This dissertation presents a new tool for analysis of the way difficult experiences

or phenomena influence the process for constructing self-identity in the performance of everyday life. This concept, refraction, emerged as part of a grounded theory methods analysis of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Itacaré, Bahia, Brazil from January to July 2014. The work here contributes to the field of performance studies as a possibility for examining how affective responses to difficult experiences contribute to a shift in perspective and subsequently shifts in the performance of self in everyday life. This research was conducted with critical and reflexive autoethnographic methods in order to hold the research accountable for the ways subject position influences the research. In this case the most salient theme that emerged from these autoethnographic methods was an unpacking of unacknowledged tourist privilege in this setting. The resulting work-in-progress

performance will offer ways for spectators to question their own assumptions

regarding tourist privilege in Brazil, and in so-called developing countries in similar

tropical climates. An additional contribution to the field of performance-based research that resulted from this dissertation is the articulation of a dynamic locus of creativity wherein rigorous established qualitative research methods complement creative practices in conjunction with a spectrum of tacit knowledge and theoretical sensitivities. This juncture becomes the theoretical space where creativity in research can be articulated in ways that are legible to both artists and researchers.

In this dissertation I use Henri Lefebvre's concept of the production of social space to study how political theatre companies and artists in the city of San Juan, Puerto Rico, appropriate and resignify, through performance, their current social space as a strategy to contest Puerto Rico's neoliberal state policies. As Lefebvre suggests, modern industrial cities like San Juan maintain hegemonic power relations through spatial practices, processes through which users and inhabitants of the city conceive, perceive and live space. Lefebvre further suggests that for social justice to be possible, space must be resignified in ways that expose otherwise invisibilized struggles for social belonging and differentiation. I argue that theatrical performance, by staging various social conflicts and contradictions between the dominating space and the appropriating space, can produce new "performance cartographies" through which its audiences – in large part disenfranchised from the neoliberal processes so celebrated elsewhere on the island – may find ways to resignify space or envision new spaces for social justice on their own behalf. Specifically, I examine five theatre groups and artists from oppressed sectors in San Juan, whose work is to various degrees in opposition to neoliberalism, to reveal how both their artistic and quotidian performances might be resignifying space toward these ends. How does the work of Agua, Sol y Sereno, Y no había luz, Teatro Breve, Deborah Hunt and Tito Kayak strategically claim or appropriate space? What kind of knowledges emerge from these spatial tactics, and how are they helping envision new forms of living and social justice in the city?

This dissertation employs an ethnographic methodological approach. It explores young people's performance of a New Afrikan subjectivity, their negotiation of a multiple consciousness (American, African-American, New Afrikan and Pan-Afrikan) and the social and cultural implications for rearing children of African descent in the US within a New Afrikan ideology. Young people who are members of the New Afrikan Scouts, attendees of Camp Pumziko and/or students enrolled at Kilombo Academic and Cultural Institute were observed and interviewed. Through interviews young people shared their perceptions and experiences of New Afrikan childhood. The findings of this study discuss the ways in which agency, conformity and the spaces in between are enacted and experienced by New Afrikan children. The findings particularly reveal that in one sense New Afrikan adults aid young people in examining their racial and cultural subjectivity in US America. In another sense New Afrikan adults manipulate young people into performing prescribed roles that are seemingly uncritical of the implications of these performances beyond an adult agenda.

