Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Duke University Press.
I came to Sara Ahmed’s work because I needed language for something I had been living for seventeen years but had never been able to fully name. I kept encountering what I can only describe as institutional kindness that changed nothing. The equity statements in my contracts, the diversity language in faculty handbooks, the rhetoric of inclusion at every convocation I attended as a sessional instructor who would never have job security, these things sounded right. They felt like evidence that the institution cared. And yet nothing changed.
Ahmed names this experience with extraordinary precision. She calls it non-performativity, which is her term for what happens when saying something becomes a substitute for doing it. Institutions issue diversity commitments that accumulate into documents and mission statements, and designated officers, and the institutional wall remains intact. The wall, in Ahmed’s analysis, is the resistance encountered by anyone who tries to make structural change. I have felt that wall. I have hit it in governance meetings I was allowed to attend, but whose decisions I had no power to influence. I have felt it in the space between an equity policy and the reality of a one-semester contract.
Ahmed also writes about the complaint as a form of knowledge. When a worker names precarity, when she refuses the story that sessional labour is flexible and freely chosen, she is making a complaint in Ahmed’s sense. That act of naming carries its own risk, because the institution treats the complainant as the problem. I have been that complainant. Reading Ahmed helped me understand that what I experienced as personal friction was a structural dynamic with a name and a literature.
Ahmed’s analysis is grounded primarily in British and Australian universities, and in racial diversity work rather than labour precarity. Her framework requires extension to reach the Canadian context I inhabit, where sessional employment intersects with settler colonialism, neurodivergence, and the specific structures of FPSE collective bargaining. Bourdieu (1991) names the linguistic and symbolic dimensions of the same harm Ahmed describes institutionally. Freire (1970) connects it to the reproduction of oppression through institutional systems. Together, they help me see my experience as structural rather than personal.
Azoulay, A. (2008). The civil contract of photography (R. Mazali & R. Danieli, Trans.). Zone Books.
When I arrived in Loreto and started taking photographs, I was unsettled by a question I could not shake loose. Susan Sontag (1977) had taught me to be suspicious of the camera as a tool of appropriation. To photograph is to take something, she argued. But I was photographing a landscape that was healing me, not a subject I had power over. I needed a different framework for what I was doing, and Ariella Azoulay gave me one.
Azoulay proposes that photography creates a civil contract, an implicit covenant among the person who makes the image, the subject or landscape being photographed, and the future viewer. In this framework, photographs are events rather than objects. They generate obligations. The viewer who encounters an image inherits a responsibility to respond to what is documented. Photography is a form of political language that exists outside the control of any single authority. It speaks across time and creates bonds of accountability.
For my research, this reframes everything. When I photograph the Sea of Cortez at dawn, when I document the painted stones and the tidal margins and the quality of desert light, I am entering a contract with the landscape, with the peoples whose ancestral territory this is, and with the readers who will encounter these images as research data. Each image is an address rather than a capture. It asks something of the person who looks at it. That asking is ethical work.
Azoulay developed her framework in the context of Israeli occupation and the documentation of Palestinian dispossession. Her civil contract framework is deeply political, oriented toward images of human suffering and injustice rather than toward contemplative landscape photography in a healing context. Moving her thinking into the territory of solo arts-based healing research requires careful adaptation. I hold her framework alongside Oliver’s (2001) witnessing ethics and Wang and Burris’s (1997) Photovoice methodology to build the ethical architecture my visual practice needs. Smith (2021) reminds me that the land I am photographing carries a history I must acknowledge, and that the contract Azoulay describes has decolonial dimensions I cannot set aside.
Bachelard, G. (1969). The poetics of space (M. Jolas, Trans.). Beacon Press. (Original work published 1958)
There is a small room in Loreto where I slept and wrote for thirty days. It had a window that faced the sea and a ceiling fan that turned slowly in the heat. I did not choose it because it was beautiful, though it was. I chose it because I needed a container, a space small enough and quiet enough that I could finally hear myself think again after years of institutional noise. Reading Gaston Bachelard in that room felt like reading a map of the room itself.
Bachelard was a philosopher who spent his later career thinking about intimate space. He argued that the spaces we inhabit most deeply live on inside us long after we have left them. He called the house the first universe of the self. By this, he meant that the rooms, corners, and thresholds we move through are not neutral containers but emotional architectures that shape how we think, dream, and know. His concept of topoanalysis, which is his word for the systematic study of the intimate places of our lives, proposes that we carry our most formative spaces inside us as imaginative and emotional resources.
Bachelard also wrote about what he called felicitous space, his term for places that shelter well-being, places where we feel genuinely held. The retreat cottage in Loreto was a felicitous space in exactly this sense. It sat between the immensity of the desert and the immensity of the sea, and within that doubling of vastness, the small domestic space became what Bachelard describes as a dialectic of the intimate and the immense. Sitting in a tiny room at the edge of an enormous ocean, I could feel something happening in my body that I now understand as the nervous system settling. Bachelard gives me philosophical language for what Menakem (2017) and Levine (2010) describe somatically.
Bachelard’s phenomenology is rooted in a specifically European domestic imaginary. His houses are implicitly settled, owned, and culturally particular in ways that carry colonial assumptions I must name. The Loreto landscape, he would have called an intimate space, belongs, before any settler’s presence, to the Cochimí, Guaycura, and Pericú peoples. Smith (2021) holds me accountable to that history. Tuan (1977) extends Bachelard’s insights into the geographic framework I need to think ethically about place-making.
Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.2.191
I include Albert Bandura’s foundational research on self-efficacy because it names something I watched being destroyed in myself over seventeen years, something I could feel leaving but had no precise vocabulary for. Self-efficacy is a person’s belief in their own capacity to act, to perform a task, to carry something through. It is built through mastery experiences, seeing others like you succeed, encouragement from people whose judgment you trust, and physiological states that signal competence rather than threat.
Sessional academic labour, as I lived it, systematically undermined every one of these sources. My mastery experiences were real but perpetually unrecognized by the institution. The models of career success I was surrounded by were exclusively tenure-track. The encouragement available to me was thin and conditional on compliance. And the physiological state of perpetual contract uncertainty produced exactly the threat activation that Menakem (2017) and Porges (2011) describe as incompatible with sustained belief in one’s own capacity. By the time I arrived in Loreto, I had very little confidence left.
The thirty days of retreat were, among other things, a deliberate programme for restoring self-efficacy. Completing the daily practices, making photographs, finishing a painted stone, sustaining presence in a difficult landscape, writing when I would rather have done anything else, these small mastery experiences accumulated into something I had lost. Ryan and Deci’s (2000) self-determination theory extends Bandura’s thinking by addressing what kind of motivation is doing the work, which matters enormously when a person is healing rather than simply performing.
Bandura’s framework is individualistic and psychological. It locates self-efficacy in the person rather than in the structural conditions that build or erode it. The research I am doing requires the structural supplements provided by Bourdieu (1991), Ahmed (2012), and Lorey (2015). Bandura explains the mechanism of harm at the level of personal psychology; other theorists explain why the conditions that produce that harm exist in the first place.
Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Doubleday.
Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann gave me one of the most useful insights I carry into this project: that the social world is a human construction, and that human beings then experience their own constructions as though they were natural, inevitable, and objective. They call this process reification, the forgetting that we made the world we inhabit. Institutions, categories, and social arrangements that feel permanent and given were built by people, and they can be otherwise. This is the philosophical ground beneath my claim that precarious academic labour is a structural condition rather than a natural feature of how universities must operate.
Their concept of the social construction of reality also underlies my claim that the researcher’s own experience constitutes legitimate data. If reality is constructed through human interaction and interpretation, then the insider’s account of how that reality is lived is precisely the kind of knowledge that rigorous inquiry should pursue. Haraway (1988) builds directly on this foundation, insisting that situated, partial perspectives are more epistemologically honest than claims of universal objectivity. Fricker (2007) applies it to the specific harm done when a knower’s account of her own constructed reality is systematically disbelieved.
Berger and Luckmann write from within a tradition of European sociology that does address questions of who builds dominant constructions only implicitly. Collins (2000), hooks (1984), and Smith (2021) supply those critical dimensions explicitly. What Berger and Luckmann establish is the ontological premise; the others demand accountability for the politics of who does the constructing and whose constructions are authorized to stand as reality.
Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press.
Lauren Berlant wrote a book about wanting things that hurt you, and I read it and felt seen in a way that was both uncomfortable and clarifying. The concept of cruel optimism, which is Berlant’s central contribution, describes what happens when the thing you most desire is also the thing obstructing your flourishing. The attachment itself is the problem, because the object of attachment is structured in a way that cannot fulfill what it promises.
I was attached to the academy. I loved teaching. I believed, for seventeen years, that if I worked hard enough and cared enough and produced enough, the institution would eventually recognize and reward what I offered. That attachment kept me in a structure that extracted my labour and expertise without offering the stability, recognition, or belonging I was working toward. Berlant would call this cruel optimism, and I believe she would be right.
Berlant also writes about the impasse, which she describes as the extended present in which ordinary life is conducted under conditions of structural crisis without any clear sense of movement or resolution. This is the perfect description of sessional academic life: neither leaving nor arriving, perpetually contingent, unable to move forward on the institution’s own terms, unable to fully let go of the identity the institution alone can confer. Alonetude, as a concept, is in part a refusal of that impasse. The decision to spend thirty days by the sea was a decision to redefine what forward means, outside the institution’s linguistic market (Bourdieu, 1991).
Berlant’s prose is dense and sometimes difficult to translate into straightforward theoretical claims, and her focus on American cultural politics requires adaptation for the Canadian academic context. Han (2015), Lorey (2015), Standing (2011), and Hochschild (1983) extend her analysis in directions that are more directly applicable to the specific conditions of sessional faculty in Canadian higher education.
Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power (G. Raymond & M. Adamson, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence is one of the most precise tools available for naming what precarious academic labour does to the people it employs. Symbolic violence, in his account, is the mechanism through which dominated groups come to accept and participate in the conditions of their own domination. It operates through the internalization of the dominant group’s values, perceptions, and categories of worth, so that the dominated person evaluates herself through the lens of those who hold power over her. The sessional instructor who accepts the institution’s implicit narrative that contract labour is a freely chosen lifestyle, who blames her own insufficient productivity for the absence of a permanent position: this is symbolic violence at work. I have lived it. Reading Bourdieu helped me understand that the shame I felt was structurally produced rather than a reliable index of my own limitations.
Bourdieu also develops the concept of the linguistic market, the idea that language operates within institutional fields where certain forms of speech carry authority and others do not. Academic institutions are linguistic markets with highly regulated entry conditions. The sessional instructor speaks, but her speech carries the same institutional weight as that of tenured colleagues only when the institution grants it. Fricker (2007) names this as testimonial injustice; Bourdieu explains its structural mechanism.
Bourdieu’s framework is powerful as a diagnostic of structural domination and somewhat less generative for theorizing resistance or healing. Freire (1970), hooks (1984), and Hersey (2022) provide the counterweight: the insistence that consciousness, resistance, and refusal remain possible even within structurally constrained positions. The concept of alonetude is, in Bourdieu’s terms, a deliberate refusal to participate in the symbolic violence of institutional self-evaluation.
Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous loss: Learning to live with unresolved grief. Harvard University Press.
