Psychological, sociological and feminist models of understanding domestic violence have contributed to the development of interventions that seek to raise awareness, keep women safe, and help them to create new lives for themselves and their families. Research literature has extensively paid attention to the ways in which women both live with and move away from domestic violence, documenting how they employ strategies of survival and resistance. The research methods employed to investigate domestic violence includes a range of quantitative and qualitative methods with particular emphasis placed upon enabling women to tell their stories in as authentic a way as possible. This thesis adds to the literature by considering how women construct what will be referred to as transitional stories of domestic violence, within which they imagine their future selves and develop the means to become what they hope for. The methodology used is original within the study of domestic violence in its synthesis of arts-based, feminist and participatory methods. The adopted epistemology sought to value the use of embodiment and imagination in the construction of knowledge, both of which are considered to be situated. The use of an arts-based method is chosen to enable a different way for women to tell their stories about their response to living with and transitioning away from domestic violence. The evaluation of this methodology shows that it is a valid form of enabling women to have the embodied subjectivity of their experiences and imagination witnessed in a way that complements the written and spoken word, whilst better allowing the physical and metaphorical quality of their stories to come to the foreground. Following a feminist agenda, attention is paid to the influence of gender upon the researcher’s findings, and upon the participants’ and researchers’ reflexive engagement with the research process. The research shows that the home has special significance for women as they transition away from domestic violence and plan for their future. The home becomes a physical manifestation and container for women’s hopes and fears for a harmonious future that often incorporates the desire for the return to the idea of a complete family. Relationships with family, friends and services are shown to be both enablers of women’s agency and resistance. Those same relationships are also shown to be capable of acting as barriers to women’s positive transitional journeys. The findings show that attention needs to be placed upon the appearance of women’s agency within the everyday tasks of creating and maintaining a home and managing relationships as they move away from domestic violence. The findings also point to the need for services to work harder on empowering women, both by adequately listening to the stories told about their pasts and hopes for the future, and by helping them to achieve their plans through challenging the limitations imposed by policies and economics.

Drawing loosely on feminist and post-human notions of learning as an “untamed” and “more-than-multiple” experience (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 154), I play with the use of Artistic Memoir as a method to explore my affectual experiences (Braidotti, 2002; Springgay, 2008) as a British Columbian, school-based Child and Youth Counsellor working as a visitor in the context of a shanti-school in Goa, India. Well practiced in traditionally Western paradigms of education, my intention is to move beyond my familiar understandings of what it means to be educated in North America to heighten awareness of intuitive forms of learning that arise in an encounter between intra-acting bodies, materials, and the agentic spaces between (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Understanding learning experiences as relational and enigmatic events, composed of rather than in the world, I engage with an inductive, intuitive and becoming-with process, exploring the emerging themes and entanglements of my presence in this Goan classroom as they grow out of a collection of child-driven, emergent art projects (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Mazzei, 2010). As I take on the implications of methodology and “data analysis” in post-qualitative research, I think with Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) constructions of maps, expressing my interpretation of these events with my own poetic and visual assemblages and navigating curiosities through Artistic Memoir. Thinking with philosophies of immanence (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), new materiality (Braidotti, 2002; Stewart, 2007) and the autobiographical nature of a/r/tography (Irwin, Beer, Springgay, Grauer, Xiong, Bickel, 2006), Artistic Memoir has unravelled as a nomadic method, giving my experiences and understandings of the projects a temporal body – a disjointed place for my data, fragments of my affectual reverberations with Goa, to momentarily settle. A fragmented and non-linear collection of poems, images, anecdotes and short stories, this composition begins from the middle and poses no end; its process is designed to stir up questions over answers. Through this method, my intention is to look into the “events of activities and encounters” with affective, arts-based education, “evoking transformation and change” in my experience with “data” and understanding of learning, being and knowing (Hultman & Taguchi, 2010, p. 535). / Graduate / 2018-05-01 / 0273 / 0727 / 0998 / a.berry089@gmail.com

