The mention of the term “summer camp” often brings to mind cabins nestled in the woods, cool lakes, warm campfires and children having fun as they swim, paddle and play. At traditional residential camps children are imagined to revel in their freedom, overcome challenges, make long lasting friendships and develop into skilled and competent young people. How much of this imagery, however, is based upon a societal discourse constructed by adult values? How often do the actual experiences match these ideals? This study explores the issue of adult driven discourses surrounding the experience of camp by comparing the perspective of camp directors with the description of one of the author’s own childhood experiences. Using narrative techniques, the author composed two distinct descriptions of the camp experience including programmatic, social and emotional elements. The comparison of these two narratives revealed the possibility for distinct differences between the adult perception of the experience and how it may actually be experienced by a child. The areas of difference centred around both social and programming elements of camp participation which, when considered together, suggest the need for children to adjust to a distinctly different social setting in order to achieve the positive experiences reflected in our cultural conceptualization of summer camp.

Using a feminist, autoethnographic methodology and in depth interviews with twenty-three participants, I sought to better understand the meaning of family memory keeping for women and their families through this research, paying particular attention to the ways that dominant gender ideologies shape family memory and the act of preserving family memory. This research also endeavoured to explore those instances wherein families lose that memory keeper due to memory loss, absence, or death. Interviews revealed that, despite its absence from the literature, women’s family memory keeping is a valuable form of gendered labour – and leisure – that makes significant individual, familial, and social contributions, while simultaneously reproducing dominant gender ideologies and gendered constructions of fatherhood, motherhood, and the family. Through an exploration of the loss of a mother’s memory due to illness, death, or absence, this study also demonstrated the loss of a mother’s memory is both deeply felt, and deeply gendered. However, this study illustrated participants challenging these dominant gender ideologies, as well, and using family memory keeping as a way to resist, critique, and cope. As such, this study speaks to the absence of women’s family memory keeping from the gendered work, leisure studies, social construction, and loss literature, contributing a better understanding of both the activity itself and the gendered ideologies that shape the activity, as well. Not only does this study speak to gaps in existing literature, but findings make fresh theoretical contributions to this literature through three new concepts: the notion of the good mother as the “remembering mother”, the concept of “compliance leisure”, and the re-envisioning of women’s unpaid labour as contributing to “the homing of the home”. And with these contributions to the literature, this research also provides valuable insight for professionals working to improve policy and services surrounding postpartum care, individual and family therapy, caregiving, extended care, and palliative care.

Title from PDF of title page. / Document formatted into pages; contains 317 pages. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of South Florida, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. / Text (Electronic thesis) in PDF format. / ABSTRACT: If cosmetic surgery has become the cultural lens through which Americans look at issues of beauty and ugliness (Haiken 1997), then minor bodily stigma is the personal lens through which we scrutinize our bodies and self-diagnose our own flaws in the first place (Ellis 1998). In this dissertation, I interrogated the stories of eight women who struggled with two specific minor bodily stigmas--strabismus (crossed eyes) and micromastia (small breasts). Cosmetic surgery presents a potential "cure" for both of these conditions, however, as some of my interviewees could testify, the results are unpredictable. While some women reported being grateful that they could try to resculpt their bodies with surgery, others were too afraid to try, or annoyed that the option existed in the first place. / ABSTRACT: Using a Grounded Theory approach, I combined autoethographic techniques with interactive interviewing to collect and interpret my data about how individuals cope with, and talk about, minor bodily stigma in an age of cosmetic surgery. The two flaws I chose to examine carry a great deal of cultural significance because in the West, eyes are revered as "windows to the soul," while breasts are regarded as powerful symbols of sexuality. Consequently, I looked at each woman's exposure to culture at three levels--the mass media, the local culture, and the circle of family and friends. First, I wanted to find out how these women identified themselves as flawed in the first place, and what impact their perceived stigma had upon their lives. I wanted to know if, and how, they communicated to others about their minor bodily stigmas. Next, I delineated the eight coping strategies outlined by my interviewees and examined the efficacy of each. / ABSTRACT: Finally, I looked at how each woman made and communicated her decision regarding whether or not to pursue cosmetic surgery as a solution to her minor bodily stigma. I asked those who had surgery to elaborate on their decision and its outcome. / System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader. / Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This study explores the historic relationship between pop music divas and gay male fandom. It charts fan experiences from the early 60s with Judy Garland to contemporary times with pop diva Lady Gaga. This project also gives a description of the embodied experience of Brett Farmer's "queer sublimity of diva reception." Farmer (2005) argues that diva worship among gay men has become a queer sublimity, "the transcendence of a limiting heteronormative materiality and the sublime reconstruction, at least in fantasy, of a more capacious, kinder, queerer world" (p. 170). Using the methods of participant observation in drag performance and karaoke singing, performance ethnography, and autoethnography, I attempt to understand how a diva's performance can influence the lives of gay men and how it can inspire visions of a more perfect world for everyone.

