No description available.

A second generation South Asian can be faced with contrasting and conflicting cultures which can impact the formation of a healthy ethnic identity. The present study investigated what facilitated and hindered a South Asian's adolescent experience of becoming bicultural. Flanagan's (1954) Critical Incident Technique was used in interviewing 8 adult participants, including 5 females and 3 males, aged 20 to 26 years of age. The results identified 88 critical incidents, forming 10 helping categories and 4 hindering categories. The 10 Helping categories were: (1) Cross Cultural Friendships, (2) Speaking both Punjabi and English, (3) Personal Attributes, (4) Shared Experiences with Peers in the 'Same Boat', (5) Family Support and Influence, (6) Involvement in Recreational, Cultural and Religious Community Activities, (7) Visiting India, (8) High School Experience, (9) University Education and (10) Acceptance of Parent's and / or Grandparent's Views. The Hindering Categories were: (1) Parental and / or Familial Expectations, (2) Media Influence / Societal Expectations, (3) Personal Conflict of Cultural Values and (4) Experiencing Racism. The categories were found to be reliable and valid through procedures such as exhaustiveness, independent raters, co-researcher's cross checking, participation rate and theoretical agreement. The resulting categories provide a list of comprehensive factors that can facilitate and hinder an individual's process towards developing a bicultural identity. The findings are discussed in relation to implications for counselling theory and practice, and future research.

Recently, in the South African and the international context, teacher identity investigations have dominated the landscape of transformation in education, in an attempt to understand the relationship between teachers’ identities and their practice of teaching. However the dearth of research on deaf education and D/deaf teachers has created a gap in our comprehensive understanding and this study has aimed to address this void and advance existing theory. This project focused individually and collectively on five Deaf teachers and how they experienced their deafness in widely differing circumstances at various stages in their lives from childhood to adulthood. The project explored firstly, how the participants constructed their identities as people living with deafness; how they understood and interpreted their lives in the context of deafness. The second component of the investigation addressed how they negotiated their deafness related identities in their practice as teachers. My purpose was to know through their personal stories how they have come to explain and know themselves as Deaf persons, how deafness gives character to their lives and how this image guides their practice as teachers. The participants, who teach in schools for D/deaf learners in KwaZulu-Natal, were drawn from a larger cohort of Deaf teachers that qualified from a three-year pilot teacher education programme designed to train D/deaf teachers to teach D/deaf learners. At the time of the research, participants were in their eighth year of teaching. Through unstructured interviews, conducted via the medium of South African Sign Language, data was obtained in the form of narratives of participants’ lives which were captured in three seamless phases that included their childhood, schooling and their experiences as teachers. The signed data was transcribed into written English text. The written text which was collaborated by participants, was used for the analysis This study has examined their individual life stories and the construction of their identities as D/deaf persons, against the backdrop of proclaimed Deaf cultural identity, where difference rather than disability is highlighted. In the analysis I argue from a post-structural perspective that the participants’ claim to positioning in either Deaf or deaf or hearing discourses is not fixed and rigid. Instead positioning overlaps fluidly and continuously between the three discourses with participants taking on character and conventions from Deaf, deaf and hearing discourses. They transition consciously or unconsciously between the systems and create multiple and contradictory identities. In addition I argue that cohesiveness and coherence in the conceptualization of a Deaf cultural community and Deaf identity is non-existent, when viewed from a post-structural lens. The institutional resources that shape their teacher identity constructions include colleagues, learners, the parent community, the curriculum, and other micro-interactions. The institutional resources intersect with biographical resources of race, religion, gender, social class, childhood and later experiences, relationships, recollections, role-models and other signifiers. A multitude of intersections and permutations emerge, to create an inexhaustible inventory of teacher positions embedded in the general discourse of teaching and discoursed by teaching. In both instances, that is, as D/deaf person and as D/deaf teacher, the school is the site that instantiated the D/deaf identity and the teacher identity and the cultural discourses that prevail in schools are the sites of resistance, acceptance and negotiation of identities. Here identity emerges in the space where subjectivities intersect with narratives of social, cultural and political discourses. This research which draws from the Deaf educators’ personal and professional experiences and is articulated through the medium of South African Sign Language, hopes to bring the educators’ histories together, and through these reflect on their lives, visualizing new possibilities for understanding deafness in an educational and cultural context. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2010.

No description available.

