Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Art Of Aging – A Portraiture Study, Alaina Mann

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

The process of aging can be viewed through different lenses within our society. In the past, scientists and medical professionals performed various studies to better understand and analyze different facets of aging, medicine, and health in general. Historically the arts have reflected multiple aspects of medicine and treatments while more recently, the arts have been used in a research capacity to provide different ways to represent illness, suffering, and care. This study used art-based research methods and portraiture to gather qualitative observations on the older populations within our community. Data collected included drawings, a field journal, and interviews. This study …

Overcoming The Inner Critic: The Therapeutic Use Of Self-Portraits With Older Adults, Brenda Echeverry

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Older adults are a growing and vulnerable population who experience discriminatory practices that impact their access to equitable housing, employment, and healthcare which was made even more obvious during the Coronavirus pandemic in the United States. A community engagement project was developed and facilitated by the writer to support older adults with the psychological effects of surviving the pandemic. This project also helped to increase accessibility to expressive arts therapy in the writer’s local community. Expressive arts therapy is an effective and accessible method to support mental health and wellness for people of all ages. Engagement with the arts helps …

The Form, Function, And Meaning Of Creative Expression, Sierra Strain, Susan Macdermott

Summer 2023 Virtual OTD Capstone Symposium

This project consists of school site observations and needs assessment data used to gain a better understanding of the various types of creative expression engaged in during the school day and to determine the form, function, and meaning of creative expression to students at a school for students with learning differences. This study discusses to the creation of a creative expression program created to help meet the sensory need demonstrated by this population of students on campus throughout the school day. The importance of zentangle based art use as a sensory regulation strategy in a school setting is discussed as …

Unearthing Complexity: Tangible Histories Of Water And Earth, Alexis Violet

Masters Theses

Unearthing Complexity investigates conceptions of time and surface through geological stories of the water and earth. Building on theories of deep time, hydrofeminism, critical zones, and grounding, I hope to foster a deeper awareness of time scales other than our own and a more tangible understanding of the embodied experience of matter in the universe. Working toward a new literacy of the water and earth in which they are recognized as living, changing bodies to which we are inherently tied at a molecular level, the site of this multiscalar inquiry occurs in the coastal zones of the Narragansett Bay where …

Migratory Material: Epigenetics & Weaving At The Us-Mexico Border, Valerie Navarrete

Masters Theses

Discourse often sutures the body shut, disallowing representations of identity to outgrow sociopolitical interests. This issue may originate from borders, but also from the unnamable pathology that generational colonial trauma transmits to the mind, body, and environment. Without a direct form of translatability, this thesis proposes a new materialism that deviates from any object-oriented ontology. Untethered and intra-active, epigenetics and weaving represent objects that transform typical ways of knowing and seeing. Their sensitivity to the environment, in addition to their mobility across generations of time, broaden the spatiotemporal loci of the body and its embodiment. Proposing new materials that expand …

The Benefits Of Art Therapy On Stress And Anxiety Of Oncology Patients During Treatment, Helen Shiepe

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Within the last ten years research on art therapy and its positive impact on oncology patients’ stress and anxiety during treatment has been minimal. Oncology patients whether they are children or adults when diagnosed experience similar reactions due to their diagnosis, treatment, and in some cases end of life care. The current question is whether or not art therapy does have a positive impact on decreasing the stress and anxiety with oncology patients while undergoing treatment. Deane, Fitch & Carmen (2000), discussed art therapy as a healing art that is “intended to integrate physical, emotional, and spiritual care by facilitating …

Eco-Interoception: What Plants, Fungi And Protista Have Taught My Body, Sara Riley Dotterer

Art Theses and Dissertations

To me, ecology is the relational, full-body awareness that I am made up of and deeply connected to everything around me; and for better or worse, this is reciprocal. I form ecotones, an ecological transitional zone between two ecosystems, with the world around me. I use this ecotonal lens to blur binaries and dissolve boundaries between me and the world “outside my body.” During my Masters of Fine Arts at Southern Methodist University, I have continuously explored and represented the lives of various more-than-human species outside of my body, including plants, fungi and protista through an ecotonal lens. Although these …

Redefining Anger For Sexual And Gender Minorities Using Art As A Visual Voice, Kirsten Ranheim

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Art therapy is an increasingly popular approach for addressing trauma and anger in clinical settings. This literature review explores the connections between art therapy, trauma, gender, and anger, drawing on a range of studies and theoretical perspectives. Background is provided on the history of anger within the context of societal institutions, interpersonal power dynamics, psychiatric nosology, and social justice movements. The review concludes that art therapy is ideally suited as a trauma-informed approach to addressing anger in the therapeutic setting. This is due to the unique opportunities that art making provides for helping individuals express and process their emotions nonverbally, …

Inner Portraits, Bethany Salisbury

Graduate Theses

This paper investigates the many interconnected layers of women’s mental health through portraiture and how animal and plant symbolism can represent the way women's hormones and bodily health affect their mental health. I reveal how the artwork created presents these connections and inner mental health narratives to the viewer, creating a space of empathy, destigmatization, and self-reflection. This body of portraiture art connects five women through a series of both two-and three-dimensional portraits based on interviews using my own adaptation of Sara Lawrence-Lightfoots’ (1983) portrait methodology.

