30 Days by the Sea is my creative research project, completed as a Master of Arts Candidate in Human Rights and Social Justice at Thompson Rivers University on Secwépemc Territory, Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada.
About the Project
In January 2026, I spent thirty days alone by the Sea of Cortez in Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico. I wrote every day. I photographed every day. I rested, and I remembered how to play, and I let my nervous system begin to find its footing again after nineteen years of precarious academic labour that had slowly accumulated in my body as what I name a slow violation of the human right to rest.
This blog documents that inquiry. It is a creative expression project submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts in Human Rights and Social Justice at Thompson Rivers University. It is written in the tradition of Scholarly Personal Narrative (Nash, 2004), a methodology that holds the researcher’s lived experience as legitimate data and storytelling as a valid form of rigorous inquiry.
Alongside the written reflections, I photographed each day. The image-based work on this blog is best understood as autoethnographic and arts-based image-making, informed by Photovoice rather than enacting it. Photovoice in its classical form (Wang & Burris, 1997) is a participatory community-based method in which a group of co-researchers hold the cameras and engages in structured critical dialogue about what their images reveal. On this blog, there is one image-maker and one image-reader, so the photographs function as visual fieldnotes that work alongside the writing to record what the body noticed, what the light did, and what could not yet be said in words. Where the word photovoice appears elsewhere on these pages, I mean it in this adapted, solo, autoethnographic sense, with the methodological lineage of Wang and Burris (1997) acknowledged but its participatory structure reserved for the dissertation.
It is also simply the story of a woman going to the sea to find out whether rest is still possible.
The Central Concept: Alonetude
This project introduces and develops the concept of alonetude, a term I coined to describe a positive, integrated, and intentional relationship with being alone. Alonetude is distinct from loneliness (which is marked by unwanted isolation and disconnection) and from classical solitude (which carries connotations of romanticized withdrawal). Alonetude is the third shore: the place where one can be fully present to oneself, in the world, without performance, without audience, and without apology.
I argue that the capacity for alonetude, for resting in one’s own company, is a human right, and that precarious labour systematically strips people of this capacity by making rest feel dangerous, guilty, or simply unavailable.
Re-entry and Sustaining Alonetude
A thirty-day project by the sea is, in some ways, the easy part. The harder question is whether alonetude can survive the return: whether what is learned by the water can be carried back into a city, a semester, a household, a body that still has a long commute and a stack of marking. I take this question seriously in the blog’s closing posts, and I want to flag it here as well, because a concept of rest that only works in a rented casita on the Sea of Cortez is not, in the end, a human right. It is a holiday.
I argue that alonetude is best understood as a practice rather than a place. The thirty days were a deep apprenticeship in a capacity I had nearly lost, but the capacity itself is portable. After returning to Kamloops, I have worked to sustain aloneness through smaller daily and weekly rituals: a slow first hour of the morning before any screen time, walks without a phone, one unbooked day each week, and a refusal of the cultural reflex to apologize for being alone. These practices are imperfect and easily eroded by the rhythms of contract academic work, and I name that erosion openly in the later posts rather than pretending the shore solved it. Re-entry is itself part of the inquiry.
What the sea offered, I now think, was not a permanent state but a recalibration: a felt memory of what an unhurried nervous system is like, against which the ordinary hurry of institutional life becomes visible as a choice rather than a given. The closing posts return to this question in more detail, and the blog is intended to be read with that arc in mind: out to the shore, into the stillness, and back again, changed but not exempt.
Implications for Institutions
If alonetude is a human right, and if precarious labour systematically strips people of the conditions in which it can be practised, then the argument of this project cannot end at personal witness. It has to make at least a beginning of a claim on the institutions that shape contemporary working life, and on the post-secondary sector in particular, where I have spent nineteen years on contract.
The institutional implications I draw from this work are concrete rather than ornamental. First, contract and sessional academic labour as currently structured is incompatible with the right to rest: when each four-month term is also an audition for the next, there is no part of the year in which an instructor can ethically be unavailable, unproductive, or alone with themselves. A meaningful response would include longer contract horizons, paid non-teaching time between terms, and an end to the practice of treating last-minute course assignments as a normal scheduling tool.
Second, universities that publish wellness statements while relying on a precariously employed teaching workforce are, in effect, asking individual workers to absorb the cost of an institutional design choice. Yoga at noon does not repair a labour structure that makes rest dangerous to one’s livelihood. Taking alonetude seriously as a right would mean auditing workload, contract length, and availability expectations against the question: can a person employed here be alone with themselves without professional risk?
