Browsing by Subject "Care"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5

Begin. Begin again : an intersectional dissection of my current directing philosophy
(2024-05) Lavery, Jenny; Sanchez, K. J.; Bassett, Alexandra; Lynn, Kirk
In this process paper, I examine how my personal life and career have intersected. Throughout this thesis, I return to the question, ‘How do we take care?’ while annotating my current directing philosophy and distilling strategies for leading creative teams that envision pathways towards positive creative experiences, where wholeness is valued, healing is possible, and joy is abundant, not despite the work, but because of it.
Feminism, care work, and collectivity : the case of progressive self-care
(2021-07-30) Berumen, Gwendolyn Marie; Williams, Christine L., 1959-
This study is an investigation into the social nature of self-care. Using the specific case of a phenomenon that I refer to as “progressive self-care,” I study a collection of groups that come together in order to practice a form of self-care that attempts to remove itself from capitalist productivity and consumption practices. Using Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Theory and Paula England’s Care as a Public Good framework, I find that groups attempt to politicize the nature of their meetings and the discourses surrounding rest, identity, and care in order to differentiate their practices from mainstream practices. I also find that collectivity is central to progressive self-care because it is fundamentally a collective practice, not an individual one. Finally, I find that progressive self-care practitioners use selfcare practices and discourses to dissect meanings of care and care work. I finish this study by discussing the implications of this work for further sociological research
Imagining adulthood from the CC Terraces
(2016-12-02) Falola, Bisola; Adams, Paul C.; Torress, Rebecca M; Gershoff, Elizabeth T; Faria, Caroline V; Sletto, Bjorn I
Researchers and policy makers have long been interested in understanding how growing up in impoverished neighborhoods impacts the life prospects of minority youth. This dissertation argues for understanding the relationship between place and life outcomes by examining how young people’s everyday experience of place takes on significance and exerts a formative influence on their sense of aspirations. It focuses on exploring the everyday encounters that shape what young people learn about their community and their life prospects, and how they use these experiences to assess their future options and opportunities. In order to examine how these daily experiences and the internalization of place connects early to later life, I integrate research from youth geographies, geographical studies of place attachment, and childhood development literature on attachment theory to develop a conceptual framework that 1) examines young people’s everyday surroundings as landscapes of care, 2) focuses on how these landscapes provide or deny support, and 3) theorizes how this caregiving relationship to place develops in ways that leave young people with secure or insecure beliefs about their ability to attain social support and to perceive themselves as valued and deserving. I use this framework to examine what American and Latino youth (9–18 years old) who lived in the CC Terraces, a public housing community in South Benson, learned about their community and their life prospects, as well as how they interacted with their daily surroundings as a landscape of care. I gathered participant observations from close to three years of ethnographic fieldwork, and conducted walking tours with youths and semi-structured interviews with adult community members. My findings suggest that young people, through experiencing a stigmatized and volatile landscape of care, can form an insecure attachment to place that is developmentally relevant. Through this insecure attachment, they adopt coping mechanisms that enable them to receive more care and buffer against stigma but yet leave them vulnerable to internalizing negative affects and to self-doubt. As a result, they become unsure about whether they can attain the social support necessary to reach their goals and whether they can hold on to their aspirations in the face of probable loss of care.
Montessori guide decision-making : how elementary Montessori guides made instructional decisions
(2013-05) Hunt, Nathalie Jean; Brown, Keffrelyn D.,; Brown, Keffrelyn D.
Teacher decision-making is referred to as the fundamental responsibility of teachers. All teachers are asked to make decisions on a daily basis in their classrooms. For decades researchers have collected data on teacher decision-making in hopes to understand how teachers make decisions and why. Interestingly, most researchers collect data on teacher decision-making only in public school classrooms. The purpose of this study was to collect teacher decision-making data in a nearly unexplored classroom environment, the lower elementary Montessori classroom. The objective of this study was to examine what characteristics operated in the decision-making of two lower elementary Montessori guides. The hypothesis was lower elementary Montessori guides may have more opportunities to understand and approach care and culturally responsive teaching given the Montessori environment seeks to develop the whole child. In order to explore lower elementary Montessori guide decision-making I chose to perform a qualitative case study design. First, I gathered information about the school. Second, I collected data on the two lower elementary Montessori guides in this study. Once data was collected I reviewed the data for emerging themes. Then, I asked the question how was care and cultural responsiveness understood and approached in the decision-making of these two lower elementary Montessori guides.The findings of this study revealed three (3) main influences on the decision-making of lower elementary Montessori guides at River Montessori: (1) Association Montessori Internationale Training (AMI); (2) school ideology; and (3) guide improvisation based on student observation. Care and cultural responsiveness was understood and approached by both lower elementary Montessori guides in this study. However, the enactments of cultural responsiveness fell short of normative understandings of culturally responsive teaching (Gay, 2000; 2002).
Radical self-care : performance, activism, and queer people of color
(2014-05) McMaster, James Matthew; Gutierrez, Laura G., 1968-
Queer people of color in the United States are perpetually under siege politically, psychically, economically, physically, and affectively in the twenty-first century under capitalist white supremacist heteropatriarchy. Radical Self-Care, connects radical artivist performance in Austin, Texas with the theoretical genealogies of queer of color critique, women of color feminism, queer studies, and performance studies in order to propose a program for queer of color survival, sustainment and political revolt. Radical self-care is the holistic praxis that names the confluence of two distinct but inextricable processes developed in the first two chapters of this thesis. In chapter one, I take up the Generic Ensemble Company’s workshop production of What’s Goin’ On? as a case study in order to theorize the ‘performative of sustenance,’ a mechanism of queer worldmaking and queer world sustainment defined by its erotic and utopian affects. Chapter two, through a discussion of reproductive rights activism at the Texas state capitol, reformulates the concept of ‘parrhesia,’ the Socratic practice of ‘free speech’ taken up by Foucault in discussions of the care of the self, into a performance praxis of speaking truth to power with the potential to interrupt hegemonic systems of oppression. The final chapter explicates the ways in which these two mechanisms converge and operate as a dyad in the holistic process of radical self-care through an analysis of Fat: The Play, a devised work that premiered in Austin by and about fat queer femmes. Ultimately, Radical Self- Care aspires to offer queers of color a methodology of queer world sustainment that is also a program of political intervention, grounded in solidarity politics, into those systems of oppression that too often characterize queer of color existence as a project of survival rather than a project of flourishing.