Electronic Theses and Dissertations (Masters)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10539/37948

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    A transpersonal approach to drama therapy techniques for embodied grief work with women who experience loss and distress from an abortion
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Brollo, Gillian Susan; Pankhurst, Margie
    Abortion as a lived experience is not often explored in research or therapy, particularly when women are distressed as a result of an abortion. This research addresses the scarcity of such explorations through developing and testing a workshop model based on transpersonal drama therapy in order to examine how women who are distressed after an abortion express and manage their experience, and also how women can integrate an abortion into their life story in order to find healing. The two key questions are concerned with firstly, how embodied activities can bring unconscious feelings to the surface, and secondly how narrative can work to integrate a distressing experience into a life story so that its emotional impact is managed and the individual finds ways to move forward from the traumatic event. Chapter One is an introduction to the context, one in which women who experience a sense of loss or grief after an abortion find few places for support, healing and most importantly, for expressions of distress. The introduction touches briefly on the hyper-politicised nature of abortion as a phenomenon and how difficult it is to communicate nuance within such a polarised context. Chapter Two is a description of the theoretical framework of the transpersonal approach which also serves a literature review. The literature drawn on includes models of drama therapy, griefwork, embodied grief activities such as rituals, transpersonal philosophies which present a world where the material and the immaterial are connected and draws these theories together within an Afrocentric paradigm. Chapter Three describes the methodology and explains how the workshop was designed and its aims. Chapters Four and Five are concerned with how data was obtained and a data analysis and discussion flowing from that analysis. The final chapter looks at findings including a deep sense of relief and healing in being offered a space to explore their personal experiences of abortion, and in the affirmation iv provided by witnessing other women’s stories and telling of their own; and recommendations for future research such as trying the model with a rural cohort, and extending the process in combining individual and group work in order to dive deeper into individual stories.
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    Entangled Intimacies: An Experimental Curatorial Project of Transdisciplinary Becoming-With
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-08) Thomas, Rory Lee Stewart; Twalo, Sinethemba
    Employing strategic modes of textual and curatorial “opacity” (Glissant 1997: 189), this project endeavours to consider how arts-based research methodologies may be uniquely positioned to explore the chaotic embodied implications of the so-called Anthropocene. This work of arts-based knowledge production and explorative enquiry is centred around an exhibition I have curated entitled Entangled Intimacies: art, more-than-human embodiment, and the climate catastrophe, which constitutes this project’s practical component. The exhibition is being held from 10 February to 6 May 2023 at the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg gallery and features newly commissioned artworks by local practitioners Tzung-Hui Lauren Lee, Io Makandal, and Natalie Paneng. This research report considers the ongoing process of curating this exhibition via a varied textual pathway that follows through a number of different considerations and references. These include an assessment of individual and collective grief, the potential of utilising curatorial opacity as a means of relating to the chaos of ecological degradation, and a discussion of a selection of previous curatorial projects from the last two decades which have engaged this reality through contemporary art. These projects include DON’T/PANIC (2011), Sex Ecologies (2021-2022), and the ongoing work of Johannesburg based not-for-profit arts organisation POOL (founded in 2015). The diverse, and at times perhaps disorientating, form of this research report is a curatorial and written reflection on the chaotic implications of more-than-human embodiment in the Anthropocene. This is conceived as an actualisation of curator Stefanie Hessler’s (2020: 249) assertion that “[t]he uneven, uncontainable climate crisis obligates curators to rethink ways of working. Exhibition making in times of ecological disaster … needs to differ from previous curatorial modes.” This project works to remain aware of the city of Johannesburg as its site of emergence while also engaging with the globally interconnected reality of the Anthropocene. It thus offers a propositional, mutable, and exploratory gesture towards what contemporary curatorial practice within this uncertain time and place marked by ecological violence may entail.