Pauline Boss gave me a term for the grief I had been carrying for years without knowing what to call it. Ambiguous loss is her concept for loss that happens without clear confirmation, closure, or social recognition, loss that cannot be properly mourned because it has no official moment, no acknowledged end, no sanctioned ritual of letting go.
The losses of sessional academic life are almost entirely ambiguous in Boss’s sense. I never lost a job, exactly. I lost the expectation of continuity. I lost the professional community I worked alongside but could never fully belong to. I lost the career trajectory that tenure implies, though it was never formally promised to me. I lost the sense of institutional home without ever being formally evicted. There was no funeral for any of these losses, because the institution would insist they were never real possessions to begin with.
Going to Loreto was, among other things, a deliberate attempt to create conditions for grieving what institutional culture had taught me I had no right to grieve. Greenspan (2003) describes dark emotions as teachers, and her work sits alongside Boss’s in this bibliography because both insist that avoiding difficult feelings produces more suffering than moving through them honestly. Menakem’s (2017) clean pain concept names the same truth from a somatic direction: moving toward the hurt, rather than away from it, is the pathway through.
Boss developed her framework from family therapy, particularly families dealing with missing persons and dementia. Her clinical focus is on family systems rather than institutional structures, and extending her concept to professional precarity requires the structural analysis provided by Bourdieu (1991) and Ahmed (2012). I use her concept here for its descriptive power, as a way of naming the specific shape of the grief that alonetude is designed to move through.
Brown, B. (2010). The gifts of imperfection: Let go of who you think you’re supposed to be and embrace who you are. Hazelden Publishing.
I wrestled with including Brené Brown in this bibliography because her work is popular rather than scholarly, and because the individualistic framing of her research can obscure the structural conditions that produce the shame and perfectionism she describes. I include her anyway, because her work on vulnerability reached me at a moment when more theoretical texts could not, and because honesty about the full terrain of my reading life is part of what Scholarly Personal Narrative methodology demands.
Brown defines shame as the intensely painful feeling of being fundamentally flawed and unworthy of connection. She argues that perfectionism is a form of shame management, an attempt to perform in ways that prevent exposure. What she is describing at the level of individual psychology is precisely what seventeen years of sessional labour produced in me through structural mechanisms that Brown does not fully theorize. Bourdieu (1991) names the structural origin: when an institution withholds authorization from certain speakers, those speakers internalize the withholding as evidence of personal deficiency rather than systemic design.
Brown’s concept of wholehearted living, which she defines as engaging with the world from a place of worthiness rather than scarcity, resonates with what alonetude as a practice aims to restore. Full presence to oneself, without performance or an audience, is wholehearted living in Brown’s terms. Her work speaks to the emotional terrain that the more theoretically rigorous frameworks in this bibliography explain structurally.
Brown’s limitation is exactly this: she tends to locate structural harms in the individual and prescribe individual solutions. The thesis must hold Brown’s emotional vocabulary alongside the structural analysis of Ahmed (2012), Menakem (2017), and Lorey (2015) to avoid reproducing the pattern of blaming individuals for conditions produced by systems. I hold her lightly here, as accessible emotional grounding rather than a theoretical framework.
Cacioppo, J. T., & Patrick, W. (2008). Loneliness: Human nature and the need for social connection. W. W. Norton.
I spent seventeen years working at an institution where I was never quite a full member. I was present at the margins of a community I was structurally prevented from joining. I taught the same students as my tenured colleagues, contributed to the same curriculum, and attended the same hallway conversations. And I felt, year after year, a particular kind of loneliness that had nothing to do with being alone and everything to do with perceived disconnection from the belonging I was adjacent to but excluded from. John Cacioppo’s research helped me understand what was happening in my body when I felt this.
Cacioppo and Patrick synthesize decades of neuroscientific research to show that loneliness is a biological signal, analogous to pain or hunger, that alerts a person to threats to their social bonds. Chronic loneliness, they argue, triggers a self-protective hypervigilance to social threat that paradoxically reinforces isolation. The lonely person becomes increasingly vigilant for signs of rejection, which makes a genuine connection harder to sustain. This is precisely what I recognize in the institutional version of loneliness I experienced: the sessional instructor who self-censors in meetings, who monitors every interaction for signals of job insecurity, who cannot afford the vulnerability that genuine professional friendship requires.
Their research also establishes something crucial for the concept of alonetude: intentional, chosen, meaningful solitude is experienced neurologically and physiologically differently from enforced isolation. The body’s response to chosen aloneness is restorative rather than threatening. This is the empirical foundation beneath the distinction I am drawing between the loneliness produced by precarity and the alonetude practised by the sea. Menakem (2017) explains the somatic mechanism; Cacioppo and Patrick establish the neurological baseline.
Their framework is individualistic and does not address the structural production of loneliness through institutional design. I supplement their work with Bourdieu (1991), Ahmed (2012), and Moustakas (1961) to hold the structural and phenomenological dimensions alongside the neurological ones.
Collins, P. H. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Patricia Hill Collins taught me that knowledge produced from the margins has a particular quality that knowledge produced from the centre cannot replicate. She calls it an outsider-within standpoint, a form of knowing that belongs to people who have been inside an institution’s social world while remaining outside its power structures. That description fits the sessional instructor with uncomfortable precision: present at the table, absent from the vote.
Collins argues that the knowledge produced under conditions of structural exclusion is a site of theoretical insight, a resource that the field needs even when it has organized itself to minimize it. She calls this kind of knowledge subjugated knowledge, meaning knowledge that has been systematically dismissed, devalued, or rendered invisible by those who control what counts as legitimate inquiry. Fricker (2007) develops the philosophical dimensions of this same phenomenon with her concept of epistemic injustice. The two frameworks together help me understand that writing this thesis is an act of restoring to circulation knowledge that institutional structures were designed to suppress.
Collins also introduces the concept of controlling images, which are the stereotypes that justify domination by making inequality appear natural. In the academy, the controlling image of the sessional instructor as freely choosing flexibility, as a professional nomad who prefers contingency, functions in exactly this way. It naturalizes a structural arrangement that produces precarity by attributing the arrangement to personal preference. Naming this is part of what the thesis does.
I hold Collins’s framework with the awareness that Black Feminist Thought is specifically grounded in the experiences and epistemologies of Black women, and that extending her framework to my own position as a settler white woman requires explicit acknowledgement of the limits of analogy. Her framework is not mine to claim, but it offers conceptual resources I can use carefully and with attribution. I am in her intellectual debt. Smith (2021), hooks (1984), and Ahmed (2012) sit alongside her in my thinking.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent his career studying what he called flow, the state of complete absorption in a challenging activity where self-consciousness recedes, time distorts, and the sense of effortful striving dissolves into something that feels effortless. He found this state in artists, surgeons, chess players, rock climbers, and factory workers who had found the precise edge between a task that challenged and a task that overwhelmed.
I bring flow into this bibliography because understanding what alonetude restores requires understanding what precarity destroys. Flow requires a particular balance of challenge and skill, and it requires an absence of constant self-monitoring. The sessional instructor under perpetual performance review, perpetually visible and assessable, perpetually measuring her own words for potential institutional damage, inhabits a condition of chronic anti-flow. The achievement imperative Han (2015) describes, and the emotional labour Hochschild (1983) theorizes, both operate by collapsing the internal space in which flow becomes possible.
The daily practices of the retreat, photographing tidal movement, painting stones, and writing before the sun rose over the Sierra, each created conditions for flow as Csikszentmihalyi understands it. There was a challenge. There was the absence of judgment. There was time, unstructured and wholly my own. I did not know, while I was doing it, that I was restoring something that had been taken. I know it now.
Csikszentmihalyi’s framework is individualistic, and his research subjects were predominantly high-achieving professionals with discretionary time, a form of privilege the precarious academic worker is structurally denied. I hold his work as supplementary vocabulary alongside the structural analyses of Lorey (2015) and Han (2015), which explain why access to flow is unevenly distributed in the first place.
Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety belongs in this bibliography because it names the institutional condition that sessional faculty are structurally denied, and because naming what is absent is part of understanding what the body learns to compensate for over years of working without it. Psychological safety is the shared belief among group members that the environment is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. It means people believe they will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up, asking questions, or naming problems.
The sessional instructor’s relationship to institutional safety is almost the precise inverse of this. Contract renewal is contingent on being regarded favourably by those with the power to approve it. Speaking up about workload, curriculum concerns, or inequitable treatment carries genuine professional risk. The rational response is exactly what Edmondson calls psychological unsafety: self-censorship, caution, monitoring, the performance of agreement and gratitude even when neither is genuinely felt. I was very good at this performance for a very long time. The retreat to Loreto was, among other things, the first sustained period in years during which I was accountable to no institutional authority but my own sense of what was true.
Edmondson’s research is management science rather than critical theory, and it operates within existing institutional structures rather than questioning why those structures produce unsafe conditions in the first place. I supplement her framework with critical analyses of Bourdieu (1991), Ahmed (2012), and Maslach et al. (2001) to hold structural causes alongside experiential consequences. Edmondson names what it feels like from inside the system; the others explain why the system is built this way.
Faragher, J. M. (2005). A great and noble scheme: The tragic story of the expulsion of the French Acadians from their American homeland. W. W. Norton.
My family carries French Acadian ancestry. That ancestry is a source of quiet pride and a source of questions I have only recently begun to take seriously. John Mack Faragher’s history of the Grand Dérangement, the British expulsion of the French Acadian population from Nova Scotia and the Maritime provinces between 1755 and 1763, is one of the sources I turned to when I began trying to understand what my body might carry from that history.
Faragher argues that the expulsion constitutes ethnic cleansing. He documents with archival precision the deliberate destruction of a distinct people, their culture, their language, and their relationships to the land they had built lives on for generations. Over ten thousand Acadians were forcibly removed and scattered across the Atlantic world. Most never returned. The culture survived, but in transformed and fragmented form.
I bring this history into the bibliography because Menakem (2017) argues that trauma is transmitted intergenerationally through the body, that the nervous system patterns of one generation are passed to the next through the mechanisms of epigenetics and embodied relational learning. If that is true, then what my Acadian ancestors experienced in 1755 may be present in some form in the body I carried to Loreto. This is a question I hold with humility rather than certainty.
It is also a question that requires me to sit with something difficult. The Grand Dérangement occurred on Mi’kmaw territory. Acadian settlers arrived in Mi’kma’ki and built their lives on land that belonged to the Mi’kmaw nation. My Acadian ancestors were themselves both victims of colonial violence and participants in the colonial occupation of Indigenous land. Paul (2006) tells the Mi’kmaw side of this history, and I include his work here as an essential counterweight to Faragher’s settler-centred narrative. My Future Research Directions section notes my obligation to pursue this inquiry in collaboration with Mi’kmaw scholars and communities rather than as a solo settler project.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1975)
Michel Foucault wrote about surveillance and how being watched changes the behaviour of the watched. His central metaphor is the panopticon, a prison design by Jeremy Bentham in which a central tower allows guards to observe every cell without being seen themselves. The crucial insight is that the prisoners begin to regulate their own behaviour as though they were always being watched, even when no guard is present. The surveillance internalizes itself. Foucault argues this logic extends far beyond prisons, into schools, hospitals, factories, and anywhere that hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement, and examination are the tools of power.
