Toward a Becoming Encounter: Arts-Based Research, Representation and Animal-Human Relations

This dissertation integrates philosophical concepts from Deleuze and Guattari’s Becoming-animal and Buber’s I-Thou Encounters to create a conceptual metaphor that I call A Becoming Encounter. Through an arts-based methodology, the production and examination of several art objects (my own and others), and the ways in which they relate to the lived experience of animals, (using Lefebvre and content analysis), a theoretical framework is developed aimed at informing future representation and shaping future relationships with nonhuman animals and environments. Toward A Becoming Encounter is a step toward an anti-anthropocentric ethics of representation and a way of being.