Title: 30 Days by the Sea: A Research Inquiry into the Third Shore
Author: Amy Tucker
Project Type: Creative Expression Project
Degree: Master of Arts in Human Rights and Social Justice
Institution: Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada, on Secwépemc Territory
Year: 2026
This Creative Expression Project documents thirty days of solitary inquiry I undertook on the ancestral territory of the Cochimí People in Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico, in January 2026. Written in the tradition of Scholarly Personal Narrative (Nash, 2004), it introduces and develops the concept of alonetude: a positive, integrated, and intentional relationship with being alone that is distinct from loneliness, from romanticized solitude, and from the enforced isolation that precarious labour produces in the body over time.
I came to this inquiry grounded in nineteen years of contract academic employment at a Canadian post-secondary institution, during which I experienced what I name slow institutional violence (Galtung, 1969; Nixon, 2011): the gradual, cumulative accumulation of harm through precarious labour structures, chronic overextension, and the systematic denial of the conditions necessary for rest, creativity, and somatic safety. I argue that alonetude, understood as the capacity to be fully present to oneself without performance, audience, or apology, is a human right, and that its systematic erosion constitutes a rights violation.
Paradigm
This project is situated within an interpretive, arts-based paradigm that treats embodied experience as a legitimate and primary site of knowledge production. I work from the premise that the body holds knowledge that language often cannot fully contain, and that first-person inquiry conducted in relation to place is rigour in a different form. The project draws on feminist epistemology (Fricker, 2007), somatic knowing (Levine, 2010; van der Kolk, 2014), and the Scholarly Personal Narrative tradition (Nash, 2004) to claim my own experience as valid scholarly evidence. It resists the institutional demand to translate somatic knowledge into the disembodied register of conventional academic writing.
Theoretical Framework
The project draws on an integrated theoretical framework that spans human rights, trauma theory, and somatic scholarship.
Rob Nixon’s (2011) concept of slow violence provides the structural lens through which I interpret the cumulative, invisible harm of precarious academic labour. Miranda Fricker’s (2007) framework of epistemic injustice names the specific harm done when a knower’s experience is dismissed or rendered illegible by dominant institutional structures.
Peter Levine’s (2010) somatic experiencing model and Bessel van der Kolk’s (2014) research on trauma and the body offer frameworks for understanding the nervous system as a site of both injury and recovery. Stephen Porges’s (2011) polyvagal theory informs my attention to safety, ventral vagal activation, and the biological conditions necessary for genuine rest.
Tricia Hersey’s (2022) rest-as-resistance framework situates rest within a broader politics of refusal and liberation.
Gaston Bachelard’s (1969) phenomenology of intimate space shapes my engagement with Loreto as a container for reflection and repair.
Together, these frameworks allow me to hold the personal and the political as mutually illuminating rather than competing registers.
Typologies and Disciplines
This project is fundamentally interdisciplinary. It spans multiple fields and draws on several traditions simultaneously, requiring multiple typological and disciplinary registers, each contributing a distinct lens to the inquiry while remaining in active conversation with the others. The interdisciplinary nature of this work is deliberate and constitutive: it reflects the complexity of the phenomena under study, which demand a multi-disciplinary frame to be adequately held.
As a typology, this project is a Creative Expression Project conducted within the Scholarly Personal Narrative tradition (Nash, 2004). The Creative Expression Project form positions creative and aesthetic practice as a legitimate vehicle for scholarly inquiry, one in which the work of meaning-making is inseparable from the form in which it is made. Scholarly Personal Narrative requires that personal experience be rigorously theorized rather than simply reported, and it holds the researcher’s own life as a primary site of knowledge production rather than as anecdote or digression.
Disciplinarily, this project draws on Human Rights and Social Justice as its home field, positioning precarious labour, epistemic injustice, and the right to rest as political and ethical claims rather than personal difficulties. It draws additionally on Education Studies, particularly the subfield of academic labour and institutional critique, and on Feminist Theory, which provides the epistemological grounding for treating first-person, embodied knowledge as scholarly evidence.
The project also draws on Somatic and Trauma Studies, which furnish the conceptual vocabulary for understanding the nervous system as a site of both injury and recovery. Place-based and environmental inquiry informs the methodological attention I give to Loreto as a fully active research setting, one that shapes the inquiry as much as the inquiry shapes it. These disciplinary threads operate together and in relation; they are woven throughout the project in ways that are constitutive and mutually reinforcing. It is precisely this interdisciplinary weaving that allows the project to hold slow violence, somatic repair, epistemic justice, and the right to rest as a single, coherent field of inquiry, each dimension illuminating the others.
Together, these typologies and disciplines fit this project because they share a common commitment: the belief that the personal is political, that the body is an instrument of knowing, and that structural harm can be named and examined through rigorous first-person inquiry. The interdisciplinary frame is a source of strength and the core argument of this project. A project about a kind of harm that crosses the lines between labour, body, language, and place requires a way of knowing that crosses those same lines.