I read Foucault as a description of what seventeen years of sessional employment did to my internal landscape. I became very skilled at monitoring my own behaviour for potential harm to the institution. I evaluated my words before speaking them in meetings. I faked enthusiasm on days when I was too exhausted to feel it. I submitted to student evaluation instruments that reduced the complex relational work of teaching to a numerical score, and I used those scores to evaluate myself in the language of the institution rather than in my own. The panopticon was never a building. It was a habit of self-scrutiny I had internalized so thoroughly that I barely noticed it.
The retreat to Loreto was, in Foucault’s terms, an escape from the field of visibility. For thirty days, I was accountable to no institutional gaze, no performance review, no numerical instrument. Alonetude became possible when the panopticon was removed. I did not know how much energy I had been spending on self-regulation until I stopped.
Foucault’s framework is most powerful as a diagnostic tool and less useful for theorizing healing or resistance. His analysis of discourse and power tends toward a determinism that can make resistance feel impossible. The creative, agentive dimensions of alonetude require the additions of hooks (1984), Lorde (1988), Hersey (2022), and Menakem (2017). Bourdieu (1991) and Ahmed (2012) engage closely with Foucault in this bibliography, each illuminating a different dimension of institutional power and its consequences.
Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977 (C. Gordon, Ed.; C. Gordon, L. Marshall, J. Mepham, & K. Soper, Trans.). Pantheon Books.
Where Foucault’s Discipline and Punish gave me the panopticon as a metaphor for institutional self-surveillance, this collection of interviews gave me something equally important: a framework for understanding how knowledge and power are mutually constitutive. Foucault argues that there is no knowledge production outside of power relations, that what counts as truth in any given field is always the result of power’s operation. The institution I worked in produced knowledge about what good teaching looked like, what a productive scholar contributed, what a valuable colleague did. Those definitions were never neutral. They systematically advantaged certain kinds of workers and disadvantaged others, and they had the character of truth precisely because the institution that produced them also held power over the people they defined.
His concept of subjugated knowledges is directly relevant to this project. Subjugated knowledges are the local, particular, experiential forms of knowing that have been buried or disqualified by the hierarchical ordering of legitimate knowledge. The sessional instructor’s embodied knowledge of what precarity does to a person over time is a subjugated knowledge in exactly this sense: present, real, rigorously held, and rendered illegitimate by the epistemic authority of the institution that produced the conditions being described. This project is an attempt to restore that knowledge to circulation. Fricker (2007) gives this restoration a philosophical name; Foucault explains the structural dynamics of why it required a fight to achieve it.
Foucault’s interviews are dense and his insights resist easy application. Ahmed (2012), Collins (2000), and Smith (2021) each put Foucauldian analysis in conversation with the lived experience of specific bodies in specific institutional positions. Haraway (1988) provides the feminist epistemological response to the question Foucault opens about the relationship between position, power, and what it is possible to know.
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). Herder and Herder. (Original work published 1968)
Paulo Freire believed that education could be transformative or oppressive, and that the difference lay in whether it treated learners as subjects capable of naming and changing their world or as objects to be filled with the knowledge decided upon by others. He called the oppressive model a banking system, in which teachers deposit pre-formed knowledge into passive students, reproducing the dominant culture and preparing the oppressed to accept their own subordination. I have spent 17 years trying to teach otherwise, in a system that was, in many ways, the banking model he described.
Freire matters to this bibliography for two reasons. The first is that his analysis of how the oppressed internalize the oppressor’s consciousness maps directly onto what I have lived. The sessional instructor who accepts the meritocratic narrative of institutional exclusion, who blames her own inadequacy for conditions produced by structural design, has internalized the oppressor’s logic. The retreat was, among other things, a practice of conscientization, which is Freire’s word for the process of developing critical consciousness about one’s own situation. I had to stop and look clearly at what had happened before I could begin to heal from it.
The second reason is that Freire insists the capacity for language and naming belongs to everyone, not only to those with institutional authority. This is a direct counter-narrative to Bourdieu’s (1991) notion of legitimate language, and it aligns with what Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) argue about Scholarly Personal Narrative: that the researcher’s own voice and life constitute legitimate scholarly data. My thesis claims the right to name my own experience in my own terms. Alonetude itself is an act of naming.
Freire has been critiqued, correctly, for his masculine framing of liberation, his occasional romanticization of the oppressed, and his insufficient attention to how race, gender, and colonial history compound and differentiate class-based domination. Collins (2000), hooks (1984), and Smith (2021) supply what his framework leaves unaddressed. I read him alongside them rather than in isolation.
Freyd, J. J. (2008). Betrayal trauma. In G. Reyes, J. D. Elhai, & J. D. Ford (Eds.), The encyclopedia of psychological trauma (pp. 76–77). John Wiley & Sons.
Jennifer Freyd’s betrayal trauma theory landed in my reading with a force that surprised me. She proposes that trauma caused by people or institutions on whom the victim depends produces a particular psychological response: the need to maintain the relationship overrides the ability to acknowledge the harm. She calls this betrayal blindness, the motivated unawareness that allows the dependent relationship to continue. Where fear-based trauma produces hypervigilance, alertness, and the impulse to flee, betrayal trauma produces a kind of studied not-seeing. You stay. You perform loyalty. You tell yourself the story that makes staying possible.
This is the story of seventeen years of sessional labour. The institution that presented itself as a community of scholars, a place where knowledge and care for students mattered, while maintaining the conditions of economic insecurity and institutional voicelessness, was enacting institutional betrayal in Freyd’s precise sense. And I maintained the relationship. I stayed because I was dependent on the income, on the professional identity, on the intellectual community, on the students I loved teaching. The staying required the not-seeing, and the not-seeing accumulated in my body as exactly the unmetabolized pain that Menakem (2017) describes.
The retreat to Loreto was a move toward acknowledgement. Removing myself from the dependent relationship, however temporarily, created enough distance to see clearly what I had been looking away from. This is, in Freyd’s terms, the beginning of healing: replacing motivated unawareness with honest recognition, however painful that recognition is.
Freud’s framework is clinical and psychological rather than structural-sociological. The structural conditions that create institutional dependence in the first place require analysis by Bourdieu (1991), Lorey (2015), and Slaughter and Rhoades (2004). Freyd explains the psychological mechanism of harm; they explain the political economy that makes the conditions of harm possible and normal.
Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford University Press.
Note on citation: this bibliography originally listed the title incorrectly. The correct title is Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing.
Miranda Fricker gave me the most precise conceptual tool available for understanding the specific form of harm that sessional academic labour inflicts. She identifies two forms of injustice that operate through knowledge. The first is testimonial injustice, which happens when a speaker receives less credibility than she deserves because of the hearer’s prejudice. The listener devalues the testimony because of the speaker’s social identity, her gender, her class, her race, and her institutional status. The second is hermeneutical injustice, which happens when a person cannot make sense of her own significant experience because the collective interpretive resources do not yet contain the concept she needs.
Both forms have shaped my professional life. Every time I named institutional harm in a meeting and was told I was misreading the situation, every time I described the conditions of sessional labour and was reassured that the institution was committed to equity, I was experiencing testimonial injustice. My testimony was undervalued, not because I was wrong, but because my institutional position as a sessional instructor meant my credibility was structurally diminished before I opened my mouth.
And for much of those seventeen years, I lacked adequate language for what was happening to me. There were no precise terms for the accumulation of harm I was experiencing. That gap is itself a form of hermeneutical injustice. Alonetude, as an original concept I am proposing in this thesis, is a hermeneutical contribution. It names something that previously lacked a name, and naming it restores to others who live this experience the epistemic resources they have been denied.
Fricker’s framework is primarily philosophical and does not address the structural conditions that produce testimonial injustice systemically. Smith (2021) and Collins (2000) provide the decolonial and Black-feminist supplements that her framework requires. Bourdieu (1991) names the structural origin of the credibility deficit Fricker describes as testimonial injustice. Together, they form the theoretical architecture for understanding the specific form of epistemic harm I am documenting.
Galtung, J. (1969). Violence, peace, and peace research. Journal of Peace Research, 6(3), 167–191. https://doi.org/10.1177/002234336900600301
Johan Galtung made a distinction that fundamentally changed peace research and that I find indispensable for naming precarious academic labour. He distinguished direct violence, which is physical harm caused by identifiable actors, from structural violence, which is harm produced by social structures without any identifiable perpetrator. Structural violence includes poverty, discrimination, and institutional exclusion. It produces preventable suffering without anyone being visibly responsible for it, and this invisibility is exactly what makes it so difficult to name and to remedy.
The precarious academic labour system is structural violence in Galtung’s sense. No single administrator decided to harm me. No individual is responsible for the system of short-term contracts, variable income, absence of benefits, and exclusion from governance that produced seventeen years of cumulative damage. The harm is structural, diffuse, normalized, and therefore almost impossible to complain about without sounding unreasonable. The institution can always point to the individual instances of collegiality and support, and those individual instances are real. But the structure persists regardless.
This thesis is situated within a Human Rights and Social Justice program, and Galtung’s peace research tradition is one of the theoretical foundations of that framing. The Key Concept of institutional violence in this bibliography draws directly on Galtung. Nixon (2011) extends his thinking into the temporal dimension with the concept of slow violence, which names the quality of harm that unfolds gradually and invisibly over time. The combination of Galtung’s structural analysis and Nixon’s temporal one gives me the framework I need.
Galtung’s framework is diagnostic rather than restorative. It names the harm with great precision but offers less for theorizing the creative, embodied, and contemplative dimensions of healing and resistance. Greenspan (2003), Menakem (2017), and Lorde (1988) are essential alongside him.
García Márquez, G. (2002). Vivir para contarla. Mondadori.
I include Gabriel García Márquez’s autobiography not as a theoretical source but as a model of what it looks like to treat one’s own life as the primary site of knowing. He opens with a declaration that struck me the first time I read it and has stayed with me since: life is what one remembers rather than merely what one lived and how one chooses to recount it. This is an epistemological claim as much as a literary one. It says that the act of telling is itself an act of making, that memory is creative rather than merely documentary, and that the writer who shapes her own story is producing knowledge rather than simply reporting it.
Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) argue this formally in the context of qualitative research methodology. García Márquez enacts it. His memoir is an act of Scholarly Personal Narrative in its most luminous form: a writer using his own life as primary data without apology, without the distancing mechanisms of academic convention, without the pretense that the narrator is standing outside the material she is studying.
I am doing this too, in this thesis. I am using my own life, my own body, my own thirty days by the sea as primary data. I am arguing that what I lived, observed, photographed, painted, and wrote constitutes legitimate scholarly inquiry. García Márquez demonstrates what that looks like when it is done with full commitment and craft. His memoir also demonstrates the power of place in generating memory and meaning, connecting to Tuan’s (1977) phenomenology of how places become repositories of interior life and to Bachelard’s (1969) poetics of intimate, inhabited space.
I hold this source lightly in the bibliography, as a literary touchstone rather than a theoretical framework. But I think intellectual honesty requires naming the authors who shaped how I think about what I am doing, even when they are novelists rather than social scientists.
Greenspan, M. (2003). Healing through the dark emotions: The wisdom of grief, fear, and despair. Shambhala Publications.
Miriam Greenspan is a psychotherapist and teacher who spent decades sitting with people in grief, fear, and despair, and her central argument is one I needed to hear: these emotions are teachers to be attended to rather than pathologies to be eliminated, attended. The Western tendency to medicate, avoid, or therapeutically manage the dark emotions, she argues, produces the very suffering it attempts to prevent. Moving through the difficulty honestly, attending to what it carries, following it to its natural resolution, is the pathway through rather than around.