This thesis explores the effects of art-making in group art therapy sessions for people affected by Parkinson's Disease. It examines their experience of self through active engagement with art materials. It also draws on the experience of family caregivers and of professionals providing other therapeutic support for these patients. The research methodology is based on feminist, post-structuralist epistemological thought, situating the research as a political, reality-altering endeavour shaped by, and interpreted through, the researcher's particular ideological lens. The thesis emphasises the importance of developing a critical overview of the research context and considering how dominant discourses have shaped both the individual patient's experience of Parkinson's and the service approach to ways of improving their quality of life. A medical model is viewed as determining a narrow understanding and experience of the condition. Broadening the focus of the work to attend to how Parkinson's is culturally and socially embedded provides new understandings of its effects on patients and their wider needs. The research design has a strong participatory component drawing on the support of a consultancy group of six people affected by Parkinson's and three family caregivers, all seen as experts through their personal experience of the condition. The researcher defines her position as researcher-near using her background as artist, art therapist and her experience of working with people affected by Parkinson's at the research site. The research design is inspired by group art therapy practice, and takes research as praxis for theory building. Social science qualitative interviewing was used with four focus groups, and in ten semi-structured individual interviews which involved participant selected examples of their group therapy artwork. Nine audio-recordings of group art therapy sessions were collected. The researcher used art-making throughout the research process to create visual researcher diaries, and 'response' art as a way of exploring the material gathered for analysis. Besides providing an opportunity to consider the role of visual expression to complement verbal, this English language thesis uses data collected in Spanish and Catalan. Translation across languages (spoken, written and visual) and cultures became a method through which to consider interpretation, explore nuances and question assumptions. The dilemmas faced in translation enhanced researcher reflexivity and facilitated exploration of the space between art and language. This thesis offers an understanding of the potential contribution of group art therapy within six themes: 'Self-construction and discovery'; 'Material action'; 'Aesthetic group movement'; 'New perspectives'; 'Artwork as legacy'; and 'Physical transformation of issues'. These themes support the view that group art therapy acted as a catalyst for well-being and better functioning for participants, and that it can be modelled as a continuous process of embodied enquiry for those affected by Parkinson's. The triangular therapeutic relationship is explored and the terms 'creator' - 'artwork' - 'audience' are proposed to recognise the flexibility in the art-maker's position between creator and audience of their artwork. That artwork is conceptualised as an active meaning generator in the group art therapeutic encounter and the artistic intersubjective matrix is explored in relation to therapeutic factors specific to group art therapy. Implications for working with other related chronic, life changing conditions are elaborated.

There have been calls within landscape (and broader environmental) policy for the greater incorporation of cultural values and stakeholder participation. This, however, has often been critiqued within the academic literature as being difficult to achieve in practice. Concurrently, academic research around ‘landscape’ has seen an emergence of exploring more embodied, experiential and ‘more-than-visual’ ways of knowing, challenging the more traditional concept of ‘landscape’ as a ‘way of seeing’ and a cultural product. This research explored the multiple ways that people value landscapes using walking interviews, arts-based methods and key-informant interviews (with local and national landscape managers). It explored the potential of visual and ‘more-than-visual’ methods to both engage and articulate with more subjective, emotional and embodied encounters with landscapes. This was then used to explore the potential and challenges of adopting cultural and more participative approaches to landscape management. After an initial analysis of the data gathered through the methods, this was then used as part of feedback events within the two case study areas to allow the participants of the research and the broader local community to engage with the work. This research argues that ‘landscape’ as a concept, when approached from a ‘more-than-visual’ perspective, highlighted that the inherently visual concept is bound up within a much broader sensory immersion within the landscape. The research demonstrated the complex and interconnected relationship between people and the landscape through the concept of ‘dwelling’ emphasising the lived-in, everyday encounters with landscape. This relationship is tied up within past individual experiences, shared social and cultural history as well as the material landscape itself arguing for a more ‘hybrid’ understanding of people and landscape. Furthermore, the research highlighted both the potential and challenges of participative approaches with multiple landscape stakeholders and challenges the ‘homogenous’ perspective of ‘community’ within management rhetoric. There is an argument for more partnership working between multiple stakeholders to generate trust and dialogue. It argues for the creation of spaces within which the more politically sensitive issues in relation to landscape management can be discussed and the potential for solutions to be created.

Dream/Hope/Love/Create/Act (and back) is a collaborative arts-based research project on the experiences that support workers have with enacting support, care and education practices in the disability support and education field. Five support workers were interviewed using arts-based and collaborative methods. Conversations focused on the disciplining power that policies, systems and structures have over the support practices provided to young people labeled with an intellectual disability. Questions were formulated on support worker experiences with enacting care, behaviour support, and curriculum. The following four issues were central to the inquiry: child development and the pressure for language acquisition; issues of consent in everyday practice and clinical spaces; the creation and enactment of behaviour plans; and disability labels and the diagnosis process. The in-depth, unstructured arts-based individual and group conversations were collaboratively designed with research participants, and topics of care, support and professional ethics were intentionally politicized. Conversations took place during the creation of poetry, painting and collage to grapple with practitioners’ own power in shaping the worlds of young people. By way of experimenting with diffractive approaches to analysis, assemblages of poetry, art and theory were created as thresholds for entry into the larger thesis assemblage. Transcripts and art were analyzed while thinking with various theoretical threads from critical disability studies, feminism, queer theory, critical race theory and social justice, with the purpose of blurring and resisting harmful and normative support practices. This study shows that support workers are honouring the bodies and communications of resistance of the young people with disabilities they support. This study also shows support workers as deeply self-reflexive as they engage in critical practices in resistance to ableism. Dream/Hope/Love/Create/Act (and back) has implications for informing research, training and education that grow support work practices to become increasingly consensual and designed with and for young people with a variety of disability labels. / Graduate

