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Subject: search.filters.subject.Narrative inquiry (Research method)

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Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    On LIFE within the Society-of-Captives : exploring the pains of imprisonment for real : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2024-12-12) Luff, Daniel John
    Institutional and social discourse upholds the prison as an effective rehabilitative solution to crime, but more recently there has been increasing criticism of the prison as a producer of harm rather than healing. Despite such criticism, discussions of the rehabilitative potentials of prisons predominantly exclude and silence insider, incarcerate voices in criminal justice debates and literature, and often do not describe what those ‘inside’, like me, are living and experiencing. The primary aim of this project is to theorise twenty years of lived experience of incarceration in the hope of contributing to the work being done to problematise risk-averse, harmful correctional practices. Through a deeply reflexive autoethnographic performance, the reader comes with me beyond prison walls, into the largely closed off, inaccessible world within. Through navigation of my lived experience of imprisonment, I reflexively theorise memories of incarceration that are usually only speculated upon through objective, exclusionary research. The account that emerges from theorising incarceration ‘for real’ analyses the constraints of political narratives and risk averse policy and practice produced within our prison system, and within the bodies that system contains. Through an interweave of autoethnographic field noting, performance and analysis, the research unpacks the connections between the structural, socio-political issues, and the pains of incarceration. Using Arrigo’s Society of Captives (SOC) thesis, the harms being produced are theorised with regard to subjectivities constituted through prison – the prisoner, their guard, and society at large. Theoretical storying shows how socio-political issues are having considerably detrimental impacts on correctional policy and practice. Prisoners are neither seen nor heard, and their keepers too are held captive, unable to engage with their charges ethically lest they be reprimanded for doing corrections differently. Through this multi-layered harm, a society of captives is being perpetuated within which the very harm and risk it proclaims to alleviate is reproduced. Embedded in a pursuit of social justice, I argue for a relational, ethical praxis wherein people are seen, and heard, for real. The change is not only theorised but rare instances of it, and the healing power it produces, demonstrated. Through autoethnography’s theoretical praxis, and embracing of the SOC thesis’ pursuit of becoming, my research also involves considerable personal movement. It illustrates how, through the utilisation of autoethnographic methodology, in particular reflexive process, it becomes possible to ethically resist harmful representations and risk-focused correctional practices. In making these movements the research brings us out of prison, and provides in-depth consideration of my bodily attempts to reintegrate into the community after two decades of largely harmful carceral experiences. In these, the narrative contributes to a growing consciousness, global debate, and movement regarding prison, rehabilitation, and how community safety is best served. And it contributes to a process of becoming within me, a bodily movement, a transition into a place where humanness can be done differently…
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    Resistance, healing and empowerment through autobiographical therapeutic performance–– 愛，媽媽 (Love, Mum) : a solo matrilineal memoir and autoethnographic inquiry on Chinese womanhood and ‘The good woman’ ideal : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing at Massey University, New Zealand. EMBARGOED until 30 July 2027.
    (Massey University, 2024) Lam, Cynthia Hiu Ying
    My research is an autoethnographic inquiry that employs creative and critical methodologies to examine the question: How does the process of writing and performing one’s life experiences and trauma act as a form of resistance to the dominant ‘good woman’ narrative, leading to personal healing, empowerment and transformation? Through the creation of my one-woman show, 愛，媽媽 (Love, Mum), a matrilineal memoir about three generations of Chinese women, I investigate how the creative process involving the writing, rehearsing and performance of my play can become a form of resistance and counter-storying against the dominant ‘good woman’ narrative, leading to personal healing and empowerment. I begin by discussing the historical context of the virtuous Chinese woman, and present research by scholars who demonstrate that depression in women contains a gendered lens, resulting from the socio-cultural pressures of living up to the ‘good woman’ ideal. My analysis uses the methodological framework of autobiographical/autoethnographic therapeutic performance (ATP). This is a method that focuses on the working through of personal traumatic material through writing and performance. My research utilises a transdisciplinary praxis, combining both arts-based and psychoanalytic theories and practice related to trauma recovery and the healing processes of ATP. My investigation is autoethnographic and deeply personal as my own life experience and creative process is used to answer my research question, as well as shining a light on the socio-cultural structures we live in. Employing a mixture of creative practice, personal reflection, theoretical examination, and a close reading of my play script and performance, I demonstrate how the creative process I went through has led to a form of personal healing and transformation, with the potential to impact and engage with the wider community.
