Using collage as a methodological and conceptual framework for re-conceptualizing knowledge in HIV/AIDS education, this thesis attends to young women’s understandings of HIV/AIDS and sexuality. Through engaging in the process of making collages, what stories do young women tell about HIV/AIDS? What discourses are produced when collage and narrative are used as methodological tools to address participants’ understandings of HIV/AIDS? By responding to their own collage texts, as well as the collage texts of others, how are issues of representation addressed? Using narrative and post-structural discourse analysis, this study explores how participants’ complex and contradictory understandings of HIV/AIDS diverge from the content and form of current school-based HIV/AIDS curriculum. Whereas the curriculum presupposes a rational and linear subject, participants’ reflexive understandings of HIV/AIDS shift throughout the study, varying as a result of roles performed, the context of the collage or image being discussed, and the dynamic interchange between participants.

Using collage as a methodological and conceptual framework for re-conceptualizing knowledge in HIV/AIDS education, this thesis attends to young women’s understandings of HIV/AIDS and sexuality. Through engaging in the process of making collages, what stories do young women tell about HIV/AIDS? What discourses are produced when collage and narrative are used as methodological tools to address participants’ understandings of HIV/AIDS? By responding to their own collage texts, as well as the collage texts of others, how are issues of representation addressed? Using narrative and post-structural discourse analysis, this study explores how participants’ complex and contradictory understandings of HIV/AIDS diverge from the content and form of current school-based HIV/AIDS curriculum. Whereas the curriculum presupposes a rational and linear subject, participants’ reflexive understandings of HIV/AIDS shift throughout the study, varying as a result of roles performed, the context of the collage or image being discussed, and the dynamic interchange between participants.

This research was simultaneously collective and individual. In this dissertation, my team and I inquired into what it means to undertake playbuilding as qualitative research and be a practitioner, specifically focusing on the roles of artist, researcher, and educator from an applied theatre graduate student perspective. I drew upon the methodological and theoretical frameworks of playbuilding as qualitative research and a/r/tography. Playbuilding as qualitative research offers creative methods for un/re/covering collective and affective ways of knowing. A/r/tography offers the opportunity to explore self and roles through art-making and reflexivity. For me, both are manifestations of the same creative impulse to make meaning and generate new understandings expressed through different perspectives and processes. This research consisted of a cohort of applied theatre graduate students who collectively explored and devised a play on what it means to be an artist/researcher/educator. The play, To Spin a Red Yarn: Enacting Artist/Researcher/Teacher stands as an artefact to the collectives’ generation, interpretation, and performance of research. In addition, I wrote an exegesis that spins my individual story within our collective. The exegesis, Behind the Curtain, extends the world of the play into the text by taking the reader on a dramatic journey through soliloquizing as dialogue. As a result of this study, I theorized a translated a/r/tographical framework into theatre- based language for the use by practitioners that is rooted in theatre practitioner praxis (theory and practice). This praxis-based study was intended to provide knowledge for artist-researchers, educators, and theatre-makers. This research offers artists/researchers/educators access to more stories, insights, and ideas about what it means to be a theatre-based artist/researcher/educator undertaking playbuilding as qualitative research. This research opens up rich possibilities that are commonplace to theatre-makers and performing artists on how different theatrical conventions could be used in playbuilding as qualitative research. For theatre-makers who are interested in combining theatre with academic research, it offers another paradigm to consider, expand, and interconnect the work that they do. Likewise, for a/r/tographers who are theatre-based, this research offers a way to conceive the work they do rooted in theatre-based language. / Graduate / 0465 / 0516 / 0727 / bishopk@uvic.ca