There is an emerging body of literature about older women and play, often focused on social groupings (e.g., Red Hats Society, Raging Grannies). This study aimed to contribute to this body of literature by exploring the meaning, experience, and place of play and playfulness in the day-to-day lives of older women. Interpreting older women’s play as a phenomenologist informed by the feminist gerontology literature, I explored, described, and interpreted play using the voices, words, lived experiences, and artful reflections of four focus groups comprised of nineteen women between the ages of 63 to 95 years. Play emerged to be a wonderful, complex, and paradoxical phenomenon for older women that interconnected in three ways: as a doing, a feeling, and a being. Within and across the women, play was characterized by these paradoxes: time flies by and time slows down, productive and unproductive, social and solitary, and serious and silly. Play was infused into the everyday lives of these older women. Arts-based methods served to invigorate and engage the women and me, and transformed the research environment into a comfortable, open space to play and be playful, and to share, gather, and build knowledge. Thus this research contributes to the growing body of literature about the lives and experiences of older women, from their perspective, adds insight into older women’s play, and grows our knowledge about collecting data through arts-based methods with older women.

Immigrant youth face uncertainty in many aspects of their lives. Most have little control over their family’s decision to immigrate and once they arrive, many encounter challenges. The Navigating Multiple Worlds project worked with a group of youth researchers to explore the relationship between stress, resilience and expressions of subjectivity among immigrant youth. Moving beyond the negative conceptualizations of stress and acculturative stress that dominate the literature, this research gathered youth perspectives on stress and what could be done to enhance supports for immigrant youth in Victoria. Through our participatory approach, the youth research team was involved in the design and implementation of interviews, focus groups and finally a photovoice exercise. Our methodology sought to highlight narrative complexities and the fluidity of experiences, with the research team reflecting on their own experiences while gathering perspectives on stress from other immigrant youth. The benefits and challenges of working in participatory paradigms with youth and the value of arts based methods for capturing youth voices and creating ‘thinking spaces’ for community engagement are highlighted. Historically, research has problematized immigrant youth identities. A focus on immigrant youth perspectives reveals that while many youth face challenges after immigration, they also emphasize the value of flexibility in self-definition. The combination of our methods, participatory approach, our focus on youth voices and taking an ethnographic approach to documenting experiences of stress, contributed to the distinctiveness of our findings. Considering stress as an idiom of narrative expression rather than an index of negative experience, acknowledges its place as part of the worldview of the participants, who use the term in multiple ways. The physicality of stress, the spatial and temporal dimensions of stress and ‘everyday stressors’ emerged from our analysis as thematic categories that describe the ways that youth experience ‘stress’. The findings of the Navigating Multiple Worlds project speak to the value of conceptualizing stress as a narrative idiom. Over the course of our research it became apparent that youth were talking about stress in ways that allowed them to discuss and normalize negative experiences, re-framing experiences of ‘stress’ in positive terms. For many, this facilitated fluid movement from a focus on challenges to a focus on coping and resilience. Our research suggests that while conflicting expectations in the lives of immigrant youth are sources of ‘stress’ for many, they can also be understood as key ‘sites of flexibility’. The processes of negotiation that occur in these ‘sites of flexibility’, as youth use the language of stress to name challenging experiences and overcome them, contribute to the resilience of youth. Although our findings are specific to a small group of immigrant youth in Victoria, BC, considering stress as an idiom of resilience as well as distress creates opportunities to recognize and enhance the strengths of immigrant youth and the supports available to them. Recommendations from our research in terms of service provision, supports, and participatory research with youth are provided, as well as suggestions for future research in anthropology related to immigrant youth and stress. / Graduate / 0339 / 0326 / 0347 / sarah.fletcher@gmail.com