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between sex-role ideology and body image among women of various ages. Theorists have suggested that poor body image may be related to the experience of being female in contemporary society. This study attempted to objectively test this theory by determining whether or not feminist women, due to less restrictive notions of their rights and roles in contemporary society, might demonstratemore positive relationships with their bodies than women with more traditional attitudes.such a relationship (between feminist sex-role ideology and body esteem) would apply across age categories.Five hundred seventy-five female faculty, staff, retirees, and students completed a demographic profile, the Body Esteem Scale, and the Simplified Attitudes Toward Women Scale. Correlational analysis of data provided no support for the proposed hypotheses. Further study is recommended. / Institute for Wellness

The primary objective of this creative project was the exploration of cultural and self identity and the painting techniques used for their creation. The paintings are an attempt to portray through the use of the human figure and symbolic elements to communicate my personal struggle relating to events in my past, present, and future. In these three large paintings I have explored an approach reminiscent to German Expressionism style along with more contemporary motifs which are derived from my research and past experiences in painting at Ball State University. It was very important for me to spend time researching artist involved in the German expressionist movement, because they have been an integral part of reshaping the way I approach art. This body of work required a variety of traditional oil painting techniques including: canvas construction, under painting, stumbling, and glazing. / Department of Art

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 133-140). / iv, 140 leaves, bound 29 cm

Mode of access: World Wide Web. / Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 245-251). / Electronic reproduction. / Also available by subscription via World Wide Web / [3], ix, 251 leaves, bound ill. 29 cm

The focus of this project is a creative investigation of the significance and function of the alter-ego in contemporary visual art, specifically in relation to sculpture, installation and video. / Artists, including myself, frequently develop characters or different personalities in and through their work in order to present an alternate, idealised or transformed self or as a tactic to investigate a different approach to their practice. These alternative constructed selves can function in diverse ways, often as a strategy for transgression, dispensing with accountability and/or for maintaining the freedoms and possibilities of a mutable identity. / Central to my research has been the development of a body of artefacts and texts that are made through, about or in response to a variety of my own alter-egos. Initially I inhabited three discrete alter-egos that were variations of myself, as an artist, in order to be able to observe and compare how they might operate and form an intra-subjective discourse. These version 'excursions', being Winifred, Edith and Sadie, can be more accurately described as semi-alter-egos because although the personalities are not entirely mine they are not different from mine they are not different from but simply 'mutilations' of my personality. They were initially outlined as Edith the struggling, self-effacing but creative loser, Winifred the straight faced, repressed, serious investigator brimming with curiosity and Sadie the successful, relaxed and happy self-enhancer for whom art and life flow. / The alter-egos evolved through changes of my appearance, behaviour and biographical data. Evidence of this approach is manifest through the amassing of fragments of images, artworks, video and photo documentation. The conception of Winifred, Edith and Sadie as artists allowed me to ground my activities in the studio around objects and materials through a project that was essentially a process. A critique of the art world is implied through the various strategies and responses of the alter-egos. The process eventually involved killing off these particular personae to more fully engage with questions of 'becoming' through a less contrived more unknowing approach to emerging alter-egos. / The artefacts were not conceived as an 'exhibition' but are residue of the research process and constitute the greater part of my thesis. The written exegesis elucidates the line of research undertaken within the studio practice with reference to personal perspectives and contemporary conceptions of the self. The exegesis also documents an exploration into the device and use of the alter-ego in recent visual arts practice and analyses how these constructed selves might permit, reveal, conceal or operate as projections of inner states or fulfilments of desire. My studio experiments and construction of artefacts have been informed by critical analysis of these functions and the ways in which they related or diverged from my own motivation and utilisation of the alter-ego. I briefly consider the area which includes abnormal psychological conditions such as the multiple personality and the splitting of the subject. / This project deals with complex philosophical issues without foregrounding a theoretical approach. The emphasis is on the generative potential through studio-based research in the area of visual arts. / Thesis (MVisualArts)--University of South Australia, 2007.

What is belonging? What does belonging mean as lived experience? What happens when displacement disrupts belonging as solid given? / I investigate these questions from my unstable position as displaced cultural 'other', as artist, as woman and as city dweller. Personal memories, dreams and the experience of reality form threads of reference that are akin to Walter Benjamin's notion of memoirs, rather than being an autobiographical chronology. / I question how a sense of belonging may be instilled, maintained, lost, achieved, resisted; how a sense of otherness may develop, persist, (re)surface. Do migrants merely amplify a universal dilemma? My position as migrant is a complex interweaving of presence and absence, developed gradually over time as a result of a wide range of factors, including the abiding effect of early childhood experiences. I focus on geography and language as central to the experience of cultural displacement and move between ambivalent positions and the seemingly solid territories of authoritative theories. / The structure of the thesis reflects these complexities. It is a psychogeographical mapping of several journeys in one, like a Deleuzian rhizome route system, or Debordian dérive, or what Jean-Luc Nancy calls a mêlée. As methodology I draw on these theories to bring together complexities, by interweaving experience, practice and theory. / The thesis comprises art works and a written exegesis. Drawings, photos, maps and other artwork intersperse with writing; artefacts include text, maps, knitting and series of images that document walking projects. I link walking to uttering, to language and the telling of stories. I explore the complex dilemmas of translation, of language as loss, contained as interiority and language as appropriated, claimed from without. Both exegesis and studio work form part of a process that is expressive, while situated within a critical context. / I argue the validity of ambivalent belonging, formed and maintained in transient connections between fragmented aspects of experience, while keeping open the potentiality of ongoing change. This research into the meaning of belonging is full of intuitive beginnings and remains open ended. / Thesis (PhDVisualArts)--University of South Australia, 2005.