Thesis (M.S.)--Drexel University, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 42).

Thesis (B.F.A.)--Pennsylvania State University, 2009. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. Thesis supervisor: Rosa A. Eberly.

This research focused on the community arts organization, Center Stage Texas (CST), and its arts integration collaboration with an urban school in East Austin, Texas. Aspects of this organization’s programming was studied to gain more knowledge about the essential components a community arts organization needs to consider when conducting a partnered, arts integrated project and how programming should be implemented in these particular school settings in order to achieve the greatest impact and success. / text

This research investigates artists’ pedagogies to address the limited understanding in the education field of how artists enact their pedagogies, why they value them, and how they describe them. I purposively selected eight people from a UK-based charitable organisation that offers creative projects for children and adults in and beyond schools. I used a principally ethnographic multiphased research design and adopted methods of data collection and analysis from grounded theory to progres- sively focus on artists’ interests that have been overlooked by education research. In the exploratory phase of research, I conducted 13 participant-led, unstructured interviews with eight artists from the organisation. I progressively focused on salient concepts that emerged from this phase through participant observation and further interviews in subsequent phases. I observed six of the eight artists from the exploratory phase as they facilitated 20 workshops in total across five sites. Each workshop averaged approximately two hours in length. I observed three or- ganisational retreats when these eight artists collectively planned, described and discussed workshops. I attended a daylong conference hosted by the organisation on outdoor learning, which included presentations by two artists I observed. I participated in two artist-led reflective conversations when five artists and three site partners discussed workshops I observed. I conducted seven semi-structured interviews with three partners and three workshop participants. To represent their pedagogies, I selected three of the five sites for descriptive cases studies that featured four of the eight artists working in outdoor settings. These workshops served, for the most part, nursery and primary school children along- side nursery nurses, teachers, and members of their families such as parents and grandparents. These four artists member checked these descriptive case studies through additional interviews. I presented a separate framework that interprets themes that emerged in these three descriptive cases. Using a nested case study approach, I included the perspectives of the eight artists who participated in the study to interpret these themes: space, time, material, body, and language. I used a focus group with six of the eight artists, as well as separate interviews with the founder and director, to examine similarities and differences in interpretation and strengthen the trustworthiness of my account. This research found that these artists attempt to create conditions for open-ended enquiry across five dimensions—space, time, material, body, and language—so that participants experience immersive and pleasurable “beautiful little moments” when they extend possibilities for being in ways that could not have been prescribed or judged. The artists positioned their pedagogies as a critique of a market-driven ethos pervading institutions, particularly schools, that have narrowed opportunities for being.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore how taste is constructed at the micro-social level of a community of practice and to investigate the dynamics that underlie the process of taste-making. An ethnographic research was conducted in the context of an arts cooperative focusing on how members maintain status boundaries from dissimilar others (inter-group dynamics) and how they negotiate intra-group taste heterogeneity (internal dynamics). The findings indicate that the community symbolically demarcates itself from outgroups in an “us versus them” fashion by continuously juxtaposing its practices to those of competitive actors through “sayings” as well as “doings”. They also begin to mark out the appropriation processes through which members employ distaste to resignify and internalise meaning to their practices (a) by exhibiting tastes of outsiders if they can successfully negotiate their intent (recontextualising exo-cultural elements), (b) by negating tastes that are prevalent in the field in order to criticise subtly outgroup practices (appropriating practice through conspicuous absence) and (c) by negotiating the ‘tastefulness’ of objects that are not valued for their aesthetics by outsiders in order to provoke (resignifying prevailing aesthetics). Finally, the study conceptualises taste-making within the community as an ongoing dialogical process amongst members with heterogeneous views about “tastefulness”. Depending on their status, members employ strategies that help them either to actualise tastes that they favour in the context of the community or to deal with the exhibition of tastes that they are not in accordance with. The thesis makes a theoretical contribution to three areas; First, to literature on taste formation by accounting for the holistic outlook of community-based taste-making practices; Second, to our understanding of negative symbolic consumption by exhibiting the appropriation processes through which distaste endows meaning to practices; Third, to the stream of works on marketplace cultures by proposing a new conceptualisation of intra-group heterogeneity.

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio University, June, 2007. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Sydney, 2008. / Title from title screen (viewed Apr. 9, 2009) Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Dept. of Performance Studies, Faculty of Arts. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print form.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2005. / Advisor: Dr. Tom Anderson, Florida State University, School of Visual Arts and Dance, Dept. of Art Education. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 19, 2005). Document formatted into pages; contains xiii, 318 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

abstract: ABSTRACT The participatory and interactive nature of the "Hearing in Color" project unites people from different walks of life. My interest lies in creating a space for people to explore their creativity, think critically, and hone their own voice in a safe and collaborative environment. I have discovered that all art forms: movement, voice, visual or digital, stimulate possibilities for expression and enable people to move forward in new directions. To this end, my project fused multiple avenues of engagement, innovative dance technology, and alternative or site-specific locations to create a community-based project aimed at promoting dialogue and enhancing ties between several groups in the Phoenix area. In this paper, I argue that a multi-layered approach to community-arts and the use of advanced technology builds bridges for diverse populations to come together to participate and learn from one another. I also maintain that community exists among all communities involved in a process of community arts, not just the participants and facilitator. When community engagement and awareness are prioritized, a multi-layered approach creates the possibilities of growth, honesty, and understanding for all people involved. / Dissertation/Thesis / Hearing In Color Video / M.F.A. Dance 2010

This thesis examines a youth community arts network and Caja Lúdica, one of its founder organisations, in post-conflict Guatemala, and argues that they not only temporarily create spaces of encounter and community but through their networking and exchange strategies have established a rhizomatic assemblage of practice characterised by its perseverance and its dispersed agency in different parts of the country. As such, the thesis asks the following main three questions: What are the practices of Caja Lúdica and the Community Arts Network in Guatemala; what are youth protagonists’ experiences; and what contribution can their practices make to debates on community arts in challenging environments but also in other parts of the world? By using Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome theory it highlights notions of networking, local protagonism and collectivity asks for more sustainable practice with youth and by introducing these terms into performance and community arts scholarship, where they are scarcely explored, it makes a critical contribution to these fields. A methodological approach based on rhizomatic notions has fostered the connection of a wide range of methods such as semi-structured interviews, participant observation, ‘following’ as a research method as well as photography, the latter two of which have been developed for researching this particular networking practice in Guatemala. By using a selected set of case studies, this investigation aims to grasp the diversity and dynamics of this practice, in particular its movement and expansion across community borders through its youth protagonists. These case studies include the exploration of a local youth group and their exchange activities as well as the observation of the Network’s collective rituals and public interventions. By doing so this thesis aims to emphasise the potential of youth as creative protagonists in challenging contexts and stresses the importance to further examine their potential and ability to resist marginalisation and contribute to the reconstruction of the social fabric in war-affected communities and beyond. It further proposes that a networking and more holistic approach to practice can foster more sustainable community arts processes, not just in terms of decreasing external funding dependency and determination, but also to establish a practice culture in and between initiatives based on collectivity, exchange and support, which becomes more important in times of austerity.