The Holocaust and the effects it has had upon witnesses has been a topic of study for nearly six decades; however, few angles of research have been conducted relating to the long-term effects of the Holocaust upon the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors--the After Generations. The After Generations are considered the proof--the living legacies--that their parents and grandparents survived. Growing up with intimate knowledge of the atrocities that occurred during the Holocaust, members of the After Generations not only carry with them their family's story, but also their own vicarious experience(s) of trauma. From this legacy comes a burden of responsibility to those who perished, their survivor parents/grandparents, the stories that were shared, as well as to future generations. Using grounded theory method, this study not only explores the long-term effects of the Holocaust upon members of the After Generations, but what it means to responsibly remember the stories from the Holocaust, as well as how individuals might ethically represent such stories/memories. Findings that developed out of an axial analysis of interview transcripts and journal writing, as well as the later development of a performance script, are embodied in a manner that allows the actual language and experiences of the participants to be collectively witnessed both symbolically and visually. Through their desire to remember, members of the After Generations demonstrate how they plan to carry on traditions, live lives that honor those that came before them, and maintain hope for the future. In so doing, the stories shared reveal the centrality of the Holocaust in the lives of members of the After Generations through their everyday choices to responsibly and actively remember through their art, writings, life-work, as well as from within their work in their local communities. Such acts of remembrance are important to the education of others as well as to the construction and maintenance of the After Generations' identities. The representation of these voices acts as a reminder of how hatred and its all-consuming characteristics can affect not only the person targeted, but multiple generations, as well.

The construction of the contemporary Taiwanese child and childhood has been under-researched. It is often understood solely in contrast to a Western context as a mysterious or even exotic existence. However, this understanding differs from what I discovered in my literary reviews, which reveal many similarities - not differences - with respect to the philosophical views of the child and childhood between the so-called "East" and "West." To gain a better understanding of the Taiwanese child and childhood, I chose the annual Taipei Children's Arts Festival (TCAF) as my main research subject and adopted grounded theory and dramatic analysis as my research methods to explore the following question: What are the representations of the Taiwanese child and childhood as reflected by the cultural artifacts of TCAF between 2000 and 2011? TCAF is the largest children's arts festival in Taiwan and theatre for young audiences (TYA) has been its main component. I therefore selected four award winning TCAF plays and their production videos as my main data. Additional data consists of forewords from the programs, which were written by mayors of Taipei City, commissioners of Taipei's Department of Cultural Affairs, and festival organizers. To provide context, I give a brief history of Taiwanese children's theatre before beginning the main analysis. My findings indicate a complex construction of the Taiwanese child and childhood. The central category states that Taiwanese children are constructed as adults' futures. This explains adults' desires to preserve children's positive qualities, and reflects adults' emphasis on learning and teaching, children's agency, and their happiness. Determining one central category/hypothesis proved to be difficult, due to the variety and complexity of my data. Missing categories include concepts of the unconscious child and children's relationships to religion, family, friendships, and gender issues. The distinctions between children and adults are both distinct and ambiguous. Although differences of the East/West binary exist, social constructions of the child and childhood become increasingly similar as the world becomes more fluid. My research highlights a variety of such elements. Future research is still needed, however, in order to broaden and deepen the understanding of the Taiwanese child and childhood.

The purpose of this study was to explore the ways in which childhood was perceived in the circuit Chautauqua movement. The methodology followed a threefold approach: first, to trace the development of the Chautauqua movement, thereby identifying the values and motivations which determined programming; next, to identify the major tropes of thought through which childhood has been traditionally understood; and finally, to do a performance analysis of the pageant America, Yesterday and Today to locate perceptions of childhood and to gain a better understanding of the purpose of this pageant. My principal argument is that the child's body was utilized as the pivotal tool for the ideological work that the pageant was designed to do. This ideological effort was aimed at both the participants and the audience, with the child's body serving as the site of education as well as signification. Through the physical embodiment and repetition of different roles, the children who participated performed certain values and cultural assumptions. This embodiment of values was expected to be retained and performed long after the performance was over - it was a form of training through pleasure.

