshop performance to examine how reflective and reflexive practice is situated within playbuilding as professional development. The document concludes with a discussion of the limitations and transformative potential of playbuilding and argues for the creation of critical pedagogical professional learning communities for teachers in school settings. / text