Embodied Becomings of Women in Yoga: A Postqualitative Pursuit

The intent of this inquiry was to engage diffractively with women’s mutual understandings in the physical and emotional embodied experiences of yoga, simultaneously incorporating my own experiences. More generally, this study occurred during a time when my interest became focused on the concept of embodiment, as it applied to embodied learning in adult education more generally. Beginning from a qualitative research framework of feminist phenomenology, which evolved as I read new research along postqualitative lines, I discovered new openings for inquiry that incorporated such concepts as the rhizome, agential realism, affective intensities, and agentic assemblages. These concepts replaced more traditional qualitative methodologies as the research became centred in posthumanist theories that engaged back and forth interaction with participants through Barad’s (2007) notion of the intra-view and through engaging with and valuing materiality in meaning making. Following such postqualitative approach, I incorporated four audio recordings from the intra-views in an effort to engage rather than represent participant performativity in ways that value researcher participation more than the researcher’s interpretive discourse. Posthumanism facilitates and even encourages engagement with human complexity, rather than trying to contain and order it. I was fortunate to be invited into the worlds of the participant women and to participate directly in many complex ways in which their experiences with the discipline of yoga have changed their lives and continue to change their worldviews, which implicates their sense of becoming. The greatest learning as the researcher in this journey has been navigating the ambiguities of my own experiences, along with the participants’, across the postqualitative and the opportunity to dwell outside the lines of the boxes of pre-established research methodology. As a result, I was privileged to see the complex and engage it as such, reading and listening “with” the women, their experiences, and the material. Thus, my purpose transcended common and summable answers, and instead I have been granted glimpses into the women’s emergent and intracorporeal becomings within the discipline of yoga.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Adult Education (MAEd)

Level thesis:degree_level

Master's

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Education

Grantor dc:publisher

Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research, University of Regina

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Budd, Chelsa Marie

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Hanson, Cindy

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Hart, Dr. Paul
• Ricketts, Dr. Kathryn

Language dc:language.iso

en

DOI

https://doi.org/10.82465/3771

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:uregina.scholaris.ca:10294/9310