WOMANSPIRIT: A COOPERATIVE INQUIRY INTO HEALING THROUGH ART FOR WOMEN WITH BREAST CANCER.
Contributors: University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.
Published: 1995
Number of pages: 263
Subjects: Health Sciences, Nursing.; Fine Arts.; Women's Studies.
Description: Living with breast cancer presents many of the challenges and struggles inherent in the human condition. Art is a way of expressing these experiences. Artistic expression has been utilized in healing therapies, yet there are very few studies exploring the nature of the process of healing through art within a support group context. The purpose of this study was to collectively explore and generate understanding of healing through art with a group of women survivors of breast cancer.

With a design of cooperative inquiry, the following questions guided the research: (a) What is the meaning of healing through expressive arts for women living with breast cancer? (b) How is healing illuminated through artistic expression? and (c) What are the processes and outcomes of women co-creating personal and collective knowing? Eighteen women of diverse backgrounds joined a healing/art group, and became co-researchers who explored their own and collective expressions of healing through art. Group sessions were held over a six month period and followed a deliberate structure of centering, art experience, reflection and action. Aesthetic and feminist methods were utilized to illuminate experience and expression through interrelating, sharing, and collective support.

The support group engaged in authentic collaboration through which preferred aesthetic methods of expression and shared meaning emerged. Photography, watercolor, collage, poetry, and the desire to combine images with words were predominant expressions and symbolic representations of their experiences. Sources of data included art and the participants' reflections on their art, researcher's field notes, ambient conversations, and transcriptions of audio-taped group sessions. Women's art and their interpretations illustrated aesthetic representations of the experience of living through breast cancer. Themes were generated within the group process as co-researchers reflected on data. Qualitative themes of personal and collective realms of healing through art realized were: Actualizing the need to express, Losing control/Gaining control, Illuminating a changing perspective, Transcending: Becoming braver, Connecting with sisters, Creating a safe harbor, Fueling the creative spark, and Celebrating the feminine. Womanspirit: The Source emerged as the underlying metaphor unifying personal and collective thematic underpinnings of this research.

The study's uniqueness lies in the collaborative nature of the inquiry designed to access both personal and relational realms of healing. Allowing the meaning of experience to become visible through art in a collective is a promising method of inquiry in nursing.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-10, Section: B, page: 5423.

Thesis (PH.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO HEALTH SCIENCES CENTER, 1995.

School code: 0831.