She calls this emotional alchemy, her term for the transformation that becomes possible when dark emotions are met with awareness and honesty rather than resistance. I arrived in Loreto carrying more of these emotions than I fully knew: grief for unacknowledged losses, fear about an uncertain future, and the despair of having worked hard at something that had cost me more than it gave back. Greenspan taught me that these were the researchers themselves. They were beyond obstacles to the research. They were the researchers.
The thirty days in Loreto were not a happiness project. They were not a wellness retreat or a productivity programme. They were an honest encounter with what I had accumulated and what needed to move through me. Menakem’s (2017) clean pain concept sits alongside Greenspan’s emotional alchemy here: both insist that moving toward the hurt rather than away from it is the pathway to genuine healing. Both describe alonetude from their own disciplinary angles.
Greenspan draws on feminist psychology and Buddhist contemplative practice, and her work carries the depth and integration that comes from long clinical experience. Her framework is personal and relational rather than structural-political, and it requires supplementing it with Bourdieu (1991), Lorde (1988), and Menakem (2017) to account for the political dimensions of the emotional terrain she maps. What the institution produced structurally, I had to heal personally. Her work addresses the personal pathway; the others address the structural origin.
Guba, E. G. (Ed.). (1990). The paradigm dialogue. Sage Publications.
Egon Guba edited this volume at a moment when qualitative and interpretive researchers were pressing hard against the dominance of positivist assumptions in social science. Guba’s central argument is that every researcher works from a paradigm, a set of beliefs about what is real, what counts as knowledge, and how knowledge can be produced, and that pretending otherwise does damage to the integrity of the research. The paradigm dialogue the title names is the conversation between competing worldviews: positivism, post-positivism, critical theory, and constructivism. Naming one’s paradigm is an act of intellectual honesty that allows readers to evaluate the premises on which knowledge claims rest.
I include Guba because this project takes paradigm seriously as a methodological foundation. My critical transformative paradigm, which holds that reality is socially constructed, that knowledge is embodied and political, and that research should be oriented toward justice rather than neutrality, is a scholarly position with a rigorous literature behind it. Guba’s edited volume is where I locate the intellectual permission to state that position plainly. Haraway (1988) takes this further by insisting that situatedness is an epistemic virtue; Mertens (2008) extends it into the transformative paradigm I claim as my own.
Guba’s framework is primarily descriptive of paradigm positions rather than transformative in its political orientation. The critical and decolonial dimensions of what this project claims require supplements from Freire (1970), Collins (2000), Smith (2021), and Wilson (2008). Guba establishes the terrain on which paradigmatic choices are made; those scholars explain why the choices matter politically and ethically, and for whom.
Han, B.-C. (2015). The burnout society (E. Butler, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 2010)
Byung-Chul Han wrote a short, fierce philosophical essay about exhaustion, and I have never read a more precise description of the specific form of depletion that the academic achievement culture produces. He argues that contemporary society has shifted from a disciplinary society, in which people are controlled through prohibition and command, to an achievement society, in which people are controlled through the internalization of an imperative to optimize, produce, and perform. The subject of this society is what Han calls the achievement-subject, a person who freely exploits herself in the pursuit of success, who has internalized the demand for constant output so thoroughly that she can no longer distinguish between her own desires and the system’s requirements.
This is the burnout that I know from the inside. I was a genuinely excellent sessional instructor by any measure I could apply. I loved my students. I cared about the curriculum. I produced scholarly work without institutional support. I stayed current, developed new courses, and mentored students who needed more than the minimum. And I did all of this from a position of structural insecurity that required performing gratitude for the privilege of being exploited. Han names this self-exploitation with clarity: the achievement-subject performs the system’s coercive work on itself. The panopticon is no longer external. It runs on internal fuel.
Alonetude as a counter-practice is what Han calls the vita contemplativa, the deliberate refusal of the achievement imperative. The thirty days by the sea were an enactment of stopping, which Han argues is the only genuine resistance available to the achievement-subject. Hersey (2022) makes the same argument from a Black liberation theology perspective, and Lorde (1988) from a feminist perspective. Together they form a chorus that the thesis needs: rest is resistance, stopping is a political act, refusing to produce is a form of freedom.
Han’s philosophical abstraction has a real limitation: his gender-neutral achievement-subject obscures how the imperative to optimize falls differently on different bodies, and how race and class determine who has access to the vita contemplativa as a genuine option. Maslach et al. (2001) provide the empirical grounding his essay lacks; Hochschild (1983), Lorey (2015), and Menakem (2017) supply the intersectional and structural dimensions he leaves unexamined.
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066
Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledges is the epistemological foundation of this entire thesis. She argues against the fiction of the view from nowhere, the claim that rigorous knowledge is produced by an observer who stands outside the material she studies and achieves objectivity through that distance. This, Haraway argues, is an illusion that makes invisible the specific body, location, history, and stakes from which every claim is made. The alternative is the partial perspective: knowledge that acknowledges its own situatedness, that is made from a particular body in a particular place with commitments, and that is more rigorous rather than less rigorous for this acknowledgement.
This is the epistemological ground I am standing on. Every claim this thesis makes comes from a specific body: that of a sessional instructor, a settler woman of French Acadian and Austrian heritage with distant Mi’kmaq ancestry, a neurodivergent scholar, and a person healing in a specific landscape on specific land. This particularity is a strength rather than a limitation. The knowledge I produce from this position has qualities that knowledge produced from a position of institutional security cannot replicate.
Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) enact Haraway’s epistemology in their argument for Scholarly Personal Narrative as a rigorous methodology. Smith (2021) extends it in decolonial directions, insisting that the politics of knowledge production require not only acknowledging one’s standpoint but being accountable to those affected by the research. Together, Haraway, Richardson, St. Pierre, and Smith form the epistemological architecture that makes this thesis possible.
The partial perspective also names the ethical limit of what I am claiming. Alonetude, as theorized here, is grounded in one specific trajectory of harm and healing. Its generalisability is constrained by the specificity of its origin. Other people who live in the conditions I am describing may have very different experiences. I am not claiming universality. I am claiming the legitimacy of this knowing from this place.
Hersey, T. (2022). Rest is resistance: A manifesto. Little, Brown Spark.
Tricia Hersey is the founder of the Nap Ministry, and her book is a manifesto for radical rest grounded in Black liberation theology, womanist thought, and the unambiguous claim that the grind culture saturating contemporary life is a direct inheritance of chattel slavery. Her argument is bold and clear: the imperative to produce, optimize, and perform without ceasing is a system designed to extract maximum value from human bodies, and refusing it is an act of political resistance. Rest, in her framework, is reparations. It is a spiritual practice. It is the refusal of extraction.
I came to Hersey’s work because I needed someone to say, in terms I could feel as well as think, that what I was doing in Loreto was legitimate. I was not being lazy. I was not failing to contribute. I was refusing a system that had extracted my labour for seventeen years without adequate return. I was stopping. And stopping, Hersey insists with a force I needed, is the point. You cannot build a new relationship with your own life while still running on the old system’s fuel.
Her connection to Audre Lorde’s (1988) insistence that caring for oneself is an act of political warfare is explicit in her text and is one of the through-lines of this bibliography. Han (2015) makes a philosophical argument for the same counter-practice that Hersey grounds in liberation theology and embodied resistance. The convergence of these two very different voices around the same political claim strengthens both.
Hersey’s book is a popular manifesto, and its limited citation infrastructure and primarily inspirational mode mean it requires scholarly grounding to function in an academic bibliography. Han (2015), Lorey (2015), Hochschild (1983), and Menakem (2017) provide that grounding. I include Hersey alongside the more formally scholarly texts because the emotional and political force of her argument is itself evidence, and because Scholarly Personal Narrative methodology demands honesty about the full terrain of one’s intellectual and emotional sources.
Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence, from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.
Judith Herman wrote the foundational text on complex trauma, and the framework she built remains one of the most comprehensive accounts available of what happens to the human being who survives prolonged exposure to conditions of threat, helplessness, and inescapable harm. Her central insight is that the trauma produced by sustained, repeated violation, what she calls complex trauma, is categorically different from the trauma produced by a single catastrophic event. Complex trauma accumulates. It reorganizes the nervous system, the sense of self, and the capacity for relationship in ways that a diagnostic snapshot cannot capture. Recovery from it requires safety, mourning, and reconnection, in that order, and each stage has its own requirements.
I bring Herman into this bibliography because the harm of seventeen years of precarious academic labour is complex trauma in her precise sense. It was prolonged, it was inescapable within the conditions of my employment, and it reorganized my nervous system in ways I am still mapping. The jaw tension, the startle response, the breath that shallows in institutional settings: these are the somatic signatures Herman describes in survivors whose exposure to harm has been chronic rather than acute. Van der Kolk (2014) builds directly on Herman’s clinical foundation; Levine (2010) and Menakem (2017) offer somatic pathways through the recovery process she describes.
Herman’s framework is clinical and interpersonal, developed primarily from work with survivors of domestic violence and political terror. Extending it to the institutional context of precarious academic labour requires the structural supplements of Galtung (1969), Nixon (2011), and Lorey (2015), which explain why the conditions that produce this harm are systemic rather than aberrant. Herman names what happens in the body; those frameworks explain why it was allowed to happen, and to whom, and in whose interests the conditions persisted.
Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.
Arlie Hochschild studied flight attendants and bill collectors and produced one of the most important concepts in the sociology of work: emotional labour. Emotional labour is the management of feelings to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display, the work of inducing or suppressing feelings to sustain the outward countenance the job requires. Hochschild argues that when this management of feeling is commodified, when it becomes part of what is sold rather than something freely given, it extracts something fundamental from the worker’s relationship to her own inner life.
I recognize this extraction with extraordinary intimacy. Sessional teaching requires perpetual emotional performance: enthusiasm for material on days when exhaustion is the real feeling, gratitude to the institution for the privilege of the contract, warmth toward students who sometimes arrive at the edges of what compassion can sustain, collegiality toward colleagues in a system that structurally positions us as competitors for scarce positions. Year after year, this performance accumulated into what Hochschild calls estrangement from one’s own feeling life. I became an expert at surface acting, managing my outward expression while feeling something quite different underneath. Eventually, I could barely locate something underneath at all.
Alonetude is, in part, the recovery of that estranged feeling of life. The thirty days by the sea were thirty days of performing for no one. There was no audience. There was nothing to manage. The return of my own unmediated emotional responses, the grief and the fear and the occasional fierce joy, felt at first like a problem. Eventually, I understood it as the research.
Hochschild’s framework is most powerful in service work contexts and requires adaptation for academic labour, where the emotional demands are distributed across relationships and obligations different from those of commercial service. Han (2015), Maslach et al. (2001), and Ahmed (2012) provide the extensions her framework needs for the specific context of higher education precarity.
hooks, b. (1984). Feminist theory: From margin to center. South End Press.
bell hooks wrote that the margin is a site of radical possibility, and I have returned to this claim many times over the past 17 years of working at the margins of an institution. She argued that a feminist movement preoccupied with the experiences of white, middle-class, educated women at the centre was failing many women and failing its own promise. She called for a feminism that begins from the margins, from the experiences of those most harmed by interlocking systems of domination, because those at the margins have a clarity about the whole structure that those at the centre cannot access.
