How can I improve my practice if I am (always in a process of becoming) my practice? Thinking with my post-living-theory of caring-with-mutuality

Hutchison, Sonia (2021) How can I improve my practice if I am (always in a process of becoming) my practice? Thinking with my post-living-theory of caring-with-mutuality. Doctoral thesis, University of Cumbria.

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Abstract

My thesis is written as a tour of my home, through which I create an alternative epistemological pathway using post-living-theory - a development and line-of-flight out of living theory. I grapple with the ethico-onto-epistemological issues of humanistic and qualitative approaches, and then shift to a posthumanistic and post-qualitative inquiry. I move from reflection and reflexivity to diffraction, producing something different and more ethical. I wrestle with a variety of assemblages of caring that I began developing as a child in care, and continued developing as a charity leader supporting carers as well as in my relationships. My post-living-theory of caring-with-mutuality emerges as a creative-relational response that embraces the multiplicities of those in the relationship. I draw on my values of love, hope, justice and participation and the concepts of the crucial Cs (capability, connect, count, courage) which are; growth mindset, single successes, and meaning and purpose. I identify times when I worked in the ruins of my values and found myself to be a post-living-contradiction. In these times, assemblages of caring-with-resilience, resistance, authority and rescuing emerge. These concepts perform differently and, I argue, less usefully than caring-with-mutuality, however they may be the best assemblage at that moment and therefore necessary to understand. Rather than creating a fixed clarified explanation, I map what caring assemblages do to my practices of being and becoming, exploring the effects and affects of the difference my actions make personally and professionally. My tour of my thesis home is intentionally performative. The metaphor holds the traditional idea of a thesis, as a search for generalisable truth, under erasure (sous rature). Using three voices; a storyteller; host and meta-host, I continually problematise the idea of a singular, separate self.

Item Type:	Thesis/Dissertation (Doctoral)
Departments:	Institute of Business, Industry and Leadership > Applied Transformative Education and Leadership
Additional Information:	Submitted to the University of Cumbria in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, word count: 79,982, September 2021.
Depositing User:	Anna Lupton
Date Deposited:	31 Oct 2022 10:42
Last Modified:	13 Jan 2024 12:32
URI:	https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/6650

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