Hepatitis C is known as the ??silent epidemic??. Globally 170 million people live with chronic hepatitis C, yet it receives little policy, media or public attention. In developed countries the blood-borne virus is primarily transmitted through illicit drug injecting practices, aiding its silenced and stigmatised status. In this thesis I uncover some of these silences by exploring the narratives of forty people living with hepatitis C in New Zealand and Australia. My status as a person living with hepatitis C informed all aspects of this research project; I therefore also include my own experiences, foregrounding researcher reflexivity and the co-constructed nature of the interview process. My aims are both practical and theoretical. On a practical level I explore the experiences of people living with hepatitis C in order to inform recommendations for policy, research and practice, while also working to elucidate and employ an approach that allows for an analysis of the ill body as a lived experiencing agent, located in a substantive web of connections whereby discourse, corporeality and sociality, inform and mediate one another. To this end I employ a ??political phenomenology?? influenced by phenomenological and poststructuralist theoretical approaches. The central, previously under-researched, issues that arose in participants?? narratives structure the chapter outline, with results chapters focusing on participants?? experiences of diagnosis, living with hepatitis C, stigma, support group membership, alcohol use, and hepatitis C treatment. For many participants, it was found that living with hepatitis C was a liminal experience where distinctions between what it was to be healthy or ill were not clear-cut. Indeed, many of the participants?? narratives exposed the inadequacy of Western binary categorisations to speak to their experiences of living with hepatitis C. Throughout this thesis it can be seen that the meanings that participants ascribed to health, illness, and their hepatitis C were fluid and contextual, informed by the interplay of corporeality and discourse. From this interplay comes the ability to speak into the gaps of dominant discourses, creating the potential for the disruption, or subtle realignment, of normative ways of knowing.

Hepatitis C is known as the ??silent epidemic??. Globally 170 million people live with chronic hepatitis C, yet it receives little policy, media or public attention. In developed countries the blood-borne virus is primarily transmitted through illicit drug injecting practices, aiding its silenced and stigmatised status. In this thesis I uncover some of these silences by exploring the narratives of forty people living with hepatitis C in New Zealand and Australia. My status as a person living with hepatitis C informed all aspects of this research project; I therefore also include my own experiences, foregrounding researcher reflexivity and the co-constructed nature of the interview process. My aims are both practical and theoretical. On a practical level I explore the experiences of people living with hepatitis C in order to inform recommendations for policy, research and practice, while also working to elucidate and employ an approach that allows for an analysis of the ill body as a lived experiencing agent, located in a substantive web of connections whereby discourse, corporeality and sociality, inform and mediate one another. To this end I employ a ??political phenomenology?? influenced by phenomenological and poststructuralist theoretical approaches. The central, previously under-researched, issues that arose in participants?? narratives structure the chapter outline, with results chapters focusing on participants?? experiences of diagnosis, living with hepatitis C, stigma, support group membership, alcohol use, and hepatitis C treatment. For many participants, it was found that living with hepatitis C was a liminal experience where distinctions between what it was to be healthy or ill were not clear-cut. Indeed, many of the participants?? narratives exposed the inadequacy of Western binary categorisations to speak to their experiences of living with hepatitis C. Throughout this thesis it can be seen that the meanings that participants ascribed to health, illness, and their hepatitis C were fluid and contextual, informed by the interplay of corporeality and discourse. From this interplay comes the ability to speak into the gaps of dominant discourses, creating the potential for the disruption, or subtle realignment, of normative ways of knowing.

This thesis explores the effects of art-making in group art therapy sessions for people affected by Parkinson's Disease. It examines their experience of self through active engagement with art materials. It also draws on the experience of family caregivers and of professionals providing other therapeutic support for these patients. The research methodology is based on feminist, post-structuralist epistemological thought, situating the research as a political, reality-altering endeavour shaped by, and interpreted through, the researcher's particular ideological lens. The thesis emphasises the importance of developing a critical overview of the research context and considering how dominant discourses have shaped both the individual patient's experience of Parkinson's and the service approach to ways of improving their quality of life. A medical model is viewed as determining a narrow understanding and experience of the condition. Broadening the focus of the work to attend to how Parkinson's is culturally and socially embedded provides new understandings of its effects on patients and their wider needs. The research design has a strong participatory component drawing on the support of a consultancy group of six people affected by Parkinson's and three family caregivers, all seen as experts through their personal experience of the condition. The researcher defines her position as researcher-near using her background as artist, art therapist and her experience of working with people affected by Parkinson's at the research site. The research design is inspired by group art therapy practice, and takes research as praxis for theory building. Social science qualitative interviewing was used with four focus groups, and in ten semi-structured individual interviews which involved participant selected examples of their group therapy artwork. Nine audio-recordings of group art therapy sessions were collected. The researcher used art-making throughout the research process to create visual researcher diaries, and 'response' art as a way of exploring the material gathered for analysis. Besides providing an opportunity to consider the role of visual expression to complement verbal, this English language thesis uses data collected in Spanish and Catalan. Translation across languages (spoken, written and visual) and cultures became a method through which to consider interpretation, explore nuances and question assumptions. The dilemmas faced in translation enhanced researcher reflexivity and facilitated exploration of the space between art and language. This thesis offers an understanding of the potential contribution of group art therapy within six themes: 'Self-construction and discovery'; 'Material action'; 'Aesthetic group movement'; 'New perspectives'; 'Artwork as legacy'; and 'Physical transformation of issues'. These themes support the view that group art therapy acted as a catalyst for well-being and better functioning for participants, and that it can be modelled as a continuous process of embodied enquiry for those affected by Parkinson's. The triangular therapeutic relationship is explored and the terms 'creator' - 'artwork' - 'audience' are proposed to recognise the flexibility in the art-maker's position between creator and audience of their artwork. That artwork is conceptualised as an active meaning generator in the group art therapeutic encounter and the artistic intersubjective matrix is explored in relation to therapeutic factors specific to group art therapy. Implications for working with other related chronic, life changing conditions are elaborated.

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Title from second page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 228-234).