The intercultural virtual dancing subject: a choreographic investigation of spatio structures In Japanese-Western cultural practice

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy (Research Institute for Media, Arts and Performance)The aim of this practice-led research is to question and examine the notion of a dancing body in two and three-dimensional spaces within the context of intercultural performance. The research will draw upon comparative analyses of Japanese and Western cultural tenets, and on how these inform specific examples of dance making. The overarching goal is to test choreographically and then theorize an intercultural meeting point in relation to space and time, which highlights exchanges and tension between Japanese and Western in modern day dance making. It is hoped that such test and theorization will stimulate, in turn, advancements in the creation of a unique form of Japanese-Western dance performance. As reported above, this research is practice-based, and develops from questioning a number of issues relating to conflicted discourses which inform current notions of dance and technology. Firstly, it explores the presentation and identity of a dancing body in two dimensions, questioning whether the creative process of choreographic experiences of three dimensions can be negotiated and presented in two dimensions - so that ‘actual’ and ‘virtual’ spaces can be blurred. Said questioning, will both move from and rely on an intercultural perspective in negotiating the spatial interplay between the live performance and screen, to then formulate the mentioned intercultural meeting point within the dance works, where two distinctive cultures can co-exist and share their own values and characteristics without any hierarchical placing. Secondly, the research questions and challenges the applicability of Western theories and practices to Japanese culture. Being based on a process of active dialogue between theory and practical experimentation, and being written by a citizen of Japan who lives in Western Europe, this research constantly reflects on how the non-Western author needs to negotiate Western cultural forms and practices with her embodied cultural preference as a dance artist. Consequently, this work suggests a potentially different approach by formulating a model of a virtual dancing body that both resides within and goes beyond boundaries of existing intercultural performance theory

Black families as embodied policy : politics of dignity transforming colonized policy procedures

Drs. Sarah Diem and Lisa Dorner, Dissertation Supervisors.Field of Study: Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis."May 2018."Family involvement in U.S. public schools continues to value functional strategies (e.g., homework help, financial contribution, time spent in the classroom) as supports for the school, denying differentiated involvement (e.g., cultural-based practices, caring for a student; Calabrese et al., 2004; Cooper, 2009). In turn, public educators such as practitioners, researchers, and policymakers can perpetuate systemic violence (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 2004) unto racial, ethnic, and language minoritized families by devaluing families' actual contributions to their children's schooling (Boncana & Lopez, 2010). In conceptualizing the educational violence experienced by the families as a Westernized colonial power, a postcolonial approach (Anzaldua, 2007) was used to ask the overarching research question for this dissertation: How do Black families and I become and act as policy agents in the process of policy development? The purpose aimed to explore how three Black mothers and I disrupted and exerted horizontal power and, in turn, developed new educational policy, through a Politics of Dignity. The dissertation was situated in a Midwestern, mid-sized town with one public school district. Data production included 3 local maps and 6 graphs utilized to analyze the geopolitics of the city. Also produced as data were 15 go-along interviews, 42 pages of field notes, 300 pages of handwritten and electronic journals, with access to three years of archival data that included minutes from board meetings, two recorded board meetings, and strategic planning documents. The westernized methodological process was deconstructed using Anzaldua's (2007) >>, creating, in turn, a postcolonial, performative case. Specifically, the analysis took on a postcolonial process called reflective action: a relational tension between interview-text-analysis. In exploring how Black mothers and I created postcolonial narratives and humanized our experience as families and policy agents, this postcolonial process helps educators understand the need for the simultaneous deconstruction and construction of one's being to engage in humanizing education. For example, Chapter 4 shows my transition from Educator, Re-searcher into an Activist-Inquirer, enabling me to challenge my own racist attitudes to work with the mothers in a more humane manner. Chapters 5 and 6 demonstrate the mothers' postcolonial survival strategies that confronted local dehumanizing geopolitics, demanding more of their personal situation, while ordering for equitable change from the school district and the city itself. The reconstructions shared herein depict the transformation that the Black parents and I underwent before working collaboratively with the school district. To conclude, I propose a postcolonial process that requires a complete reconceptualization in the following: educational power as horizontal, theory and research as practice, and policy development as inclusive of families as policy entrepreneurs.Includes bibliographical references (pages 264-293)

Rethinking multiphase leisure experience: a hermeneutic phenomenological approach to experiences of art museum visitation

