Graduation Year

2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ph.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Degree Granting Department

Communication

Major Professor

Aubrey A. Huber, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Aisha Durham, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Christopher McRae, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Elizabeth Aranda, Ph.D.

Keywords

Arts-Based Research, Belonging, Cultural Citizenship, Latinidad, Media Representations, Performance

Abstract

In this dissertation I use autoethnography and performance methods to create a performance art installation that examines and re-imagines the role of media representations in shaping how I as a Latina actively negotiates belonging and identifies this concept as always in a processes requiring negotiation. I argue belonging is influenced by how I see myself or don’t see myself in media representation and offer the counter-narrative as a way of asserting agency and disrupting marginalization. In this project, I tend to the tensions felt between being a community member, media maker, and qualitative researcher in order to disrupt media messages. I approach this research process as a performance, intercultural communication, and Latina/x media studies scholar. Through autoethnographic accounts, I offer personal insights into embodied research and unfold the various ways that identity, the self, and media representations inform our cultural selves. Using a multidisciplinary approach, I ask how the concept of belonging is constituted for me in relation to media representations and consider how performance art enables me to embody alternative narratives of belonging that challenge dominant media representations. Guided by these two questions I use media analysis and respond to media texts using performance art as a method. I then crafted my responses into a counter-narrative about belonging in my performance art installation, “Latinidad: Framed, created, disrupted,” which shared my research and generated a place for belonging with broad audiences. The performance art installation allowed me to synthesize my autoethnographic reflections and performance process for sensing belonging. Overall, I argue creative methodologies, such as autoethnography and performance art, are generative for reclaiming cultural heritage and ancestral connections to effectively transform representational erasures and stereotypes into spaces for authentic belonging.

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