Theses (Anthropology)
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Item Re-worlding the self in graphic narratives—A case study of sense, affect, and mad-centered knowledges of psychosis(2024) Kernan, Luke; Boudreault-Fournier, AlexandrineThis doctoral project, Re-worlding the Self in Graphic Narratives—A Case Study of Sense, Affect, and Mad-Centered Knowledges of Psychosis, collaboratively explores and addresses experiences of psychosis (sensory breaks from reality) with Mad-identifying participants who describe their earliest memories of these interior events from a sensorial and visual perspective. Co-creating an arts-based ethnography of psychosis through the ongoing production of artworks and media, I survey the ways that participants’ narratives of psychosis materialize through visual and poetic representations of their lived experiences of madness. I examine how individuals distressed by psychosis move beyond their symptomatic illnesses and narrowly prescribed identities and find new ground to (re)make themselves through expressive processes. Within a synergetic inter-arts research setting, I led a series of five online workshops with two unique groups of participants, each of whom had prior past episodes of psychosis and were immersed in outpatient mental health services. Participants drew from and upon their interior, emotionally charged experiences during the workshops to develop multisensory and narrative drawings that became both prompt and foundation for subsequent individual interviews. We then collaborated on participant-led comics that became the foundational impetus for re-imagining the ethnographic text. Through this novel approach to arts-based research, I aimed to understand psychosis from empathic, sensorial, and visual perspectives. This project documents, engages, and theorizes the role of “psychosic” imagination and creativity in the lives of ten participants who have experienced psychosis as a life event and were involved in comics-making activities. Here, I track how participants, as cherished Mad interlocutors and co-collaborators, sought to resolve communication and subject-positioning issues that arose from the equally ineffable and challenging dynamics of psychosis and madness. These conflicts were internally registered and spurred a vital set of self-fashioning, polyphonic dialogics that primed my interlocutors for self-transformation and psychosic re-worldings. These collective efforts not only de-center ethnographic practice through research-creation strategies, but they succinctly clarify aspects of how madness and pressured, non-normative consciousness are experienced, generating a set of symbolic, poetic, and visual languages to capture expressions of psychosis. Moreover, as a collaborative research-creation practice, our extensive, year-long work aided in destigmatizing and reframing mental duress. Participants simultaneously developed ways to navigate emotional tensions, challenge points, and affective accruals wrought by psychosis through graphic narrative modalities, offering this practice as one that sees Mad-inclusive systems of living myth intertwined with post-traumatic growth.Item Reframing crisis: Hope and future-making in contemporary Cuban photographs(2024) Smith, Graydon; Boudreault-Fournier, AlexandrineFollowing the COVID-19 pandemic, already challenging circumstances in Cuba have significantly worsened, heavily impacting how Cubans envision their lives and futures. Using a combination of visual and ethnographic methods, I conducted two months of fieldwork in the summer of 2023 in Cuba’s second largest city, Santiago de Cuba. Using photovoice, photowalks, and semi-structured interviews with eight Cuban young adults, I visually explore life following the worst economic crisis in the island’s history. Following COVID-19, an already fraught political climate has further devolved, migration has reached historic rates, inflation renders many goods unobtainable, and infrastructure and services are challenged. For many, future paths are unclear; they may seek better lives abroad, or fight to improve their conditions on the island, in a tumultuous and polarized political climate. For youth, migration often appears more viable to catalyze change. I employ the theory of radical hope to consider how people produce meaning and futural momentum despite tremendous pressure and uncertainty. Curating images into five key themes, I consider discourses of migration, loss, change, escape, and survival during difficult times. As I argue, these photographs inform a non-generalizable, nuanced image of life during crises, highlighting sustaining moments alongside threats to hope. This centers a more dignified view of life, emphasizing momentum rather than fatalism, individual agency, and the possibility for change without prescribing future paths. By emphasizing possibility alongside critique, I raise questions about these indeterminate trajectories and the role of hope in a seemingly hopeless time, finding that a portrait of contemporary Cuban lives and futures are difficult to characterize with pre-existing ideas.Item Alternative health care utilisation among seniors(2000) Wolfe, Nuala KatherineItem A faunal analysis of two middens on the east coast of Vancouver Island(1980) Wigen, Rebecca J. S.Item Tool kits and activity areas at site DhPt 10A in the Kootenay River Valley.(1974) Whitlam, Robert GeorgeItem The Mau movements in Western and American Samoa : an ecological approach(1983) Wedlake, Barbara FairItem On assigning gender to post-cranial bison bones(1985) Walde, Dale AllenItem Opening to vision : the use and interpretation of trance in contemporary society(1991) Wagner, John RichardItem Harmonious relations : a core cultural value of the southern Plateau Indians.(1970) Stafford, Bret WilliamItem Tsimshian testimony before the Royal Commission on Indian Affairs for the Province of British Columbia (1913-1916)(1981) Stuckey, Naneen Ethyl-GraceItem "Images" and "Issues" : the portrayal of Asians in the Vancouver Daily Province and the Vancouver Daily World, 1907 to 1908(1995) Steinhausen, Wendy CarolItem Coping and compliance in coronary patients : an acculturation study(1986) Steele, Robert William SeanItem Item