Third, and more broadly, the right to alonetude has implications beyond the academy: for care workers, gig workers, parents of small children, people in carceral and clinical settings, and anyone whose time is colonized by the demand to be perpetually reachable. I do not fully develop each of these threads in this project, but I name them here as the praxis horizon to which the personal narrative is pointed. The shore is where the inquiry began. It is not where it is meant to end.
About Me
Amy Tucker
Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada
ORCID: 0009-0006-9872-2248 · LinkedIn Profile
I am a white, settler, cisgender woman and a senior athlete at Thompson Rivers University on Secwépemc Territory. Since 2007, I have worked as a contract instructor in post-secondary education. I am a writer, a photographer, an artist, and someone who is slowly learning that stillness is also a form of scholarship. I use Scholarly Personal Narrative as my primary research methodology. I am committed to trauma-informed, arts-based, and body-based approaches to inquiry. I believe that the human body is an archive of everything institutions prefer to leave unnamed.
Rigour, Ethics, and Self-Care
This project follows the Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN) methodology, as developed by Robert Nash (2004), which positions the researcher’s lived experience as the primary site of inquiry. Because SPN draws exclusively on the author’s reflections, memories, and meaning-making – rather than on data collected from human participants – formal Research Ethics Board (REB) approval was not required for this work. No interviews, surveys, observations of identifiable persons, or third-party data were used to generate the reflections shared here. The same applies to the photographic practice described above: the images are autoethnographic, made by and of my own engagement with the place, and do not depict identifiable participants.
Rigour in this project is not established through generalizability or replicability, but through what Nash calls the criteria of honesty, plausibility, and resonance. I have aimed to be honest by writing reflexively and transparently about my assumptions, uncertainties, and shifts in my thinking over the past 30 days. I have aimed for plausibility by grounding personal reflection in relevant scholarly literature and situating my experiences within broader theoretical conversations about rest, precarity, solitude, and the right to be alone. Resonance is offered to the reader as an invitation: these reflections are not universal claims, but stories meant to be tested against your own life and your own shore.
Where other people appear in this narrative – friends, family, colleagues, neighbours along the bay, strangers met in passing – I have used pseudonyms, composite descriptions, or omitted identifying details. I have included only material I judged would not harm those involved, and I have erred on the side of leaving things out when I was uncertain. Where my photographs include other people, faces are either not visible, not in focus, or the person has consented to appear. The sea, the light, the desert, and my own footprints are the main characters here.
A statement of trustworthiness
Because qualitative and arts-based work cannot be evaluated against the criteria of positivist research, I draw on Laurel Richardson’s (2000) five criteria for assessing creative, analytic and narrative scholarship as the standard to which this project should be held. Richardson asks of such work: does it make a substantive contribution to our understanding of social life; does it have aesthetic merit, that is, is it crafted with care and does the form serve the inquiry; is it reflexive, naming the author’s position and the conditions of its own making; does it have impact, moving the reader emotionally, intellectually, or to action; and does it offer an expression of a reality, a credible, lived account of a human experience? I have written each entry with these five criteria in view, and I invite the reader (and any examining committee) to read the work against them. To Richardson’s five, I add Tracy’s (2010) overlapping markers of sincerity and resonance, both of which align with the criteria Nash names within SPN itself. Trustworthiness in this kind of work is not the absence of the author from the data. It is the disciplined, visible presence of the author within it.
A statement of relational ethics
The hardest ethical question in autoethnographic work is not the one about the author. It is the one about the people who appear in the author’s story and did not choose to be written about. In this project, I write about my mother, my five-year-old self, my childhood, my colleagues and former students, and the institutions where I have spent nearly two decades of contract labour. None of these others sat down to a consent form.
I have approached this responsibility through the lens of Nel Noddings’ (1984, 2013) ethics of care, which asks not, first, what I may disclose? But what does this person, in their particularity, need from me here? Care ethics treats the relationship as the unit of moral attention, not the rule. In practice, that has meant several concrete commitments. Where living family members and friends appear, I sought their consent in advance for the substance of what would be said about them, offered them the opportunity to read entries before publication, and removed or altered material at their request without argument. Where consent could not be sought (my five-year-old self, who cannot be asked; people who have died; institutions, which do not consent in the same sense as persons), I have asked instead whether what I am writing is true, necessary, and offered with care, and I have held back material that failed any of those three tests. Where naming a colleague or a student could harm them or expose them without their knowledge, I have used pseudonyms, composite figures, or removed identifying details; where naming an institution risks harm to people still inside it, I have written about structures rather than individuals.
