Date of Award

Winter 1-15-2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Educational Studies

First Advisor

Dr. Kimberly A. Lowe

Second Advisor

Geoffry Fried, Professor Emeritus

Third Advisor

Dr. Lisa Donovan

Abstract

Abstract

This dissertation addresses gaps in understandings of looking in research and practice by creating and defining sociolooking. Sociolooking is a theory of looking together and choreographing looking experiences. Researchers, educators, and practitioners across many fields value close looking and have offered step-by-step strategies for facilitating looking. While these strategies and related research are instrumental in understanding discrete aspects of looking and learning to look, they do not fully acknowledge or explore the underlying social and dynamic ways people engage in looking in everyday situations. This leads to the creation of one-dimensional, potentially inaccessible, or ineffective experiences. On the contrary, sociolooking offers a holistic framework to understand and practice looking together. Sociolooking posits that looking is interconnected with our human social way of being, our inherent desire to connect, to share, and to learn with and from one another, and that individuals actively engage in looking with others, consciously and subconsciously. To conceptualize sociolooking, the researcher developed an integrated dynamic research approach and adopted writing as a method of inquiry. The researcher brought together insights from published literature in multiple fields to identify building blocks of sociolooking and describe how the interplay of these building blocks shapes sociolooking experiences. The researcher then examined sociolooking in real life situations to demonstrate and further refine the theory of sociolooking in an iterative exploratory process. This process yielded the central finding of this dissertation, the natural patterns of sociolooking, which explain how individuals interact with each other, objects, and their physical surroundings on their own accord and, often, unconsciously. Drawing from the natural patterns, the researcher proposed a set of guiding principles for practitioners to embrace the whole experience of sociolooking and to adopt the fluidity of choreography rather than the rigid and product-focused nature of planning and design. This dissertation offers new ways of looking at looking by embracing what individuals intuitively know and do, paying attention to the real-time interactions associated with looking and other factors that shape looking together, and offering a family of terms that conveys how we should conceive, research, and apply looking and looking together.

Comments

This disseration is an interdisiciplinary conceptual exploration which draws from a broad range of fields. It holds meanings for both theory and practice and is relevant to several fields. These fields include education, museum studies, art education (e.g., strategies for looking at art, drawing, and collage-making) art and architectural theory and criticism, architecture, environmental architectural psychology, anthropology, philosophy, neuroscience, and sociolinguistics.

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