I am a settler woman. hooks’s framework was built from the experience and epistemology of Black women, and I cannot simply take it as my own. What I can do, and what I try to do in this thesis, is receive the conceptual gift she offers while being honest about the differences in our positions. The outsider-within standpoint, which Collins (2000) develops in detail and which hooks anticipates, describes something real about the sessional instructor’s position: present within the institution’s social world, absent from its power structures, seeing the architecture of exclusion from close range precisely because one is never fully inside the building.
The margin, in hooks’s account, generates a particular kind of knowledge that the centre needs but often refuses to credit. This is Fricker’s (2007) testimonial injustice operating at the structural level. The knowledge produced from seventeen years of sessional labour, the knowledge this thesis is attempting to contribute, is marginal knowledge. It sees what tenure-track knowledge cannot see, because it is positioned differently. Alonetude is a concept generated from the margin, and it names something that the centre’s vocabulary cannot fully contain.
Hooks engages with Collins (2000), Lorde (1988), Fricker (2007), Ahmed (2012), and Smith (2021) throughout this bibliography.
Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.
Rachel and Stephen Kaplan developed what they called Attention Restoration Theory, and it is the primary scientific framework I use to explain why spending thirty days by the Sea of Cortez healed something in me that seventeen years of institutional life had damaged. Their theory begins with a simple observation: directed attention, the focused, effortful cognitive effort required for most work and most problem-solving, depletes with use and requires restoration. It is a finite resource. When it runs out, people become irritable, cognitively impaired, unable to concentrate, and emotionally reactive.
Natural environments are particularly effective at restoring directed attention, the Kaplans argue, because they engage what they call involuntary attention: effortless fascination with natural phenomena like moving water, changing light, birdsong, and cloud movement. Involuntary attention restores the system precisely because it requires no directed effort. The mind is engaged but not working. The Kaplans identify four qualities that make an environment restorative: being away from depleting demands; extent, meaning the sense of being in a coherent and whole world rich enough to occupy the mind; fascination, the content that holds attention effortlessly; and compatibility, the match between the environment and the person’s purposes.
The Sea of Cortez at Loreto exhibits all four properties with a completeness I could feel in my body from the first morning I walked to the water. Louv (2005) popularized this research for general audiences; the Kaplans provide its scientific foundation. Tuan (1977) gives me the phenomenological vocabulary for how the restoration is experienced from inside the body, how the landscape becomes place through sustained attention.
The Kaplans’ framework is environmental psychology and leaves unaddressed the political and structural dimensions of who has access to restorative natural environments and on whose territory those environments exist. Smith (2021), Nixon (2011), and Louv (2005) are necessary supplements for holding the political and colonial dimensions of the landscape alongside its restorative ones.
Karr, A., & Wood, M. (2011). The practice of contemplative photography: Seeing the world with fresh eyes. Shambhala Publications.
Andy Karr and Michael Wood offer a photographic practice grounded in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition, which gave me a methodological language for what I was trying to do with the camera in Loreto. Their central concept is the flash of perception: the moment of direct, pre-conceptual seeing before the mind names, categorizes, and interprets what it encounters. Contemplative photography trains the practitioner to dwell in this moment rather than rush past it, to make images that express direct perception rather than impose a predetermined aesthetic.
This practice is the opposite of what Sontag (1977) describes as the acquisitive gaze. Where Sontag’s camera is predatory, moving quickly to capture and possess, contemplative photography begins from receptivity. The photographer waits for the image rather than hunting for it. She attends to what is present rather than constructing what she wants to see. This is very close to what I found myself doing naturally during the thirty days, arriving at the shoreline before my mind had fully populated itself with its habitual concerns, making images from a quality of stillness I had almost forgotten was available to me.
The flash of perception is also a description of what alonetude makes possible more broadly. When the performance demands of institutional life are removed, when there is no audience, no evaluation, no management of impression, direct perception becomes accessible again. Alonetude restores the flash. The contemplative photography practice both documents and enacts this restoration.
Karr and Wood’s work is a practitioner text rather than an academic one, grounded in Buddhist tradition rather than social science methodology. For the scholarly architecture of my visual research practice, I rely on Sontag (1977), Azoulay (2008), Oliver (2001), and Wang and Burris (1997), among others. But the practice itself, the act of picking up the camera and walking to the water before my mind was ready, was shaped more by Karr and Wood than by any of the others.
Leavy, P. (2015). Method meets art: Arts-based research practice (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
Patricia Leavy’s Method Meets Art is the text I return to when I need to anchor the arts-based dimensions of my research within a recognized scholarly methodology. She argues that arts-based research approaches are uniquely suited to exploring phenomena that resist quantification, that aesthetic form is inseparable from content, and that knowledge produced through creative practice is as legitimate and rigorous as knowledge produced through other qualitative methods. The painted stones, the photographs, and the visual art are data in my research, and Leavy’s framework provides the methodological justification for treating them as such.
Where Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) establish writing itself as a method of inquiry, Leavy extends the argument across the full range of creative practices. Her concept of research as art rather than art as research data is the crucial epistemological move: the creative practice is not illustrating findings I have already reached through other means. It is producing knowledge through aesthetic engagement that written narrative alone cannot generate. Some things I learned in Loreto I learned first through the camera and only later found words for.
Leavy’s second text in this bibliography, Research Design (2017), provides the methodological infrastructure for situating arts-based research within the broader landscape of qualitative inquiry and for understanding how the different methods I am combining relate to one another. Wang and Burris (1997), Pink (2013), and Nash (2004) sit alongside Leavy as the methodological architecture for this research.
Arts-based research remains a contested terrain in many institutional contexts, and Leavy’s work is important partly because it articulates the epistemological arguments that those institutional contexts will require. Having this infrastructure matters for a thesis that makes non-conventional methodological choices.
Leavy, P. (2017). Research design: Quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods, arts-based, and community-based participatory research approaches. Guilford Press.
Leavy’s Research Design text is a reference work that belongs in this bibliography primarily as methodological grounding. It situates arts-based research within the full landscape of social science inquiry, demonstrating that creative practice is a legitimate and well-theorized approach rather than a marginal or decorative addition to more serious methods. For a thesis that combines Scholarly Personal Narrative, photography, visual art, and contemplative practice within a Human Rights and Social Justice program, having this methodological infrastructure clearly articulated matters.
The community-based participatory research discussion in this text is also relevant to the thesis’s future research directions, which envision alonetude as both a pedagogical and collective practice and an individual one. Wang and Burris’s (1997) Photovoice methodology is one form of community-based participatory research; other forms could be developed that bring alonetude into collective rather than solo practice. Leavy (2017) provides the methodological vocabulary for those future directions.
This text is a companion to Leavy (2015) and is cited alongside it in the bibliography. Neither replaces the other; together they provide both the philosophical grounding and the practical methodological infrastructure for the research approach this thesis enacts.
Leavy, P. (2022). Research design: Quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods, arts-based, and community-based participatory research approaches (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
This second edition of Leavy’s research design text updates and expands the first edition (2017) in ways that are directly relevant to this project. The 2022 edition incorporates more recent developments in arts-based research, community-based participatory approaches, and the ethical dimensions of qualitative inquiry, and situates these approaches within a clearer account of the epistemological premises that distinguish them from quantitative traditions. For a project that combines Scholarly Personal Narrative, photography, visual art, and somatic inquiry within a Human Rights and Social Justice framework, having this updated methodological scaffolding matters.
The 2022 edition also develops Leavy’s treatment of researcher positionality in ways that align with the epistemological commitments of this thesis. She argues that the researcher’s identity, experience, and social location are constitutive of the research rather than sources of bias to be managed. This is the methodological enactment of what Haraway (1988) establishes philosophically: that situated knowledge is more rigorous than the fiction of a view from nowhere. My positionality as a sessional instructor, a settler woman, and a person healing from institutional harm is data. Leavy’s updated framework gives that claim methodological standing.
This entry is paired with Leavy (2015), which establishes the philosophical and methodological foundations of arts-based research practice. The two texts function together: (2015) provides the epistemological argument for why creative practice generates legitimate knowledge; (2022) provides the research design infrastructure for situating that practice within a broader scholarly methodology. Nash (2004), Wilson (2008), and Pink (2013) complete the methodological architecture this project relies on.
Levine, P. (2010). In an unspoken voice: How the body releases trauma and restores goodness. North Atlantic Books.
Peter Levine watched animals in the wild for years, studying how they return to ordinary functioning after encounters with predators and threats. He observed that animals routinely and spontaneously discharge traumatic activation through the body: trembling, shaking, completing interrupted movements, and returning to rest. He also observed that human beings, equipped with self-consciousness and social inhibition, interrupt this natural process. We stop the trembling. We compose ourselves. We present a regulated exterior while the incomplete response is frozen inside the nervous system. This interruption, Levine argues, is why trauma persists.
His framework is called Somatic Experiencing, and it proposes that healing from trauma requires the gradual, careful completion of the body’s interrupted responses rather than the cognitive processing of traumatic memory. The body must complete the movement it was prevented from completing. Healing, in this account, is a physiological process as much as a psychological one.
In Loreto, I found myself doing things that I now understand through Levine’s framework. Swimming in cold water and feeling my body respond with a primitive, involuntary awakening. Walking in desert heat until the movement itself became meditative. Sitting with my feet in the tide and feeling something unknot in my lower back that had been held tight for years. I did not plan these practices as somatic healing work. I followed what my body wanted to do, and what my body wanted was to move, to be in the elements, to complete something.
Levine’s work is closely related to Menakem (2017) and van der Kolk (2014); all three are trained in somatic approaches and share the fundamental premise that trauma is held in the body and requires bodily release. Levine’s framework is clinical and individual, whereas Menakem’s is explicitly racialized and collective. Both are necessary for this research.
Louv, R. (2005). Last child in the woods: Saving our children from nature-deficit disorder. Algonquin Books.
Richard Louv popularized the empirical research on what the absence of time in natural environments does to human beings, and the term he coined, nature-deficit disorder, named something I had been experiencing without language for it long before I arrived in Loreto. His argument is accessible rather than technical: human beings evolved in relationship with the natural world, and the contemporary removal of that relationship, particularly for children and urban workers, produces measurable consequences for attention, emotional regulation, and psychological wellbeing. He draws on Kaplan and Kaplan’s (1989) attention restoration theory and Ulrich’s (1983) work on restorative environments to argue that contact with nature is a developmental and psychological necessity.
I include Louv because he makes accessible what the research underlying this project establishes technically. The thirty days by the Sea of Cortez were a deliberate attempt to restore something that seventeen years of institutional life inside buildings had depleted. Louv names that depletion with clarity, and his work reaches readers who would find Kaplan and Kaplan’s academic register more difficult to access. Both are present in this bibliography because the evidence and the argument each need their version of the case made.
Louv’s framework is primarily developmental and psychological. Smith (2021), Nixon (2011), and the land acknowledgements throughout this project hold the political and colonial dimensions explicitly. The healing the natural world offered me in Loreto was real; the land on which it took place belonged to the Monqui and Cochimí peoples long before it became available to settler visitors seeking restoration, and those two facts must be held together.
