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A Phenomenological Study of Aesthetic Experience Within an Arts Council's Events and Programs: Finding Joy, Expression, Connection, and Public Good in the Arts

Smith, Katherine K.
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9050-1906
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1479423181791095

Abstract Details

2016, Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, Educational Leadership.
City Township made a township-level decision to utilize arts events and programming to create community formation within its public. A non-profit entity entitled the Arts Planning Council was established to harness the aesthetic experience within the arts and to address the deep state cuts to the township budget. My aim was to understand the formation of a community based arts education program, how it contributes to the meaning and creation of community, how human connection is created through existential aesthetic experience, and how it can lend a feeling of communitas (V. Turner, 1969) among township members. Through the interpretive discourse and the methodology of hermeneutical phenomenology, I analyzed how the Arts Planning Council made meaning of the aesthetic experiences that occurred in their arts events and programming that result in community creation. For two years, I functioned as a participatory observer and conducted formal and informal interviews with Arts Planning Council board members, township trustees, and township administrators. I applied horizontalization (Moustakas, 1994) to cluster significant statements from their accounts into consistent themes of understanding. Using the emerging themes of the arts as joy, the arts as expression, the arts as connection, and the arts as a public good as generative guides for writing, I divided the study into sections that elaborate on the phenomenon of the aesthetic experiences within the arts events and programming and how those experiences lead to community creation. I concluded that the members of the Arts Planning Council and township trustees understand the receptive joy, expression, and connection derived from the liminal experience of the arts creation and participation. The resulting feeling of spontaneous communitas lends a desire to continue communitas into a normative state. Ultimately, desire engenders a joint aim to deliver the arts as an irreducible, social good. This idea interrupts the discourse that arts education should only occur in schools and makes the responsibility for educating the public one held by all township members. The result is an ecology of education built within the revitalized community of City Township.
Kathleen Knight-Abowitz, Ph.D. (Advisor)
177 p.
Aesthetics; Art Education; Arts Management; Education Philosophy; Educational Leadership
community based art education; community of practice; aesthetics; community; arts council; communitas; public good; joy; expression; connection; ecology of education

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Smith, K. K. (2016). A Phenomenological Study of Aesthetic Experience Within an Arts Council's Events and Programs: Finding Joy, Expression, Connection, and Public Good in the Arts [Doctoral dissertation, Miami University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1479423181791095

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Smith, Katherine. A Phenomenological Study of Aesthetic Experience Within an Arts Council's Events and Programs: Finding Joy, Expression, Connection, and Public Good in the Arts . 2016. Miami University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1479423181791095.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Smith, Katherine. "A Phenomenological Study of Aesthetic Experience Within an Arts Council's Events and Programs: Finding Joy, Expression, Connection, and Public Good in the Arts ." Doctoral dissertation, Miami University, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1479423181791095

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

miami1479423181791095
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© 2016, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License A Phenomenological Study of Aesthetic Experience Within an Arts Council's Events and Programs: Finding Joy, Expression, Connection, and Public Good in the Arts by Katherine K. Smith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by Miami University and OhioLINK.