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    Men's work : narratives of engaging with change and becoming non-violent : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2024-07-26) Kean, Matthew Joseph
    Family violence continues to be a harsh reality for many families, whānau and communities around New Zealand. The primary aim of this project is to produce new possibilities for the violence prevention sector by linking theory and community practices supporting men, and their families, with pathways of change in relation to their cultural, gendered, socio-economic, and religious experiences of the world. In partnership with Gandhi Nivas, a community-based organisation providing early intervention support services to families in the Auckland region, I collaborate with men accessing Gandhi Nivas for support to bring to the fore an ethics of care empowering non-normative processes of change towards non-violence. Informed with the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, I provide an autoethnographic analysis of fieldwork experiences, 1:1 interviews, and a weekly men’s social support group, expanding on Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic theory to privilege narratives of events, felt experiences, and embodied memories of different institutional, legal, political, and socio-cultural forces conditioning men’s every day social worlds. With narratives as a form of re-remembering men’s sticky networks of affective memories, I experiment with nomadic subjectivity as a cartographic methodology capable of tracing sensorial data with enlivening moments of bodily sensation. This is not a straightforward task. A complex project, I craft a mosaic of affective connections with selections of notes, transcripts and events reverberating flows of materiality that produce changes to specific social, political, gendered, and cultural locations, enabling me to reflexively analyse what experiences follow me, what social processes I have articulated, and what processes are left off the page. I elaborate an understanding of nomadic subjectivity as a tactic enabling me to bear witness to both men’s capacities for violence and non-violence within men’s social world, by unfolding affective memories with a series of textually connected hesitations, pauses, and irruptions of social forces conditioning how we experience the world. Informed with Deleuzian political thought, nomadic narratives help me materialise different, unpredictable arrangements of fluxes, flows, and forces with indefinite processes of individuation, providing different potentials, capacities, and limits past the limits of normative knowability. Retrospectively evoking the complexities of following the affective movement of men, which we bring out into the community and to others, this research positions non-violence not just as the absence of violence, but as an iterative process of embodying variations in arrangements and connections of thought processes, propelling alternative modes of relations empowering an ethics of care and concern for others through which violence becomes less possible, reduced, and mitigated. Engaging with an organisation that celebrates difference within ethical frameworks of care informing a diversity of professional practices and experiences, this collaborative, community-oriented research project embraces embodied understandings of change processes men experience whilst in the care of Gandhi Nivas, and puts to work DeleuzoGuattarian non-normative subjectivities of affectivity and intensity as entry points to resonate embodied materiality I cannot know—but feel. With men invoking becomings of non-violence unable to be represented with normative masculinities and hegemonic notions of violence and non-violence, writing a nomadic subject enables me to attend to how different experiences of forces act on and through us, affirming empowering productions of a self with the material and discursive possibilities of men’s daily life.
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    Crafting death : grief, stories, and materiality in Katikati Coffin Club : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Social Anthropology at Massey University, Palmerston North, Aotearoa New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2020) Russell, Bronwyn
    Coffin Clubs are a social phenomenon in Aotearoa New Zealand, where people gather for two main purposes: to talk about death and dying, and to build their own coffins. This latter, practical aspect is what sets Coffin Clubs apart from other death-related support groups. This research explores why people attend Katikati Coffin Club. My field work involved attending Katikati Coffin Club on a weekly basis for more than a year. While I was there, I helped build and decorate many coffins, including my own. Using participant-observation and ethnographic accounts from club members, my findings reveal the nuanced reasons people choose to attend Coffin Club, and why many continue to attend long after they have finished building their coffin. This research explores the practical element of Katikati Coffin Club through the lens of the anthropology of craftwork. I consider how the act of building a coffin facilitates conversations about death, dying and grief. I argue that building a coffin can be seen as a form of storytelling, and an acknowledgement of mortality. Finally, I suggest that Coffin Club provides an alternative to the coffins sold by the funeral industry, and is a way to take control of/personalise ‘death work’ (actively preparing for death, both practically and in more abstract, emotional ways). My findings assert that Coffin Club helps people talk about death and grief. It creates a space for people to share different practices relating to death work, and provides an opportunity to craft narratives. As club members tell their stories through crafting a coffin, they are also able to narrate their loss and grief. As they craft their coffin, they also craft the relationships and the social space around them. In performing a practical aspect of death work, Coffin Club members are working on grief and loss. Woodwork, death work and the work of grief, occurring simultaneously.