Long, C. R., & Averill, J. R. (2003). Solitude: An exploration of benefits of being alone. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 33(1), 21–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5914.00204
Christopher Long and James Averill wrote the first systematic psychological framework for positive solitude, and their work is the closest existing scholarship to what this thesis is proposing, which is precisely why alonetude is the next theoretical step rather than a repetition of what they have already accomplished. They define solitude as a state of reduced social inhibition and increased freedom to select one’s own mental and physical activities, and they identify four primary benefits: freedom from the performance of social identity, creativity in the space of uninhibited thought, intimacy with the self through deep self-awareness, and the spiritual dimension of contemplative aloneness.
All four of these benefits describe what the thirty days in Loreto produced, and Long and Averill’s research establishes that these are not idiosyncratic responses but documented dimensions of the experience of intentional solitude that generalize across individuals. Their framework provides the empirical grounding that alonetude builds upon.
Where their work ends and alonetude begins is at the question of structural origin. Long and Averill describe the psychology of positive solitude without asking why some people have access to it, and others do not, without asking what conditions produce involuntary isolation that must be transformed into chosen solitude, without attending to the political and somatic dimensions of that transformation. Alonetude holds all of this alongside the psychological benefits they document.
Long and Averill are in close dialogue with Moustakas (1961), whose phenomenological work they build upon, and with Tillich (1963), whose theological distinction between the pain of loneliness and the glory of solitude they translate into psychological research terms. Winnicott (1958) and Storr (1988) complete the lineage from which alonetude emerges.
Lorde, A. (1988). A burst of light: Essays. Firebrand Books.
Audre Lorde wrote some of these essays while fighting liver cancer, and the force of her writing comes partly from that proximity to death and partly from a lifetime of refusing to be anything other than wholly herself in a world that persistently asked her to be less. The essay collection includes her most cited formulation: caring for myself is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare. I have returned to this sentence more times than I can count.
For years, I read it as permission. Permission to rest. Permission to take my own wellbeing seriously in a context that systematically treated it as irrelevant to my professional value. But, on closer reading, I understand that she is not only offering permission. She is making a structural argument: that systems designed to extract maximum labour from certain bodies depend on those bodies accepting their own expendability, and that refusing this acceptance, choosing one’s own survival and flourishing over the system’s demand for sacrifice, is a political act.
The thirty days in Loreto were a political act in Lorde’s sense. They were the refusal of a system that had treated my body and my inner life as inputs to an institutional production process. They were the assertion that my survival matters. Hersey (2022) develops this argument explicitly and at length. Lorde said it first, in fewer words and with more force.
Lorde engages with hooks (1984), Collins (2000), Menakem (2017), Han (2015), and Hersey (2022) throughout this bibliography. Her voice anchors the political and personal dimensions of alonetude as resistance in a way that no other single source in this bibliography does.
Lorey, I. (2015). State of insecurity: Government of the precarious (A. Derieg, Trans.). Verso.
Isabell Lorey applies a Foucauldian analysis of governmentality to precarity, and her central argument is both clarifying and deeply unsettling. She proposes that precarity in the contemporary economy has become a technology of governance rather than simply an economic condition. Governments and institutions actively produce and manage insecurity in ways that make workers flexible, self-managing, and compliant. Precarity is not a failure of the system. It is a feature of the system, designed to produce subjects who regulate their own insecurity through adaptability and self-optimization.
This framework helps me understand something that had puzzled me for years: why the sessional labour system persists despite widespread awareness of the harm it causes. The answer, in Lorey’s terms, is that it produces exactly what the system needs: a highly skilled, easily dismissed, self-managing workforce that internalizes its own insecurity as a personal responsibility rather than a structural condition. The sessional instructor who accepts flexibility as the price of doing work she loves, who manages her own precarity through perpetual professional development and institutional availability, is Lorey’s precariat managing itself on the state’s behalf.
Alonetude, in Lorey’s framework, is a refusal of this self-management. It is the decision to stop optimizing for institutional approval and to dwell instead in the existential uncertainty that Lorey names as the shared human condition, the precariousness that belongs to all living beings whose survival depends on relationships and is always incomplete. The difference between this precariousness and the managed precarity the system produces is the difference between a human condition to be navigated and a governmental technology to be resisted.
Lorey is in close dialogue with Standing (2011), whose analysis of the precariat as a social class complements her governmental analysis, as well as with Han (2015), Berlant (2011), Slaughter and Rhoades (2004), and Bourdieu (1991). Together, they form the political economy of precarity that contextualizes everything else in this bibliography.
Maslach, C., Schaufeli, W. B., & Leiter, M. P. (2001). Job burnout. Annual Review of Psychology, 52(1), 397–422. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.52.1.397
Christina Maslach and her colleagues produced the most empirically rigorous account of burnout available, and their framework maps the conditions of sessional academic labour with a precision that, on reading, feels like a portrait of someone I know intimately, because it is a portrait of me. Burnout in their account is a three-dimensional syndrome: exhaustion, which is the depletion of emotional and physical resources; cynicism, the distancing from one’s work as a means of managing that depletion; and inefficacy, the sense that one’s efforts are no longer meaningful or effective.
They also identify six dimensions of person-work mismatch that produce burnout: overload, lack of control, insufficient reward, breakdown of community, absence of fairness, and values conflict. All six describe the sessional instructor’s working conditions with accuracy that I find simultaneously validating and painful to read. The overload of full teaching without the resources of a full-time position. The absence of control over curriculum, governance, or one’s own employment continuity. The rewards, financial and symbolic, were insufficient for the contribution being made. The breakdown of community through structural exclusion from full faculty belonging. The systematic unfairness of unequal conditions for equal work. And the values conflict between commitment to educational quality and the institution’s market-driven priorities.
Maslach and colleagues position burnout as a person-environment mismatch rather than a personal weakness, and this reframing matters enormously. What happened to me was a structural condition, not a personal failure. Han (2015) provides the philosophical architecture for understanding why the achievement society produces these conditions systematically; Lorey (2015) explains the governmental logic that makes them normal rather than exceptional.
Their framework is management science and operates within existing institutional structures. The structural critique these conditions demand requires the additions of Bourdieu (1991), Ahmed (2012), and Slaughter and Rhoades (2004). Maslach names what happened to me; the others explain why it happened.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception (C. Smith, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1945)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that the body is the very condition of consciousness itself, beyond mere instrumentality, the very condition of experience, and this argument is foundational to everything this thesis claims about somatic knowledge. He proposed that perception is always already embodied: we know the world not through abstract cognition but through the body’s practical engagement with it. The body schema, his term for the pre-reflective, habitual way the body inhabits and navigates space, is the primary site of knowing. We understand the world first through how our bodies encounter it, and language comes later, and incompletely.
This matters enormously for a thesis that claims the body as a legitimate research instrument. If Merleau-Ponty is right, then what I learned by swimming in the Sea of Cortez, by walking in desert heat until my legs understood the ground, by sitting with painted stones until my hands knew something my mind did not yet have words for, is genuine knowledge produced through a genuine method. The body knows even when it cannot articulate what it knows. Somatic knowledge, as I define it in the Key Concepts section, draws directly on Merleau-Ponty alongside Levine (2010) and van der Kolk (2014).
Merleau-Ponty also grounds Pink’s (2013) sensory ethnography and Bachelard’s (1969) phenomenology of intimate space, both of which are important methodological resources for this research. He is the philosophical foundation beneath the empirical and clinical frameworks that Levine, van der Kolk, and Menakem (2017) build from somatic practice.
His phenomenology is also relevant to the contemplative photography practice I engaged in during the retreat. Karr and Wood (2011) describe contemplative photography as a practice of direct, pre-conceptual perception; Merleau-Ponty explains why such perception constitutes a legitimate form of knowing rather than merely a subjective impression.
Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press.
Rob Nixon coined the concept of slow violence, and it gave me a temporal vocabulary for the specific quality of the harm I had been experiencing and struggling to articulate. Slow violence is his term for violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, dispersed across time and space, leaving no single dramatic moment and no obvious perpetrator. It unfolds over years, over decades, leaving no single dramatic moment, no obvious perpetrator, no event that the law or public conscience can easily attach to. Nixon’s primary concern is environmental harm, the slow contamination of communities, and the gradual destruction of ecosystems that sustain life. But the concept extends.
The harm of seventeen years of sessional labour is slow violence. It accumulates gradually, invisibly, in the body and the psyche across years of deferred recognition, economic insecurity, and institutional voicelessness. There is no catastrophe to point to. There is a long, slow erosion. Galtung (1969) names this structural violence, the harm produced by systems without identifiable perpetrators. Nixon adds the temporal dimension: the harm unfolds across time in ways that resist representation and accountability precisely because it lacks spectacle.
Writing this thesis, and writing it in the first person, is an attempt to represent what slow violence does to a specific body over a specific span of time. The Scholarly Personal Narrative methodology, as defended by Richardson and St. Pierre (2005), is one of the few research methods adequate to this kind of documentation. Nixon himself argues for the role of writer-activists in making slow violence visible through narrative. I am doing this. This thesis is that work.
Nixon’s environmental justice framework also intersects with the research’s decolonial dimensions. The slow violence he documents against poor communities in the global south through environmental degradation is deeply related to the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their land and resources. Smith (2021) holds me accountable to that connection.
Mertens, D. M. (2008). Transformative research and evaluation. Guilford Press.
Donna Mertens developed the transformative paradigm as a formal research framework, and her work gave me the scholarly infrastructure for the claim that research can and should be conducted in explicit solidarity with those who have been marginalized by unjust structures. The transformative paradigm centres the experiences of people who have been harmed by systems of power and orients the research process toward knowledge that serves liberation rather than domination. It refuses the fiction of the neutral researcher and insists that the political and ethical commitments of the researcher are constitutive rather than disqualifying: they shape what questions are asked, how they are pursued, and what purposes the knowledge produced is meant to serve.
I situate this project within the transformative paradigm because I am conducting research from inside the conditions I am studying. I am a precarious academic worker writing about precarious academic labour. My exhaustion is data. My recovery is inquiry. My refusal to individualize structural harm is a political act. Mertens gives that act a methodological name and a rigorous literature. Her framework sits alongside Guba’s (1990) paradigm dialogue and Haraway’s (1988) situated knowledges. Mertens operationalizes those commitments in the design of research that is accountable to the communities it studies.
Mertens’s framework is primarily oriented toward evaluation research and community-based inquiry. Extending the transformative paradigm into the specific context of arts-based, solo, first-person inquiry requires the additions of Nash (2004) and Leavy (2015, 2022). The transformative commitment and the arts-based method are the same commitment enacted through different instruments.
Moustakas, C. E. (1961). Loneliness. Prentice-Hall.
Clark Moustakas wrote about loneliness in a way that no one else in this bibliography quite does: from the inside of it, phenomenologically, attending to the texture of the experience itself rather than its causes or cures. His central claim is that loneliness is an irreducible feature of human existence, that the experience of being fundamentally alone in one’s own consciousness is a condition to be explored and inhabited rather than a pathology to be treated. He describes what he calls the creative potential of existential loneliness, the capacity of deep aloneness to strip away accumulated performances and social expectations and return a person to something more essentially her own.
Moustakas also shaped the tradition of heuristic inquiry, a research methodology in which the researcher’s direct, passionate engagement with the phenomenon under study is itself the primary research instrument. His heuristic approach insists that the most profound knowledge of a human experience comes from someone who has lived it deeply and reflected on it rigorously. This is the methodological lineage behind Scholarly Personal Narrative as Nash (2004) develops it, and it is the lineage behind alonetude as I am proposing it: a concept that came from seventeen years of imposed aloneness and thirty days of deliberate presence with what that aloneness held.