I want to openly name two limits of this approach. First, I cannot fully consent for the dead, the very young, or my own younger self; I can only write toward them with as much care as I am able, and accept that some readers may judge this insufficient. Second, my mother appears in this work as a beloved and complicated figure; she has read the entries in which she is named and given her consent to their publication, and where she preferred a different framing, I revised. The reader should know that what is on the page is what she has agreed can be on the page. The post Navigating the Third Shore develops the methodological and ethical framing in more detail, and readers who want a fuller account of how trustworthiness and relational ethics are worked out across the project should begin there.
Caring for myself through the process
Writing from one’s own life can surface unexpected emotional weight, especially when the subject matter is rest, precarity, and the body’s memory of harm. I took several deliberate steps to remain well across the thirty days and the writing that followed. I set a sustainable daily rhythm and gave myself permission to skip a day when I needed rest rather than push through. I built in time outdoors every day – walking the shoreline, swimming, sitting with the sea – treating the landscape as both subject matter and restorative practice. I kept a separate private journal for material that felt too raw to share, distinguishing clearly what was for me from what was for the reader. I stayed in contact with trusted friends and with my supervisor, both of whom could offer perspective when the work felt heavy. Before publishing each entry, I paused and asked myself whether sharing it still felt right; when the answer was no, I waited, or I kept the piece private. When difficult memories arose, I treated them gently – slowing down, stepping away from the desk, returning to the body, and trusting that the work would still be there when I came back.
Anticipating Objections
Scholarly Personal Narrative invites a particular family of critiques, and a project that did not take them seriously would be the weaker for it. I want to name the four objections I find most pressing and indicate, briefly, how I respond to each within the body of the work.
1. Is this just a memoir wearing the costume of research? Critics of autoethnographic and narrative methods (for example, Delamont, 2009; Atkinson, 2006) argue that work grounded in the author’s own life lacks the analytic distance that scholarship requires and risks producing self-indulgent rather than rigorous knowledge. I take this seriously. My response is that SPN, as Nash (2004) frames it, is not memoir but a deliberate movement between personal story, scholarly literature, and what he calls universalisability: the obligation to ask whether one’s particular experience can illuminate something beyond itself. I have tried, in each entry, to hold that movement rather than collapse into the personal alone. Readers will judge how often I succeed.
2. A sample of one cannot be generalized. This is true, and I do not claim otherwise. The project does not offer generalizable findings about rest, precarity, or solitude. It offers a carefully situated case from which readers may draw what Stake (1995) calls naturalistic generalization: recognition of patterns in their own lives through a resonant other. Generalisability is deliberately replaced by transferability and resonance.
3. The privilege problem. Spending thirty days alone by the Sea of Cortez is itself a marker of relative privilege, and any argument about rest that ignores this risks universalizing the experience of those who can afford retreat. I name my own positionality clearly (white, settler, cisgender, formally educated, with the financial and bodily capacity to travel) and I argue throughout that the right to alonetude must be theorized most urgently for those who cannot leave: shift workers, carers, people in poverty, people whose lives are surveilled. The shore is where I could see the problem clearly. It is not the place where the problem lives.
4. Reliability and the slipperiness of memory. Narrative inquiry is sometimes critiqued for treating remembered experience as if it were transparent data. I work against this by writing close to the day (most entries were drafted within twenty-four hours of the experience they describe), by including the photographic record as a parallel and partly independent witness, and by marking explicitly in the text where I am uncertain, where I am reconstructing, and where a memory has shifted in the telling. Reliability in this kind of work is not the absence of subjectivity. It is the disciplined naming of it.
None of these responses, I think, finally dissolves the objections. They are live tensions inside the method, and I have tried to write with them rather than around them.
How to Navigate This Blog
This blog contains 270+ posts across several types of writing: daily journal entries, scholarly essays, bilingual reflections in Spanish and English, original poems, memory pieces, and vignettes. If you are new here, the best place to begin is the Start Here page, which lists all posts in their intended reading order. You may also browse by category using the navigation menu.
Some posts contain content warnings noting reflections on trauma, grief, childhood experiences, and the body’s memory of harm. These are marked at the beginning of each relevant post. Please care for yourself as you read.
This project was completed on Secwépemc Territory. I acknowledge with gratitude and respect that I live, work, and write on the unceded traditional territory of the Secwépemc People.