Traumas are moments which disrupt a way of being, often involving death or injury and a period of recovery for its survivors. They can be personal, experienced by an individual, or collective, experienced by a group of individuals, such as a family. Others, like the bombing of Hiroshima, impact much larger communities, such as an entire town, an entire nation, or even the world. These national traumas often include large-scale death or injury and impact the lives of thousands. In addition to their immediate physical and material affects (mortalities, economic impact, creating a need for aid), these events shatter not only an individual's sense of well- being, but also larger notions of national identity, stability and security. In many cases, they also reveal the limits of prevailing concepts of national cohesiveness, citizenship and belonging while often simultaneously upholding or reconstructing newly problematic concepts of national cohesion. Traumas are documented and grappled with through various media, including literature, poetry, art, photography, and journalism. This dissertation, "Performing Nation, Performing Trauma: Theatre and Performance after September 11th, Hurricane Katrina and the Peruvian Dirty War" examines how theatre and performance are utilized to respond to, document, memorialize and represent national traumas resulting from such historical crises as the Peruvian Dirty Wars, Hurricane Katrina, and September 11th, as well as how they resist dominant narratives that construct national traumas as such. These traumas are relived and expressed through performance perhaps precisely because the members of a nation (consciously or subconsciously) recognize that nation is also performed. This dissertation focuses on both the content of and the reception of these performances and the particular implications that performances about national traumas hold for theatre critics/scholars, performance practitioners and audience members (those immediately connected and not so obviously connected to the event).

Drawing from Foucault's notion of heterotopias, my dissertation identifies and examines three distinct but related events that resignified (re-imagined) Chile during 2010, the year of its Bicentenary, namely: the Rescue of the 33 Miners trapped in the San José mine, the Chilean Military Parade performed in celebration of Chilean Independence, and the Mapuche Hunger Strike of 32 indigenous people accused of terrorism by the Chilean State. My central hypothesis states that these three events constitute heterotopias with strong performative components that, by enacting a utopian and a dystopian nation, denounce the flaws of Chilean society. I understand heterotopias as those recursive systems that invert, perfect or contest the society they mirror. In other words: heterotopias are discursive constructions and material manifestations of social relations that dispute, support, or distort cultural assumptions, structures, and practices currently operating in the representational spaces of a given society. In addition to following the six heterotopological principles formulated by Foucault, these case studies have performance as the central constituent that defines their specificity and brings the heterotopias into existence. Due to the performative nature of these heterotopias, I have come to call them performance heterotopias, that is, sets of behaviors that enact utopias in the historical world, the place in which we live, the site in which "the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs," as Foucault puts it. Here, performance would act as the interface, the point of interaction, and suture between the conceived, the perceived and the representational spaces each heterotopia articulates. Thus, a performance heterotopia would be a particular type of heterotopia which is enacted through performance. A relevant aspect that emerged from my research is that heterotopic places not only mirror, contest, and compensate their own host society, but also refer to, and intersect with other contemporaneous heterotopias enacted in that society. In my conclusion I suggest that such interactions also happen between heterotopias that emerge in different countries and cultures. If so, the mapping of utopias enacted in the macro socio geographies of Latin American countries could offer new perspectives to understand the sociopolitical processes that are underway in the region.

The purpose of this study is to examine how community-based youth theater ensembles create conditions for youth to practice cultural agency and to develop a sense of themselves as valuable resources in a broader community development process. The researcher employed a qualitative methodology, using a critical and interpretive case study approach which enabled her to document and analyze three community-based youth theaters in New York City: Find Your Light, a playwriting/performance program for youth associated with the NYC shelter system; viBeStages, an all-girl youth ensemble (part of viBe Theater Experience or "viBe"); and Ifetayo Youth Ensemble (IYE), a multi-age ensemble for youth of African descent living in Flatbush and its surrounding neighborhoods (part of Ifetayo Cultural Arts Academy). All three programs are youth-based performing arts ensembles with a mission-driven focus on positive youth development and community building; they are long-term engagements, active in their communities for at least three years; and they are all part of arts organizations that value artistry as their principle means of impacting communities. All of the young artists involved in these programs participated in a sustained process of creating original performance pieces based on stories relevant to their lives and/or the lives of their communities. This dissertation examines how, through their playmaking processes, they began to identify, critique and experiment with commonly held beliefs about human agency and interaction, to activate and embellish the symbolic systems and repertoires that make up their communities, and to practice new ways of coming together. Through their use of artistic practices, the youth developed a sense of themselves as viable shapers of their communities and, in varying degrees, also used other aspects of culture (values, rituals, traditions, aspirations and the arts) to make meaning, contribute, and shape their cultural locations, offering new forms, symbols, structural models and imaginings.