Since Clawson and Knetsch (1966) first proposed the multiphase leisure experience (MLE) model, the phasic nature of leisure experience has been given substantial attention by tourism and leisure scholars who to date have largely focused on the dynamic on-site experience with quantitatively measurable values. However, their traditional goal-oriented, post-positivist approach is limited in its ability at both the practical and theoretical levels to fully reflect the holistic aspect of the model that emphasizes not only the connectivity of phases from anticipation through recollection, but also the equal value between phases. In this dissertation, I have applied the multiphase leisure experience model from a hermeneutic phenomenological perspective and explored the experience of a visit to the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) based on this meaning-based approach in order to investigate the meanings of the multiphase leisure experience for art museum visitors. This approach emphasizes understanding an individual’s life experience as a reflection of cultural traditions that are transferred through language. The methodological framework is based on hermeneutic phenomenology and Gadamer’s fusion of horizons. This multidimensional concept enabled me to apply the MLE model to interpreting the meaning of the museum visit as a cultural leisure experience. By engaging in analysis of the symbolic metaphors that emerged from and delivered a node of crucial values, meanings and concerns of each participant, I was able to consider both the individually different experiences and their socio-cultural contexts that assisted in comprehending the evolving meaning of their visits. Through in-depth interviews and reflexive journals with twelve participants, I sought to understand the meanings of the multiphase leisure experience for art museum visitors beyond the physical boundaries of the museum. Furthermore, I sought to understand how the verbal interaction between interlocutors influenced the meanings of their visits. Participants’ narratives were interpreted with six symbolic metaphors that led to the identification of a representative image of their visits: learning for those who consistently interpreted SeMA as an educational institution and showed interest in exhibits they considered worth learning; aesthetic for those whose aesthetic appreciation neglected the external values of exhibits and played a crucial role in constructing the meaning of their visits throughout all the phases; high-culture for those who alienated themselves from this cultural institution, considering it exclusively for the wealthy and educated; everyday-ness for those who signified their everyday concerns and interests without paying attention to the aesthetic value of the exhibits; trigger for those whose experiences at SeMA directly triggered them to visit other art institutions; diary for those who focused on telling and creating their own stories in relation to their on-site experiences. Their self-reflective stories at the intra-textual level were analyzed and situated with sociocultural traditions at the inter-textual level. This showed that the meanings of their visits reverberated with contemporary Korean orientations such as collective authority, disinterestedness, post-museum, cultural capital and cultural autobiography. These multi-layered interpretations enabled me to understand how the initial signification of their visits became recessed, conserved, altered and expanded in the final recollection phase. The findings encourage leisure and tourism scholars to escape from the narrow interpretation of leisure as a frozen, snapshot-like immediate experience and to understand leisure as a contextualized phenomenon that erodes the boundaries between extraordinary and ordinary experiences, off- and on-site activities, work and leisure, and leisure and tourism. My interpretation of the findings supports the need to consider leisure experience as an evolving set of meanings

El Norte tampoco existe: First-and-Third-World as show (essays on the epistemology of the spectacle from Guy Debord, Santiago Álvarez, Gregory Nava and Arthur Tuoto, 1965-2016)

The history of United States – Latin American relations has been dominated by discourses of development since the earliest stages of independent nationhood. In the twentieth century, these discourses found an epistemological anchoring in the geopolitical concepts of First World and Third World well past the Cold War Era, as well as in the related notions of Empire and Neo-Colony in more recent postcolonial studies. As cultural concepts, these binary categories exceed the economic basis to which they claim reference. The dissertation examines this projection beyond the economic foundation as a function of spectacular media and focuses on the degree to which these categories (which regulate crucial aspects of the mutual U.S. – Latin American imagination) may constitute compromised epistemological dogmas firmly governed by the very capitalist status quo that they attempt to counter. In order to develop a theorization of the textual forces at work in the formation of the cultural concepts of First and Third World, this dissertation examines the work of Cuban revolutionary filmmaker Santiago Álvarez in dialogue with an update of Guy Debord’s theories on the spectacle, the dérive, and psychogeography. Together with critical considerations of theories of space-time, modernity and postmodernity, as well as of the nation-state epistemological order, it formulates a reading of the development discourses, called here “demarcational critique.” This model is also put into conversation with a key theoretical work on the topic (John P. Leary’s A Cultural History of Underdevelopment), a fictional film (Gregory Nava’s El Norte), and an experimental montage of crucial meta-reflective value (Arthur Tuoto’s Não Me Fale Sobre Recomeços). Through an exploration that seeks to blur the line between theoretical and fictional texts, this dissertation concludes that development discourses, and their main subsidiary notions of First and Third World, generally studied as purely economic categories, possess a spectacular dimension, and that the analysis of this dimension must involve cultural studies. It further highlights the problematic nature of those notions in relation to a postcolonial project by examining their Eurocentric, moralizing, and racialized nature. Finally, this dissertation proposes and demonstrates an alternative, non-national model for postcolonial discourse

Bābā Āb Dād

In dieser ethnographischen Arbeit wird die Traumkultur einer Gruppe von Sufis aus der Region Kurdistan unter Zuhilfenahme des strukturalistischen Ansatzes mit einem besonderen Fokus auf den lacanschen Rückgriff auf Siegmund Freud untersucht. In seiner Traumdeutung hat Freud zwei Konstitutiva von Traumarbeit herausgearbeitet – Verdichtung und Verschiebung. In dieser Arbeit ist die Beziehung zwischen Verdichtung und den „Janusworten“ von besonderer Relevanz. Der Leser wird durch das Nachvollziehen der sufistischen Traumkultur und des ethnographischen Materials Kenntnis darüber erlangen, wie die Leidenschaft für Worte und die Leidenschaft dafür, Worte „aufzuladen“ – durch den häufigen Gebrauch von poetischen und metaphorischen Wendungen – das visuelle System insofern betreffen, als dass hinter jeder Erscheinung ein Wort als Botschaft versteckt ist. Dieser Prozess macht aus jedem Traum ein Worträtsel und aus jedem Wort ein Traum-Objekt