This work explores: liberatory possibilities and limitations of narrative in healing from rape; the work and meanings of forgiveness, specifically seeking a complex definition of forgiveness drawing on spiritual, feminist, complexity, and phenomenological philosophies; and the relationships between narrative processes and forgiveness. I use an autoethnographic approach, offering my story of rape and healing in the aftermath. I attend to the physicality of the narrative, and to the way in which memory resides in the body, thus creating an embodied text. I examine current models of rape recovery, and the terms used by organizations, practitioners, and authors of rape narratives to frame the recovery process, contending that current models and the language of recovery fails to recognize the dynamic and non-linear trajectory of healing. I return to my own process of forgiveness, which is illustrative of the unpredictable event of forgiveness, which grows from the dissolution of self and other.

In 2006, I began working collaboratively with People First members to use video as a means of telling experience-based stories. Although, I found little information that would help prepare me to work collaboratively with people who have been labeled with an intellectual disability. I was acquainted with participatory approaches to making video and with inclusive research methods with people with learning disabilities. After working for over two years and facing a variety of hurdles and barriers, The Freedom Tour documentary was released in DVD in 2008, and a year later, short video stories were published on the Internet as part of the Label Free Zone web-based project. After having worked intensely and with great urgency to “get these stories out,” I felt the need to pause. To reflect upon my experiences and to ask questions about the work I was doing, I chose to write stories adopting an auto-ethnographic approach. Experimenting with auto-ethnography as a method of inquiry and storytelling as a form of representation, gave me the opportunity to experience a process I had encouraged so many others to do: telling experience-based stories. I hope this study will increase our knowledge and understanding of collaborative video storytelling projects involving people who have been labelled. I also hope that by delving into and speaking from my experiences as filmmaker/facilitator, sibling and now auto-ethnographer I have contributed, if ever so slightly, to shifting our thinking about intellectual disability from a deficit perspective to an assumption of competence. / May 2013

In the late 1970's Japanese Americans began organizing to demand redress from the United States government in both symbolic and material form; they asked for an apology and reparations. In 1981 a Congressional commission, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC), was formed to investigate Japanese American Internment and give recommendations to Congress for further actions. The Commission held public hearings in Los Angeles, California and 9 other cities across the United States. More than 150 individuals gave testimony at the Los Angeles hearings alone. Many were Japanese Americans who had never spoken publicly about their experiences. On March 8, 2011, I performed a solo performance entitled What We Could Carry that wove together text and historical narratives from the archives of the Los Angeles redress hearings with auto-ethnographic interpretations of Japanese American memory. This written thesis is a reflection on the methods, theories, and implications of my performance. I locate my performance as scholarship within performance studies and place my work in conversation with other scholars such as Joseph Roach. In Chapter One I argue that Roach’s concept of surrogation can be extended to include embodied witnessing as a constitutive role in performing collective memory. In Chapter Two I document and analyze my research and creative processes as an embodied experience. Lastly, in Chapter Three I consider both successes and failures of my solo performance. / text

