This research seeks to explore how the metal arts are taught to women in Kuwait in an undergraduate setting, making the call for the use of feminist pedagogy when teaching the metal arts to women in Kuwait. This research is achieved using the qualitative methodology of analytic autoethnography. The theoretical framework is a feminist lens bridging the social construction of gender with the gendering of objects and feminist standpoint theory. The data comes from the experiences of creating three of my own pieces of artwork as well as the pieces themselves in tandem with historical, political, and cultural contexts. The analysis from this research is then bridged with feminist pedagogy in order to begin to develop an inclusive metal arts curriculum for women in Kuwait.

This research looks thoughtfully and deeply at the relationship between art education and signs, as defined by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1964/1998). Signs, as articulated by Deleuze (1964/1998), are violent disruptions to our way of understanding the world, causing us to think again and/or re-consider what we once knew (or thought we knew). This study looks generatively at how these kinds of disruptive and disorienting moments might be mined for possibilities in art education and remind us of our own relationality. As a post-qualitative lived inquiry, it asks how might art education be-with apprenticeship to signs and what might art education do-with sign-encounters? Using the theoretical lens of transcendental empiricism and new materialism, this study considers how art educators might hold open the space of sign-encounters for oneself and one's students by turning towards the rhizomatic cut and staying with uncertainty. It is focused on the doing-with, making-with, and thinking-with of art, pedagogy, and philosophy/theory, investigating their deep entanglements in spaces of disruption and ultimately developing frame-works for engaging in this kind of work in the classroom. Drawing from Erin Manning and Brian Massumi's theory of research-creation, this research was experienced in an emergent, layered, and complex way over …

Building on Fredric Jameson's critical theory, this dissertation examines how the aesthetics of cognitive mapping were used to uncover overlooked political, economic, social and cultural dimensions behind my artistic engagement with Islamic patterns. Using a critically informed variant of arts-based research (ABR), I explored the complexity of the interconnected economic, social, political and aesthetic realities informing my positionality as a Muslim Saudi female artist/research completing her dissertation in a Western country. Particularly, my work revealed how certain global forces (including capitalist relations between Saudi Arabia and the USA, as well as global postmodern cultural influences) shape the processes of appropriation and re-signification of patterning appropriated from Islamic aesthetics. This research culminated in a body of artwork for a solo exhibition at Paul Voertman's Gallery at the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas located in Denton, Texas. I conclude the study with recommendations for a regional ABR to be developed by educators for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The study also suggests that this model of cognitive mapping as a critical art making methodology would be a great pedagogical tool for museums and art education curriculum to implement in Saudi Arabia.

This research explores the relationship between narrative, empathy and anxiety in art museum education. The study begins from my personal experience with anxiety and is methodologically rooted in narrative inquiry and friendship as method. In this study, I propose a creative method of narrative postcard writing called (fe)mail – rooted in a feminist ethic of care that seeks to understand and empathize with the experience of others through correspondence. This research asks relevant questions about the future of art museum programming for mental illness and the act of writing (fe)mail as a reflective practice for academics and educators in the field of social science. In my narrative analysis of the program and the data, I also problematizes my role as researcher, educator and friend throughout the study by considering my own biases, expectations and personal educator agenda. The study is divided into two parts. The first comprises correspondence and analysis of (fe)mail between myself and my best friend/co-participant, Atleigh. In Part I, I conduct a narrative analysis of the (fe)mail data produced between us in order to answer the following questions: What qualities of (fe)mail will appear in the exchange? Can (fe)mail be used as a tool for self-care during …

Historical dress as a museum theater and research process encompasses material, technological, and cultural experiences from the past in the present. This research examines how intimate experiences with heritage materials, processes, and environments may impact development of educator pedagogy. Historical attractions in the US draw visitors due in part to providing guests with context for the objects and built environments displayed. New Materialist theory offers insights into how inanimate objects and environments "teach" human and non-human entities in their own right. Using a New Materialist lens, I observed, interviewed, and conducted participant observations through a novel research methodology, intra-active narrative inquiry, with costumed museum educators to better discern how relations between humans and historical materials intra-act as embodied experiences of object knowledge in museum pedagogy.

This study encompasses my attempt to understand the lived experience of students in a higher education art appreciation course when a traditional textbook was replaced by a computer game. The methodology uses a mixture of phenomenological interviews and games as well as game machines to interpret these lived experiences. The process of allowing the research to dictate the direction I would take in my research is central to my research process. The initial research idea evolved into three research games and three versions of those games by using the data from student interviews as a generative data. The implications from this study focus upon creating new pedagogical interventions in the form of a studious labyrinthian pedagogy rather than a finite maze-like approach to art education. This dissertation examines how art education can benefit from more freedom and exploration for students to navigate their own learning.

At least half of the art objects in the public trust are currently in need of conservation today. In consideration of this crisis, a posthuman version of art conservation curriculum is proposed to transgress current limitations of the field. Through applying Michel Foucault's genealogy and archaeology to art conservation and its education, Anthropocentric motivations undergirding conservation are revealed. Foucault's death meditation inspires my narrativization of a fire event that incites a re-visioning of my over 25 years of conservation and teaching experience. By re-contextualizing theorist Ted Aoki's works, art conservation curriculum becomes a reflective and affective site for reciprocal healing of self and other, incorporating the lives of conservation students and art objects. Reconsidering art conservation curriculum in light of Aokian notions of curriculum as plan and curriculum as lived, provokes the curricular potentialities of new materialism, along with quantum physics' entanglement, intra-agency and intra-activity for the field. Art conservation and its curriculum are radically reimagined as indwelling between humanist priorities of the Anthropocene and posthumanist possibilities towards more caring, ethical and sustainable futures for both human and nonhumans' coexistence on this planet.