Move, make, imagine: bringing imaginal, embodied and relational consciousness to change work

Haven is a wholesome girl with big teeth who comes from Maine. She has lived in Spain for years, so she is not so innocent anymore. Perhaps that is why she began to lurk around this inquiry, wending her savvy way into autoethnographical experiments, turning them,sometimes, into fiction. Reality exasperates her, despite her love of the breathing planet and of Fritjoff Capra’s prose, despite her suspicion of his self-indulgence. She is less simple than she seemed when she first knocked on the door and joined the work to be done on doctoral matters. I now see that she began to subvert things, however subtly, early on. I have trouble nailing her down, but then that may be my own shortcoming. Keira, on the other hand, brazenly sauntered into Haven’s and my inquiry scoffing at doctoral work altogether. She is getting on with life, refusing all the while to see that this is serious (isn’t it?). We might not get this right, Haven and I, if Keira keeps living life at such a pace, a siren to everyone, including Haven. She keeps surviving and laughing and breaking down at such a relentless pace. Her wake is full of color and fright. She is both warm and violent. Haven can tell you that writing about how I have changed through writing stories has led us through discoveries of psychoanalytic theory, theatre, autoethnography, feminist theory, poetry, ecology and more. When we had to do work we dove into Performance Studies and what a world of possibilities is there for our intention of creating spaces in which people can learn and flourish. The qualities of such spaces are, for us, centered around embracing deep imagination, promoting bodily involvement and engaging with others. These have become the three pillars of our thesis. Part I of the thesis explores personal writing, including poetry, fiction, autoethnography, journaling and essays to address personal change in an artful manner. I get to know Haven and Keira in the early chapters and they have inquired with me, first into the bigger context of my changing -such as our ecology and philosophical grounding- and then into more granular, methodological possibilities -such as autoethnography, and writing poetry and fiction. Part I includes an initial reflection on extending this work out into the greater world beyond myself and my interactions with Haven and Keira.

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

DProf thesis

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Middlesex University / Ashridge Business School

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Semler, K.

Identifier

oai:repository.mdx.ac.uk:881q3

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.mdx.ac.uk:881q3