Women and non-binary individuals have always dealt with difficult interactions of bodily and mental …

[Review] Carol Gigliotti. The Creative Lives Of Animals. New York University Press, 2022. 289 Pp. Isbn 9781479815449, Wendy Woodward

Animal Studies Journal

[Review] Carol Gigliotti. The Creative Lives of Animals. New York University Press, 2022. 289 pp. ISBN 9781479815449

'Pooped In My Yard And Ate My Grass Last Night': Wild Burros And Tales Of Belonging In Riverside County, California, Christian Hunold, Jennifer L. Britton

Animal Studies Journal

Riverside County, California is home to several hundred free-roaming burros (donkeys) who frequent the open spaces surrounding and between the cities of Riverside, Moreno Valley, Loma Linda, and Redlands, as well as the public parks, private properties, residential developments and roadsides in these towns. Tales of more-than-human belonging (and not-belonging) in Riverside County render visible how multispecies places are mediated by infrastructures of consumption and infrastructures of reciprocity. Where infrastructures of consumption generate callousness, infrastructures of reciprocity sustain responsibility. We investigate these dynamics by tracing how two geographically close but infrastructurally distinctive spaces frequented by the area’s wild burros are …

[Review Essay] Animal Worlds After Uexküll: Ed Yong. An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal The Hidden Realms Around Us. New York: Random House, 2022. 449 Pp., David Herman

Animal Studies Journal

[Review Essay] Animal Worlds after Uexküll: Ed Yong. An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. New York: Random House, 2022. 449 pp.

Not Another Plant-Based Documentary: A Critical Review Of Eating Our Way To Extinction, Melissa Plisic

Animal Studies Journal

Despite mounting evidence that industrial animal agriculture is a formidable force of climate change and mass extinction, many humans remain impervious to this knowledge. Eating Our Way to Extinction is a timely documentary that takes this issue head on. This film review is guided by Alexandra Juhasz’s explanation of media praxis as ‘an enduring, mutual, and building tradition that theorizes and creates the necessary conditions for media to play an integral role in cultural and individual transformation’ (299). Eating Our Way to Extinction attends to some of the most popular strawman arguments against veganism and is widely accessible. That being …

Continuing, Shauna Le Ann Smith

MSU Graduate Theses

Taking something whole, breaking it apart, and making it into another form of wholeness is the essence of both papermaking and grief. The papermaking process involves separation, maceration, and forming of new life; the grieving process involves a similar evolution. Creating this body of work has been a pursuit of continuation—a part of me forming new life. Using papermaking processes, I create work that is visually quiet. The details are only noticeable through sustained attention and close proximity. The quiet visual qualities are intended to create a viewing experience that is meditative and slow. The lack of details of the …

[Review] Krishanu Maiti, Editor. Posthumanist Perspectives On Literary And Cultural Animals. Springer, 2021. Second Language Learning And Teaching: Issues In Literature And Culture. 188 Pp. Isbn 978-3-030-76159-2 (Ebook), Wendy Woodward

Animal Studies Journal

[Review] Krishanu Maiti, editor. Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals. Springer, 2021. Second Language Learning and Teaching: Issues in Literature and Culture. 188 pp. ISBN 978-3-030-76159-2 (eBook)

Cover Page, Table Of Contents, Contributor Biographies And Editorial – Dedication To Siobhan O’Sullivan (1974-2023), Melissa Boyde

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2023 12(1): Cover Page, Table of Contents, Contributor Biographies and Editorial – Dedication to Siobhan O’Sullivan (1974-2023)

The Mouse Colony, Katerina Tsiopos

Animal Studies Journal

The Mouse Colony

Simply Caring, Lisa Kemmerer

Animal Studies Journal

Simply Caring

[Review] Matthew Calarco. The Boundaries Of Human Nature: The Philosophical Animal From Plato To Haraway. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. 170 Pp. Isbn9780231194730, Wendy Woodward

Animal Studies Journal

[Review] Matthew Calarco. The Boundaries of Human Nature: The Philosophical Animal from Plato to Haraway. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. 170 pp. ISBN9780231194730

Cover Page, Table Of Contents, And Contributor Biographies, Melissa Boyde

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2022 12(2): Cover Page, Table of Contents, and Contributor Biographies.

[Review] Francesca Mackenney. Birdsong, Speech And Poetry: The Art Of Composition In The Long Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. 244 Pp. Isbn 9781316513712, Wendy Woodward

Animal Studies Journal

[Review] Francesca Mackenney. Birdsong, Speech and Poetry: The Art of Composition in the Long Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. 244 pp. ISBN 9781316513712

Can Animals Contract?, John Enman-Beech

Animal Studies Journal

Animals are, or are like persons, and so should not be treated as mere property. But persons are not just non-property; they are contractors. They interact with property and with other persons. This article analyses the possibilities for a range of animals to fit within market liberal society as contractors from a legal disciplinary perspective. Some animals are capable of contract-like relationships of reciprocal exchange, and can consent, in a certain sense, to parts of such relationships. However, the dangers of the contractual frame, which is used to legitimate exploitation, may exceed the benefits. Some scholars have begun to explore …

Introduction: Critical Animal Studies In An Age Of Extinction, Eva Kasprzycka, Chloë Taylor, Kelly Struthers Montford

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2023 12(2): Introduction: Critical Animal Studies in an Age of Extinction