The purpose of this dissertation was to examine how I can facilitate experiences with art that promote "productive ambiguity," or the ability to transform tensions that disrupt our current understandings into opportunities for personal growth. Ambiguity becomes productive when our encounters with difference stimulate curiosity, imagination, and consideration of new possibilities and perspectives. While employing a multi-methods practitioner inquiry that combined elements of action research, autoethnography and arts based research, I addressed the following questions with a voluntary group of fifth grade research participants: How can I facilitate experiences with art that promote productive ambiguity? How do my students interact with the various visual content and instructional strategies that I develop and implement? How might these interactions inform my future teaching practice, and how does my own reflective visual journaling process inform my research? In addition to employing reflective sketching to document and analyze data, I also presented research findings in the form of a visual research narrative. My analysis of research findings produced the following teaching strategies for facilitating meaningful experiences with art that promote productive ambiguity: (a) Use an inquiry approach to instruction as much as possible in order to position students to actively navigate the space between the known and unknown while seeking fresh understandings rather than passively accepting new information. (b) Explore how new concepts or themes relate to students' lives in order to situate unknowns in relation to their present knowns. (c) Aim to balance structure, flexibility and accountability while developing and implementing curricula. This promotes productive ambiguity as both teachers and students negotiate their pre-conceived ideas or plans and push themselves to respond to challenges encountered within their immediate environment. (d) In order to avoid unnecessary confusion, explicitly state that students should takes risks while generating new ideas rather than identifying a pre-existing solution. (e) Finally, ask students to identify why skills and knowledge generated during these activities are valuable in order to promote meta-cognition of how this ambiguous space can become more productive. In addition to these practical findings, research participants agreed that sharing their interpretations of visual phenomena with one another enabled them to understand each other better. I also discovered the ways in which productive ambiguity emerged in the spaces in between my teacher/researcher/artist roles when I perceived challenges as prospects for personal transformation. As a whole, this dissertation exhibited how relational aesthetics and arts based research theories translated into my elementary art classroom practice while simultaneously integrating these concepts into the research study design and presentation.

By blending lifewriting e.g. diaries/journals, creative non-fiction, poetry, and autoethnography and technology e.g. social networking, such as YouTube, I study my own life, and advocate for a method, theory, and approach to teaching language, culture, and identity in the ESL classroom that also uses both. I call this Transautomedia. I combine analysis (theory), application (original research projects), and activism (vigorous action in support of my cause). This is written (semi) linearly, but is also an art installation in the form of a website called The Human Archive Project (THAP), a Trans-Space, not bound by language, genre, discipline, or identity. On THAP I research my hybrid identity and ask: In what ways did being brought up simultaneously Jewish and Muslim help shape my hybrid identities? How do language, religion, culture, community, power, class, and gender contribute to my complicated and changing identities? I also write about myself since I am discussing writing about the self and since my own struggles with my hybrid identity can serve as an example of the kinds of issues that ESL (and all L2) learners face as they attempt to build their new identity in another language, another culture. Additionally, my dissertation includes two projects: Reclaiming Lithuania, a Vlog series about my Lithuanian Jewish identity, and Baubie, a memoir about the death of my Holocaust survivor grandmother. Finally, this dissertation also includes a pedagogical aspect. I create a syllabus with activities for The ESL classroom using lifewriting and technology, and how-to's on such things as website design.

This study, informed by critical pedagogy literacy, inquires into the accomplishments of the policy of Doi moi Giao duc, or Educational Renovation, in Vietnam. The study, which occurred over two years, uses critical literary analysis and autoethnography as primary methodologies; it focuses is on the author's personal experience and the analysis of literature and public documents to inquire into educational polices and practices. How the key tenets of Renovation - democratization and modernization, socialization and equalization - have been translated into practice was the center of the investigation. This study indicates that there has been a wide difference between the Renovation manifesto and its practice. This in turn has been the genesis of a critical literacy or resistance against that disparity by many teachers and learners. The study also suggests that schools are not only sites of dominion but also of contestation and that the oppressed have the ability to be self-conscientized. The study sought to understand the inconsistency and the ambiguous attitude about a Freirean praxis, and interpret this as an inescapable product of cultural and political circumstances. In this way, the study emphasizes the power of Paulo Freire's theory of critical education and at the same time suggests the possibility of its being reinvented in this sociopolitical context.