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    Becoming (non)violent : accountability, subjectivity and ethical non-violence in response to intimate partner violence : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology at Massey University, Manawatū, Aotearoa New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2019) Denne, Stephanie
    This thesis joins a movement of critical resistance and ethical activism problematising the increased institutionalisation of domestic violence interventions. A Eurocentric, capitalist, and neoliberal knowledge economy appears incapable of accounting for or accommodating the multiple, intersecting gendered social power relations and conditions of possibility that enable violence against women and children. Through a process of reflexive reading, I draw on the work of philosopher and feminist theorist Judith Butler, engaging with theories of accounting for oneself, subjectivation and ethical non-violence to analyse men and women’s narratives of (non)violence in the context of a men’s stopping violence programme. I interrogate the sociocultural regimes of intelligibility, subjectivity and morality that produce the accountability of gendered subjects of violence at sites of ethical exchange, and the consequences of such a production for those affected by, and responding to, domestic violence. Throughout the thesis, I question how systems of response and intervention reproduce power relations of domination and oppression through the production of fixed and inflexible identity categories of difference and dis-ease for targeted surveillance, regulation and discipline. Accounts of oneself are read critically as sites of embodied and embedded violence, where demands for narrative consistency and coherence enable the denial, minimisation and justification of men’s violence as a response to the risk of condemnation and subjective threat. I examine how patriarchal and colonising narratives tolerate, justify and encourage violence as a reiterative practice of hegemonic masculinity, where the embedded masculine subject self-regulates and disciplines their embodied subjectivity for authority and control within hierarchical gender binaries. I consider how feminine subjects are positioned as inferior to, or a ‘lack of’ the masculine ideal, enabling the dehumanisation, exclusion and silencing of women as objects and technologies for masculine privilege and domination. I conclude by advocating for ethical non-violence in domestic violence research and response, acknowledging our shared subordination and vulnerability to sociocultural regulatory regimes. I imagine how suspending the satisfaction of judgement and practices of patience can facilitate processes of articulation to exceed the constraints of violent subjectivities and engage in processes of ‘becoming’ within collaborative partnerships of resistance, transformation and non- violence.
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    A story in the telling. . . : an exegesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree, a Masters in Fine Arts, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2018) Cook, Damon
    This exegesis contains a laying out of the ground that is our contemporary moment of environmental and social crisis,. This includes the approaches and attitudes that have brought that crisis into being. These are approaches and attitudes that seek to control and master the world. The ‘body’— that is, our own bodies and the body of that world— is where this drama is seen to play out. Art and contemplative practices are understood as offering counter modes to control and exploitation. These counter modes of practice and understanding are examined and critiqued. An attempt is made to perform this problem by offering points of clarity and orientation, while, at the same time avoiding too much clarity and control. Which is to say that this exegesis is also a literary text, in part and whole. Finally, in keeping with this performance of clarity and control, and possible counter modes, the concluding section —‘Where to Next’— offers two suggestive, rather than explicitly directive ways forward.
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    Negotiating the in-between : how two foreigners living in rural Japan narrated changes in their identities : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters in Education (Guidance Studies), Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2009) Lankshear, Andrew
    This thesis used narrative inquiry to find out how two foreigners, who had resided in rural Japan for a long period of time, narrated reflectively how they had changed as a result of their cross-cultural transitions. This thesis came about through my own transition experiences in Japan leading to a hybrid, bicultural notion of myself, and my subsequent curiosity as to how others underwent changes in identity, possibly leading also to hybrid selves. Each participant was interviewed twice. Their changes were contextualised within dominant themes arising from their life stories. In addition, they were analysed using a modified version of Herbert Hermans' personal position repertoire (2001), which was able to identify key identity positions and underlying beliefs that aided or hindered their transitions. This research found that the participants' respective dominant life themes of estrangement and communion had major impacts on their cross cultural transitions, local relationships, and life satisfaction. The first participant followed a theme of estrangement and evoked identity positions and imagined audiences to justify his stance. The second participant took on a learning model to enhance her relationships with the local Japanese, resulting in alterity, the incorporation of a Japanese identity position in her own personal position repertoire and subsequently a hybrid self. In both participants some identity positions were aligned to Japanese ways of being, consequently coming to the fore in their psyches, whereas others were subjugated. Also new positions were incorporated, while others were lost, with affective outcomes. The participants' transitions were impacted on by their environments. The first participant initially worked within a foreign enclave and had no close personal Japanese friends. The second participant was immersed in local public schools and enjoyed high recognition in her small, rural town. Motivating factors for being in Japan were also found to be of consequence for the participants' cross-cultural transitions. This thesis was able to capture the complexity of the participants' cross-cultural transitions through considering them as having multiple selves that were revealed through reflective life stories and collated within a personal position repertoire.