Moustakas writes from a primarily existential and humanistic tradition that engages structural conditions only indirectly. Lorey (2015), Bourdieu (1991), and Collins (2000) supply those structural and political dimensions. Tillich (1963), Winnicott (1958), Long and Averill (2003), and Storr (1988) form the intellectual lineage alongside Moustakas from which the concept of alonetude emerges.
Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.
Robert Nash wrote the book that gave me permission to do what I was already doing: use my own life as the primary site of scholarly inquiry. I had spent years being trained to write myself out of my research, to flatten the first person into a passive voice and pretend the researcher had no stakes in the questions she was asking. Nash’s argument is direct and uncompromising: personal narrative, rigorously engaged, is a legitimate and powerful form of scholarly knowledge production. He calls this Scholarly Personal Narrative, and he argues that the stories we tell about our own lives, when examined with honesty, theoretical grounding, and critical awareness of their broader significance, constitute genuine contributions to knowledge. Reading him felt less like discovering a new framework and more like being handed language for something I had believed for a long time but had never dared to claim.
Nash identifies four qualities that make Scholarly Personal Narrative rigorous rather than merely confessional. He calls them vulnerability, broader significance, action, and scholarly engagement. Vulnerability means the writer takes genuine personal risks, sharing what is difficult and uncertain without performing mastery. Broader significance means the personal story is connected to larger patterns and situated within theoretical frameworks that allow the reader to see how one person’s experience speaks to collective realities. Action means something shifts in the narrative, that the writer moves, learns, or honestly acknowledges what remains unresolved. Scholarly engagement means lived experience and academic discourse are brought into genuine conversation rather than decoration applied to findings reached by other means. I return to these four qualities throughout this project as a check on my own writing. They are the standard I hold myself to.
Nash also argues that Scholarly Personal Narrative is both a methodology and an ethical stance: a refusal to participate in the pretence that the researcher stands outside the material she studies. This argument sits alongside Haraway’s (1988) situated knowledges and Richardson and St. Pierre’s (2005) writing-as-inquiry in the epistemological architecture of this thesis. Where Haraway establishes the philosophical grounds for claiming that all knowledge is partial and located, Nash provides the methodological practice for enacting that claim in the form of scholarly writing. The thesis I am writing is Scholarly Personal Narrative, and Nash’s framework is the permission slip I carry throughout it.
Nash’s framework has real limitations that are worth naming. His examples draw heavily from the disciplines of education and moral philosophy, and his model of rigour is calibrated to those contexts. Extending Scholarly Personal Narrative into Human Rights and Social Justice, somatic inquiry, and arts-based research requires the additions of Leavy (2015, 2022), Wilson (2008), and Pink (2013), each of whom pushes the methodological permission Nash offers into territories his book leaves unmapped. Nash also writes primarily from a position of institutional security, and there are ways in which his framing of the scholarly personal narrative as freely chosen fails to fully reckon with the conditions facing precarious academic workers for whom naming institutional harm carries genuine professional risk. That tension is one this thesis lives inside, and naming it is part of what the project does.
Noddings, N. (2013). Caring: A relational approach to ethics and moral education (2nd ed.). University of California Press.
Nel Noddings built her ethics of care around a simple observation that I recognize from every year of my teaching practice: that what makes education genuinely transformative is the quality of the relationship, the attentive, responsive care that the teacher offers the student as a whole person rather than as a knowledge-acquisition project. Noddings calls this natural caring, the spontaneous impulse to attend fully to another’s needs, and ethical caring, the deliberate cultivation of that attention even when it does not come naturally.
I have given this kind of care to students for seventeen years. I have offered it freely and consistently, often beyond what my contract required, or my personal reserves could sustain. Hochschild (1983) would call this emotional labour; Han (2015) would identify it as the self-exploitation of the achievement subject. But Noddings adds something neither of them addresses: the asymmetry of care in a system that extracts it without returning it. The institution required and received my care for students. It did not offer comparable care for me.
Alonetude, read through Noddings’s framework, is the turning of caring attention toward oneself. It is the practice of becoming the cared-for as well as the caring-one, of receiving attention and presence rather than always and only giving it. Brown (2010) describes this as the core of what she calls wholehearted living; Lorde (1988) describes it as a political necessity. Noddings provides it with an ethical foundation within the relational philosophy of care.
Noddings engages with Hochschild (1983), Freire (1970), Brown (2010), Lorde (1988), and Greenspan (2003) throughout this bibliography.
Paul, D. N. (2006). We were not the savages: Collision between European and Native American civilizations (3rd ed.). Fernwood Publishing.
Daniel Paul is a Mi’kmaw elder and activist, and his history of the Mi’kmaw nation in Mi’kma’ki is a text I approach with both scholarly respect and personal gravity. I have distant Mi’kmaq ancestry on my mother’s side. I acknowledge this without claiming it as an identity, because the claiming of Indigenous identity by settlers carries harms that my commitment to reconciliation does not allow me to reproduce. But the ancestry raises obligations, including the obligation to learn the history of the people whose blood I carry, however distantly.
Paul documents the systematic dispossession, violence, and assimilation policies that European colonialism enacted against the Mi’kmaw nation, using Mi’kmaw oral and archival sources to tell a history that settler historiography has consistently minimized or distorted. He names the arrival of European settlers, including French Acadians, on Mi’kmaw territory, and the complex relationships of alliance, trade, and conflict that developed over the colonial period.
Faragher (2005) tells the history of the Grand Dérangement from an Acadian perspective; Paul’s work is essential because the Acadian story is incomplete without the Mi’kmaw perspective on the same events and the same land. The Grand Dérangement occurred on Mi’kmaw territory. Acadian settlers, including my ancestors, arrived and built their lives on land that was already home to the Mi’kmaw nation. This history does not produce equivalence between Acadian displacement and Mi’kmaw dispossession, but it demands that I hold both simultaneously.
Smith (2021) holds me accountable to the decolonial obligations that follow from conducting research on Indigenous territory. Paul’s work provides the specific historical grounding for those obligations in the Mi’kmaw context. The Future Research Directions section of this bibliography reflects my commitment to pursuing the Mi’kmaq-Acadian historical dimensions of my ancestry through collaboration with Mi’kmaw scholars rather than as a solo settler inquiry.
Pink, S. (2013). Doing sensory ethnography (2nd ed.). SAGE.
Sarah Pink argues that conventional ethnography privileges the verbal and visual in ways that distort the full sensory reality of lived experience, and she proposes methodological practices for attending to smell, sound, touch, taste, and proprioception alongside what can be seen and said. Her sensory ethnography draws on Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) phenomenology of the lived body and proposes that photographs, recordings, and embodied fieldnotes function as methods of knowing rather than merely documentation.
This framework describes, with methodological precision, what I was doing in Loreto. The daily attentiveness to tidal rhythms, the quality of early-morning light, the feel of the sea at different hours, the smell of the salt flats, and the sound of desert birds before dawn: all of this was sensory ethnographic data, produced through sustained, reflexive, embodied engagement with the research environment. I did not call it that at the time. I called it paying attention. Pink gives me the methodological language to understand that paying attention, in this full-body, multi-sensory way, is a form of research.
Pink’s framework also positions the photography not as illustration but as visual knowledge, data that resist full translation into verbal description and that carry dimensions of the experience that only the image can hold. Karr and Wood’s (2011) contemplative photography practice and Pink’s sensory ethnography converge here: both prioritize direct, embodied, sensory experience over pre-formed narrative, and both treat aesthetic engagement as a legitimate form of knowing.
Pink is in dialogue with Merleau-Ponty (1962), Leavy (2015, 2017), Karr and Wood (2011), Wang and Burris (1997), and Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) throughout this bibliography.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton.
Note on citation: the title was previously listed incorrectly in this bibliography. The correct title is The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation.
Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory is the neurophysiological architecture beneath everything this thesis claims about why the retreat healed what it healed. His research proposes that the vagus nerve, the body’s primary autonomic pathway, operates through two distinct circuits. The ventral vagal circuit is associated with social engagement, safety, and regulated calm: the state in which the nervous system signals that connection is possible and threat is absent. The dorsal vagal circuit is associated with immobilization, shutdown, and the freeze response triggered by extreme threat. Between these two poles, the sympathetic nervous system governs the fight-or-flight responses that mobilize in the face of moderate threat.
Porges also developed the concept of neuroception, the nervous system’s subconscious, continuous scanning of the environment for cues of safety or danger, operating prior to conscious awareness. The body is always reading the room, always assessing whether it is safe to relax. Chronic neuroception of social threat, which is exactly what seventeen years of contingent employment produced in me, keeps the nervous system in persistent low-level activation, unable to settle into the ventral vagal state associated with rest, creativity, and genuine connection.
The landscape of Loreto, its predictable tidal rhythms, its distance from institutional social hierarchies, and its sensory richness without social demands provided exactly the cues of safety that polyvagal theory predicts will activate the ventral vagal circuit. Swimming in the sea, particularly, engages the dive reflex, a dorsal vagal response that, in a chosen, controlled context, the nervous system experiences as different from involuntary freeze. Menakem’s (2017) body settlement practices and Levine’s (2010) Somatic Experiencing are both grounded in polyvagal theory. Porges is the neurophysiological foundation for the somatic healing claims made in this thesis.
Richardson, L., & St. Pierre, E. A. (2005). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 959–978). Sage.
This chapter changed how I understood the relationship between writing and thinking. Richardson and St. Pierre argue that writing is a method of inquiry, a way of discovering what you know rather than a way of reporting what you already knew before you sat down. The daily journal entries that constitute the primary data of this project were the analytical process. Writing was where the inquiry happened. Every sentence was a step in the thinking, and the thinking only became visible in the writing.
Richardson and St. Pierre also push back sharply against the assumption that academic writing must perform objectivity through the passive voice and the removal of the writer from the text. They call this the view from nowhere, borrowing Haraway’s (1988) formulation, and argue that it is both epistemologically dishonest and aesthetically deadening. Their alternative is writing that acknowledges its own situatedness, that uses the full resources of language including voice, tone, metaphor, and narrative structure, and that treats the text itself as a site of inquiry rather than a transparent vehicle for meaning produced elsewhere.
This 2005 chapter is paired with Richardson’s (2003) standalone piece on writing as inquiry. Both belong here because together they constitute the methodological foundation for treating the writing of this thesis as itself a research act. Nash (2004), Leavy (2015), and Wilson (2008) extend the permission they offer in different disciplinary directions.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68
Ryan and Deci’s self-determination theory proposes that human beings have three fundamental psychological needs: autonomy, the experience of self-direction in one’s actions; competence, the experience of effective engagement with the environment; and relatedness, the experience of meaningful connection with others. Environments that support these three needs produce intrinsic motivation, well-being, and growth. Environments that frustrate them produce alienation, reduced motivation, and psychological decline.
I include this framework because it provides the motivational psychology that explains what institutional precarity destroys and what the retreat restores. The sessional instructor’s working conditions systematically frustrate all three needs: autonomy is undermined by contingent employment and the absence of governance voice; competence is undermined by perpetual evaluation and the institutional devaluation of expertise; relatedness is undermined by structural exclusion from the full faculty community. The thirty days in Loreto restored all three, completely and without condition. I had total autonomy over my time and attention. Daily practices built genuine mastery and competence. And the quality of relatedness I found with the natural world filled something that the institutional community had been failing to meet for years.