Methods
I employed an arts-based, trauma-informed, and body-based methodology across thirty consecutive days of place-based inquiry.
The primary research instrument was the daily journal entry, written each morning in direct response to embodied experience, landscape, and the physical and emotional residue of the previous day.
Photography functioned as a second research instrument: I photographed what drew my attention without prior intention, treating the photographs as evidence of where my nervous system was willing to rest.
Bilingual writing in English and Spanish served as a third instrument, allowing me to inhabit language differently and access registers of meaning that English alone was unable to reach.
Poetry, painting, and drawing functioned as fourth, fifth, and sixth instruments, respectively: poetry as a way of condensing embodied perception into form; painting and drawing as non-verbal practices that allowed the body to communicate what prose was still learning to hold.
The eighty (plus) blog posts that constitute the project include daily reflections, bilingual essays, original poems, visual art, memory vignettes, and scholarly analyses. Together they trace a thirty-day arc from exhaustion and hypervigilance toward what Porges (2011) calls ventral vagal activation: the biological state underlying genuine rest, curiosity, and connection.
Analysis was ongoing and recursive rather than sequential: I read across the daily entries as a body of data, identifying emerging patterns in somatic response, language, image, and relational awareness.
Ethics
This project engaged several interrelated ethical considerations that shaped both its design and its conduct. As a first-person inquiry in which I am simultaneously a researcher and the primary research subject, I took responsibility for the honest and accountable representation of my own experience without performing vulnerability or aestheticizing harm. I worked to maintain the distinction between reflection and self-exposure, and to write in ways that served the inquiry rather than the reader’s comfort or my own self-presentation.
The project is situated on Indigenous land in two locations, and I held this as an ongoing ethical obligation rather than a disclosure to be satisfied in an opening statement. The land acknowledgements throughout this work represent my effort to remain awake to the colonial histories embedded in the landscapes where I rested and researched, and to resist the settler tendency to extract benefit from place without accountability to the peoples whose relationship with that land preceded and exceeds my own.
When this project engages with Indigenous place names, language, or cultural knowledge, I do so only as someone inspired by and drawn toward those ways of knowing. I approach Indigenous literature, language, and culture with respect and humility, and I make no claim to authority, expertise, or insider standing. I am a settler on unceded land. Any engagement with Indigenous knowledge in this work is an act of listening rather than appropriation, and I remain accountable to the understanding that being moved by something differs from having the right to claim it.
As a contract academic worker writing about the institution that employs me, I navigated the ethics of naming harm within a power relationship that remains unresolved. I chose to name the structural conditions of precarious labour honestly, while grounding critique in documented theory and my own documented experience rather than in the identification of individuals. The project seeks legibility rather than retribution; for a form of harm that is routinely rendered invisible.
The visual and creative materials in this project, including photographs, paintings, and drawings, are entirely my own work. No other persons are depicted or identifiable in any of the materials shared. The bilingual writing produced in Spanish was generated with the assistance of Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by me; translation notes appear throughout the project to acknowledge this process and its limitations.
Acknowledgement of Tools Used
Several digital tools were used in the research, writing, and production of this project. I name them here in the interest of transparency and scholarly accountability.
Grammarly was used throughout the writing process for editing, grammar, spelling, and word-smithing, and to assist with organizing and refining phrasing.
Google Translate was used to produce the Spanish-language passages in this project and to assist in finding the right wording across languages. All translated passages were subsequently reviewed and refined by me; translation notes appear throughout the project to acknowledge this process.
Google Gemini was experimented with to create short videos and was used to brainstorm ideas and create tables within the project.
NotebookLM was used to organize and engage with the scholarly literature, and to create infographics and podcasts as part of the research and synthesis process.
In all cases, I am responsible for the final decisions about what is written, how it is framed, and what is submitted. All tools were used in the service of my own thinking and voice, rather than as a substitute for it. The intellectual and ethical responsibility for this work rests with me.
Contributions to the Literature
This project makes several contributions to scholarship in human rights, social justice, and arts-based inquiry.
First, it introduces the concept of alonetude as a theoretically grounded and empirically documented human experience that existing literatures on solitude, loneliness, and isolation leave inadequately named.
Second, it extends Nixon’s (2011) framework of slow violence into the specific context of contract academic labour in Canadian post-secondary education, demonstrating through first-person somatic documentation that precarity produces measurable harm in the body over time.
Third, it positions the right to rest, to solitude, and to embodied knowledge as political claims within a human rights framework rather than as personal preferences or wellness aspirations, building on and extending Hersey’s (2022) politics of rest.
