Single Motherhood, Media, Methods, And Messiness: Exploring Virtual Reality As A Tool For Autobiographical Expression

<div>This research/creation project documents my experiences of living as a single mother with minimal financial, family, and social support. Since research suggests that virtual reality (VR) can generate heightened empathetic response in users, I chose to develop my story using VR as the primary creative tool. This study required engagement with the creative and methodological approaches of arts-based research—a process of learning-by-making that prompts questions and reflections on ethics, techniques, aesthetics, value, and subjectivity. The finished project, then, is an exploration of my journey not only as a single mother, but also as a researcher exploring emerging technological affordances and their capacity to engender empathy and serve as tools of autobiographical expression. In this way, the work could further be understood as contributing to the emerging field of autotheory, in which the researcher’s subjective and embodied experience is integrated with theoretical and philosophical approaches.</div><div><br></div>

Single Motherhood, Media, Methods, And Messiness: Exploring Virtual Reality As A Tool For Autobiographical Expression

<div>This research/creation project documents my experiences of living as a single mother with minimal financial, family, and social support. Since research suggests that virtual reality (VR) can generate heightened empathetic response in users, I chose to develop my story using VR as the primary creative tool. This study required engagement with the creative and methodological approaches of arts-based research—a process of learning-by-making that prompts questions and reflections on ethics, techniques, aesthetics, value, and subjectivity. The finished project, then, is an exploration of my journey not only as a single mother, but also as a researcher exploring emerging technological affordances and their capacity to engender empathy and serve as tools of autobiographical expression. In this way, the work could further be understood as contributing to the emerging field of autotheory, in which the researcher’s subjective and embodied experience is integrated with theoretical and philosophical approaches.</div><div><br></div>

Effectiveness of Narrative Messaging Styles about the Social Determinants of Health and Health Inequities in Ontario, Canada

Health inequities are systemic, avoidable, and unjust differences in health between populations. These differences are often determined by social and structural factors, such as income and social status, employment and working conditions, or race/racism, which are referred to as the social determinants of health (SDOH). According to public opinion, health is considered to be largely determined by the choices and behaviours of individuals. However, evidence suggests that social and structural factors are the key determinants of health. There is likely a lack of public understanding of the role that social and structural factors play in determining health and producing health inequities. Public opinion and priorities can drive governmental action, so the aim of this work was to determine the most impactful way to increase knowledge and awareness about the social determinants of health (SDOH) and health inequities in the province of Ontario, Canada. A study to test the effectiveness of four different messaging styles about health inequities and the SDOH was conducted with a sample of 805 adult residents of Ontario. Findings show that messages highlighting the challenges faced by those experiencing the negative effects of the SDOH, while still acknowledging individual responsibility for health, were the most effective for eliciting an empathetic response from Ontarians. These findings can be used to inform public awareness campaigns focused on changing the current public narrative about the SDOH toward a more empathetic response, with the goal of increasing political will to enact policies to address health inequities in Ontario.

Dream Screen: On Cinema and Painting, Blur and Absorption

This chapter explores some of the ways in which low definition or blur orchestrate the encounter between film and painting. Depending on the technique, film stock, the choice of analogue or digital filming, and the degree of experimentation, such an encounter may take an endless variety of forms. Focusing on the effects of blur on figurality and the representation of the human form, this chapter interrogates intermedial resonances as well as the regimes of identification or absorption that are produced when the depiction of the figure eschews visual clarity. With reference to films ranging from the silent to the digital era, the author considers the sense of absorption and empathetic response the softening of contours elicits from the viewer, as well as the contradictory effect of the blurring of lines, between intimacy and distance, closeness and concealment. In turn, M. Beugnet looks at the different kind of absorption offered by the chaotic universes of the cinema of sensation, before discussing the tension between theatricality and absorption in evidence in recent filmmaking.