The purpose of this study is to determine social factors that influence help seeking behaviors by mothers who are concurrently involved in two social service systems: Child Protective Services (CPS) and family violence advocacy programs. Through the application of the behavioral model (of service use) for vulnerable populations, this study seeks to determine predisposing, enabling and need characteristics that impact help seeking behaviors at a family violence agency after participation in an ADVANCE (Acknowledging Domestic Violence and Navigating Child Protection Effectively) course, a group intervention class developed specifically for women involved with CPS. The research design is a mixed-method approach with an ADVANCE course evaluation embedded within the overall analysis of help seeking behaviors. The analytic strategies include pre-test/post-test means comparisons through paired t-tests, qualitative thematic analysis through arts-based methodology, and ordinary least squares and logistic regression analysis. This study considers six outcome variables related to protective help seeking behaviors: seeking services, seeking protective actions related to children, seeking a safety plan, seeking a protective order, seeking safe housing, and seeking financial independence. Several social factors identified influenced help seeking behaviors amongst child welfare involved women experiencing violence, namely, number of children, age of children, level of interest in services, previous participation in services, level of social support, perceived victim status, perceived need for a safety plan, and perceived need for change in family. This study should serve to enhance intervention practices utilized by both family violence advocates and child welfare professionals.

Indigenous adoptee scholars across Turtle Island and beyond have done good work in coming to understand their identity through community connection, culture, education and practice. A plethora of research has guided young Indigenous interracial adoptees on their journey, yet there are few stories focused on the experiences of interracial Maya adoptees reconnecting to their culture in KKKanada. Currently there is limited research documenting Maya adoptees experiences of displacement and cultural reclamation in KKKanadian adoption studies. Research must make more space for these stories and the stories of local Indigenous communities supporting them. In this story (thesis), through engagement with current literature and ten research questions, I explored what it meant to live as an interracial adoptee in West Coast Indigenous communities. An Indigenous Youth Storywork methodology was applied to bring meaning to relationships I have with diverse Indigenous Old Ones, mentors and Knowledge Keepers and their influence on my journey as a Maya adoptee returning to my culture. My personal story was developed and analyzed using an Indigenous decolonial framework and Indigenous Arts-based methods. This storying journey sheds light on the intricate intersections of interracial adoption, specifically for Maya Indigenous Youth who currently live in KKKanada. The intention of this Youth Storywork research work is to create space for Indigenous, Interracial, Transracial and Maya adoptees in Child and Youth Care, Social Work and Counselling Psychology education, policy and practice. / Graduate / 2021-11-18

Research on employment in Canadian AIDS service and allied organizations (AASOs) should recognize the unique experiences of immigrant women workers of African descent given their transnational HIV histories, working roles, relationship and responsibilities, interconnected identities and senses of belonging, and intersecting systems of oppressions they navigate within their working lives. Guided by decolonizing, anti-colonial, and transnational feminist thoughts, the Because She Cares study aims to understand the experiences of African women living with HIV who are employed in the HIV sector in the province of Ontario, Canada. Using performance narrative methodologies, this inquiry explored HIV-related work as agential, cultural and social practices of caring work; and deciphered the local and transnational interconnections to African women’s sensemaking of their work as HIV caring work. Ten African women with employment histories in Canadian AASOs participated as the Narrators. Using performance narrative methods based on oral traditions, I gathered, interpret and shared their stories of HIV caring work. In collaboration with the Narrators, I poetically “retold” interview narratives to embody the emotive resonance of the original telling and evoke the theoretical and political relevance of the sharing. Study findings illuminate the multiple self, communal and social modes of caring that emerged in women’s HIV-related work, the shifting responsibilization of African women living with HIV as carers, the intersecting systems of oppression African woman navigate in Canadian work spaces and strategies of care-full work that translocates “back home”. This study documents work experiences of African women whose HIV-related engagement is notable yet, typically overlooked in Canadian research on HIV-related employment and civic engagement. Decolonizing, anti-colonial, and transnational feminist thinking allowed me to use culturally responsive methodologies that highlight how HIV caring work becomes processes of identity and belonging, and its corresponding rights and responsibilities, within and across local and transnational contexts. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Guided by decolonizing, anti-colonial, and transnational feminist thoughts, the Because She Cares study aims to understand the experiences of African women living with HIV who are employed in the HIV sector in Ontario, Canada. Study aims include better understanding HIV-related work as agential, cultural and social practices of caring work and deciphering its local and transnational interconnections. Ten African women with employment histories in Canadian AIDS service and allied organizations (AASOs) participated as the Narrators. Using performance narrative methods based on oral traditions, I gathered, interpret and shared their stories of HIV caring work and “retold” narratives as poems. Study findings illuminate the multiple self, communal and social modes of caring that emerged in women’s HIV-related work, the shifting responsibilization of African women living with HIV as carers, the intersecting systems of oppression African woman navigate in Canadian work spaces and strategies of care-full work that translocates “back home”.