In this research, I investigate multiple entry points for understanding and developing art and visual culture curriculum to respond to the Anthropocene. Informed by posthuman, feminist, and ecological theories, I ask what practices and theory art educators might take up to cultivate emergent artistic practices with students toward responding to the geological, social, and present moment. Organized around integrating visual art into school and community garden sites, this writing includes curriculum theory, a unit design and reflections on implementation and the writing process. Using autoethnographic and visual art methodologies, I attempt to engage the subjective relational space between myself, my psyche, and the phenomenon of teaching, writing, and embodying this curriculum. Through this research, I wanted to know whether co-facilitating with human and non-human members of school gardens would stabilize affective and relational containers of care and stewardship as part of the learning environment. To this end, I found that co-facilitating with place, including the garden, is a stabilizing environment for myself as a teacher, but can also be conducive to perpetuating Western and white narratives of place. Another central theme and finding from this data was the lived experiences of grief. Employing autoethnography (Ellis & Bochner, 2000), I reflected on my teaching through my psyche, body, and emotions. I found and analyzed this data through present moment awareness of my embodied response to the experience of writing and facilitating a four-week art curriculum with middle school girls in their school garden. As an emergent response to this grief, I have therefore organized my writing around the notion of mending posthuman heartache in the Anthropocene. This is a call I believe educators should take seriously. The Anthropocene moment is in so many ways the result of deep disconnection and separation, years of violence against the planet, and against humanity in the forms of colonization, patriarchy, white-supremacy, and capitalism. I hope for this research to contribute to animating art and visual culture education toward affective and critical ecological solutions to the moment we are living in. The implications of this research are not empirical in nature, but rather take up poetic, artistic, and enigmatic qualities of the present to tease out ways of being with, working against, and creatively responding to these times in which we live. To conclude, I believe any practices that cultivate care and affective relationship to place, self, and the other members of our human/non-human communities, such as visual art and gardening practices, can serve as containers and resources for living in the Anthropocene.

In recent years, the use of social media has grown significantly, yet associations between digital photo-practices and female self-representation in cyberspaces remain unknown. This thesis aims to assess how female self-images shared on Instagram are being associated and evaluated. Inspired by the cyberfeminist effort to create positive cyberspaces for women by reevaluating the relationship between technology and women, a posthuman feminist framework is applied to allow an analysis beyond modern western dualistic understandings of nature vs. culture and reality vs. virtuality. A focus group discussion with four female-identifying participants, mean age 25 years old, was conducted on October 25, 2022. The discussion focused on three digital photo-practices. The analysis of posting frequency suggests that a regular display of female self-images is generally negatively associated with superficiality due to the incompatibility of patriarchally female attractiveness with female intellectuality. Further it suggests that revealing images are generally negatively associated due to the coupling of cyberspaces with masculinity. A digital affirmation of femininity is associated with self-objectification through the male gaze and therefore with sexual intent directed at men. Lastly, the analysis suggests that photo editing practices are generally negatively associated with artificiality. Due to the acceptance of binary oppositions, “artificial” images are negatively associated as “unnatural”. The analysis concludes that the extent of digital photo-practices determines the extended criticism.