Fourth, it contributes a methodological model for arts-based, place-anchored, first-person research that treats the nervous system and the daily lived body as primary data sources, demonstrating that such work can meet the standards of scholarly rigour while remaining faithful to the epistemological premises from which it proceeds.
Fifth, it models the integration of bilingual writing and photography as research instruments within a Scholarly Personal Narrative framework, expanding the formal possibilities of that tradition.
A note on the limits of individual narrative: This project documents one body, one recovery, one thirty-day arc. It is necessarily singular. The methodology, Scholarly Personal Narrative, is first-person by design, and that design produces knowledge through particularity rather than generalization. I want to name honestly what this means: the recovery I document here was made possible by individual resources and circumstances that are unequally distributed. Alonetude, as I argue throughout, is a human right, but access to the conditions for practising it is structurally unequal. The political argument of this project points beyond individual recovery toward collective and structural change: toward labour conditions that allow workers to remember that rest is possible, toward institutions that build the conditions for alonetude into the working life rather than forcing workers to reclaim it in stolen time. This project is the beginning of that argument, a beginning rather than its completion. The next study needs more voices, more bodies, more contexts, and a methodology that can hold them collectively.
Keywords
alonetude, scholarly personal narrative, creative expression project, academic precarity, slow violence, epistemic injustice, somatic knowledge, human right to rest, institutional gaslighting, trauma-informed research, arts-based inquiry, bilingual writing, solitude, the third shore, Loreto, Mexico, Secwépemc Territory
Land Acknowledgements
Kamloops, British Columbia, Secwépemc Territory
This Creative Expression Project was researched, written, and completed on the unceded traditional territory of the Secwépemc People. Thompson Rivers University sits on Secwépemc land, and I am grateful for the ongoing generosity of this territory, which has held me, my work, and my learning for more than two decades.
The Secwépemc are a sovereign people with deep and living connections to the lands, waters, and places of the Interior Plateau. Their stewardship of this land precedes and exceeds the institution that now occupies it. I write with awareness that academic precarity, the subject of this inquiry, has its own colonial genealogy, and that the institutional violence I name in this project exists within a broader structure of settler colonialism that continues to dispossess Indigenous peoples of land, language, and livelihood.
I acknowledge this land as an ethical commitment rather than a formality: to remain awake to the relationship between the rights I claim and the rights that continue to be denied.
I want to name something about Loreto that goes beyond its colonial history, because the colonial history is only part of what I entered. Mexico is a living country with a living culture, a living language, and living people whose relationship to that land, that sea, and that Spanish language is one of deep belonging. I arrived as a settler visitor, seeking rest and recovery. The people of Loreto, their warmth, their rhythms, their unhurried relationship with the afternoon light and the water, were part of what the place offered me. I received that offering as a guest. There is a difference between arriving as a guest and claiming a place as one’s own, and I hold myself accountable to that difference. The thirty days I spent there produced knowledge I could have produced nowhere else. They also produced a debt of gratitude I can only begin to repay through honesty about my position, my privilege, and the generosity I was shown.
Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico, Cochimí Territory
The thirty days of inquiry at the heart of this project were lived on the ancestral territory of the Cochimí People, whose presence in the Baja California peninsula extends back thousands of years. Loreto, known as Conchó to the Monqui people who originally inhabited this territory, was a place of gathering, ceremony, fishing, and living long before it became a colonial mission town or a research site.
The Cochimí were among the peoples most devastated by Spanish missionization in the eighteenth century. The Jesuit missions established at Loreto beginning in 1697 brought epidemic disease, forced settlement, and the systematic suppression of Cochimí language and cultural practice. The colonial violence of that history is present; it is held in the landscape I walked, the water I sat beside, and the silence I found restorative.
I came to this land as a settler visitor seeking rest and recovery. I hold the irony clearly that I found healing in a place where so much was taken. I offer this acknowledgement with the understanding that my thirty days by the sea were made possible by a history I inherited without earning and am unable to undo, only name, hold honestly, and carry forward with care.
Gracias a esta tierra. Thank you to this land.
Limitations
This project carries three limitations I name openly. First, it is a single-participant study: the data are drawn from one body, one recovery arc, and one set of circumstances. The findings illuminate rather than generalize, and the methodology is designed for depth over breadth. Second, the therapeutic conditions I accessed in Loreto required a convergence of economic resources, settler mobility, and freedom from caregiving obligations that are unequally available; the argument that alonetude is a human right is strengthened, rather than weakened, by the honest acknowledgement that access to its conditions remains structurally constrained. Third, the Spanish-language passages in this project were produced with translation assistance and refined to the best of my ability; they are gestures toward a different register of expression rather than fluent claims of bilingual authority. Each of these limitations is addressed within the project itself, and each is, in a different way, generative: the singularity is the methodology, the structural inequality is the political argument, and the linguistic reaching is the epistemological claim.
For a full list of all sources cited throughout this project, see the References page.