Han’s (2015) achievement-subject is someone whose motivation has been so thoroughly externalized that self-determination theory’s spectrum collapses: the person appears to be acting autonomously but is in fact entirely governed by internalized external demands. Ryan and Deci provide the motivational psychology to explain the internal mechanisms of that collapse and the conditions required for its reversal.
Their framework is individual and psychological; Lorey (2015), Bourdieu (1991), and Slaughter and Rhoades (2004) provide a structural analysis of the institutional conditions that produce the motivational deficit that Ryan and Deci document.
Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy: Markets, state, and higher education. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades provide the political economy of what happened to me. Their concept of academic capitalism names the institutional logic that treats knowledge as a commodity, students as consumers, and faculty as knowledge producers whose output is measured through commercial metrics. They trace how North American research universities have been restructured under neoliberal market conditions to privilege entrepreneurial activity, applied research, and market-oriented programmes, while systematically defunding the disciplines that produce less commercially productive knowledge.
The sessional academic labour market is one direct consequence of this restructuring. Teaching can be separated from research and delivered by contingent labour at lower cost, with higher institutional flexibility, and without the long-term obligations that tenure requires. This is a structural decision driven by the logic of academic capitalism, and it produces the specific conditions of harm this thesis documents. Bourdieu’s (1991) symbolic violence operates within the institutional framework Slaughter and Rhoades describe. Ahmed’s (2012) non-performative diversity commitments serve the institution’s market positioning. Lorey’s (2015) governmental precarity is the mechanism through which academic capitalism manages its contingent workforce.
Reading Slaughter and Rhoades gave me something I needed: the clear knowledge that what happened to me was a structural decision with a logic, a history, and a political economy behind it. It was not an oversight. It was a design. That knowledge does not make the harm smaller, but it does make it nameable, and naming is the beginning of both healing and resistance.
They are in close dialogue with Standing (2011), Lorey (2015), Han (2015), and Bourdieu (1991) in this bibliography.
Standing, G. (2011). The precariat: The new dangerous class. Bloomsbury Academic.
Guy Standing named a new social class, and in naming it, he named me. The precariat, his term for those who live and work precariously without stable employment, predictable income, occupational identity, or the social rights historically attached to employment, is a class produced by global neoliberal labour market restructuring rather than by individual failure. Standing argues that the precariat is growing in anger and that its members share a distinctive set of experiences: insecurity, anxiety, alienation from the work they do, and the denial of the opportunity to build a social identity through labour.
Within the precariat, Standing identifies a group he calls proficians: professionals who work as freelancers or on short-term contracts, highly educated and skilled, formally professional but economically insecure. This is the sessional instructor to the letter. Seventeen years of professional training, genuine expertise, and deep commitment to the work, without the security, social rights, or institutional identity that define the professional as a class. I was a professional without a profession, in Standing’s terms.
Understanding myself as a member of the precariat rather than as an individual who had made suboptimal career choices was important to my healing. Lorey (2015) extends Standing’s class analysis by showing how this precarity is produced through governmental technologies rather than simply by market forces. Slaughter and Rhoades (2004) locate it within the specific institutional logic of academic capitalism. Together, they explain why the conditions I experienced were structural rather than accidental.
Standing is in dialogue with Lorey (2015), Slaughter and Rhoades (2004), Han (2015), Berlant (2011), and Bourdieu (1991) throughout this bibliography.
Storr, A. (1988). Solitude: A return to the self. Free Press.
Anthony Storr wrote Solitude as a direct challenge to what he saw as twentieth-century psychology’s over-investment in interpersonal relationships as the primary source of human fulfilment. Drawing on the lives of creative people, Darwin, Kierkegaard, Beatrix Potter, and Kafka, he argued that for many individuals the development of imagination, inner life, and creative work through sustained solitude is as important as, and sometimes more important than, close relationships. The capacity to be alone, which he takes from Winnicott (1958), is a mark of emotional maturity rather than a deficit.
I include Storr because his work provides important scholarly precedent for the claim that alonetude is a practice of cultivation rather than a privation, and because his documentation of creative lives lived through and in solitude demonstrates across a range of historical examples what Long and Averill (2003) establish through empirical research. The capacity for solitude is a resource, not a symptom.
Where Storr’s work falls short for this research is exactly where so many of the classical solitude texts fall short: his lonely and solitary exemplars are almost exclusively privileged men whose aloneness was chosen and sustained by material security. He does not address the conditions that make some people’s solitude a luxury and others’ a sentence. The structural analysis that contextualizes voluntary solitude and distinguishes it from imposed isolation requires the frameworks of Lorey (2015), Bourdieu (1991), and Moustakas (1961). Long and Averill (2003) provide a more systematic and less gender-limited psychological framework for the same terrain.
Tillich, P. (1963). The eternal now. Scribner.
Paul Tillich was a German-American existential theologian, and the first chapter of this collection of sermons contains the formulation that most clearly marks the conceptual gap that alonetude fills. He distinguishes loneliness, which he describes as the pain of being alone, from solitude, which he describes as the glory of being alone. Our language, he observes, has wisely created two words for two different experiences of the same condition.
This distinction is essential to alonetude, and it is also insufficient for my purposes, which is why alonetude represents the next theoretical step rather than a synonym for what Tillich is describing. Tillich’s solitude is available to those who can choose it, who have the material conditions and the psychological resources to transform aloneness into something generative. The loneliness I am theorizing from is structurally produced: imposed by institutional conditions, by precarity, by the systematic erosion of belonging. Alonetude names the space between Tillich’s two words, the territory of the person who is doing the active, effortful, somatic work of transforming imposed isolation into chosen presence.
Tillich’s theological framing also gives alonetude a spiritual dimension that I find resonant, even though this thesis does not operate within a religious framework. The contemplative practices of the retreat, sitting with the sea before sunrise, attending to tidal movement with full sensory presence, were practices of a kind of presence that Tillich’s account of solitude makes room for. Karr and Wood’s (2011) contemplative photography, Bachelard’s (1969) phenomenology of intimate immensity, and Tillich’s theology of solitude all point toward the same quality of attention.
Tillich sits alongside Moustakas (1961) and Long and Averill (2003) in this bibliography as part of the historical and intellectual lineage from which alonetude emerges. Winnicott (1958) and Storr (1988) complete that lineage.
Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Aldine.
Victor Turner extended Arnold van Gennep’s (1960) analysis of rites of passage and gave the middle phase, the threshold state, its most resonant name and its fullest theoretical treatment. He called it liminality, from the Latin word for “threshold”. In the liminal phase, the person undergoing a transition has left their previous social position and identity but has not yet arrived at the new one. They are, in Turner’s memorable formulation, betwixt and between. The ordinary markers, roles, hierarchies, and obligations of social life are suspended. The person is, in a sense, structurally invisible.
Turner argues that this state is creative. The suspension of ordinary structure creates the conditions for something new to emerge. It is precisely because the old identity has been set aside that a new one becomes possible. And the quality of human connection that arises among those in liminal states, which Turner calls communitas, is characterized by an unstructured, egalitarian sense of shared humanity, stripped of the social differentiations that normally organize interaction.
The thirty-day retreat was a liminal space in Turner’s precise sense. I had left my institutional role, at least for those thirty days, but had not yet arrived at whatever comes next. I inhabited the threshold between the first shore of ordinary institutional life and an unknown destination. The Third Shore, as I name it in this thesis, is liminality by another name: the shore that is neither departure nor arrival, that belongs fully to neither the old life nor the new one, that is entirely and only the crossing itself.
Turner engages with van Gennep (1960), Bachelard (1969), Tuan (1977), Tillich (1963), and Moustakas (1961) throughout this bibliography. Together they form the theoretical architecture for understanding the thirty days as a ritual threshold rather than simply a rest.
Ulrich, R. S. (1983). Aesthetic and affective response to natural environment. In I. Altman & J. F. Wohlwill (Eds.), Human behaviour and environment: Advances in theory and research (Vol. 6, pp. 85–125). Plenum Press.
Roger Ulrich’s research on how people respond aesthetically and affectively to natural environments was among the first to demonstrate, empirically and rigorously, that visual contact with natural settings produces measurable reductions in stress and measurable improvements in psychological state. His foundational finding, that natural environments engage a kind of involuntary, restorative attention that urban and built environments cannot replicate, laid the empirical groundwork for the Kaplans’ (1989) attention restoration theory and for the broader field of environmental psychology that followed. I learned, walking to the sea each morning in Loreto, what Ulrich’s participants learned in controlled studies: that the water, the light, the movement, and the scale of the natural world do something in the body that no amount of institutional effort or indoor productivity can match.
His work matters to this project because it provides the scientific foundation beneath what might otherwise seem like a personal preference for dramatic scenery. The Sea of Cortez was a research instrument. Its capacity to restore directed attention, reduce physiological stress markers, and support the conditions necessary for genuine reflection was a feature of the methodology, deliberately chosen. I went to Loreto because I needed to heal, but I also went because I understood, however intuitively, that the environment itself would do work that no indoor writing retreat could have done. Ulrich explains why that intuition was correct.
Ulrich’s research is empirical and environmental-psychological in orientation, and it does engage with the political and colonial dimensions of the landscapes it studies only indirectly. Smith (2021), Nixon (2011), and the land acknowledgements in this project hold that dimension explicitly. The healing the natural world offered me in Loreto was real; the land on which it took place belonged to the Monqui and Cochimí peoples long before settler visitors arrived seeking restoration, and those two facts must be held together. Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) extend and systematize Ulrich’s empirical findings; Louv (2005) translates them for a general audience. Together they form the environmental psychology foundation of this project’s methodology.
Ulrich, R. S. (1983). Aesthetic and affective response to natural environment. In I. Altman & J. F. Wohlwill (Eds.), Human behaviour and environment: Advances in theory and research (Vol. 6, pp. 85–125). Plenum Press.
Roger Ulrich’s research on how people respond aesthetically and affectively to natural environments was among the first to demonstrate, empirically and rigorously, that visual contact with natural settings produces measurable reductions in stress and measurable improvements in psychological state. His foundational finding, that natural environments engage a kind of involuntary, restorative attention that urban and built environments cannot replicate, laid the empirical groundwork for the Kaplans’ (1989) attention restoration theory. I learned, walking to the sea each morning in Loreto, what Ulrich’s participants learned in controlled studies: that the water, the light, the movement, and the scale of the natural world do something in the body that no amount of institutional effort or indoor productivity can match.
His work matters to this project because it provides the scientific foundation beneath what might otherwise seem like a personal preference for dramatic scenery. The Sea of Cortez was a research instrument. Its capacity to restore directed attention, reduce physiological stress markers, and support the conditions necessary for genuine reflection was a feature of the methodology, deliberately chosen. I went to Loreto because I needed to heal, and also because I understood, however intuitively, that the environment itself would do work that no indoor writing retreat could have done. Ulrich explains why that intuition was correct.
Ulrich’s research is empirical and environmental-psychological in orientation. Smith (2021), Nixon (2011), and the land acknowledgements in this project hold the political and colonial dimensions of the landscapes it studies. Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) extend and systematize Ulrich’s empirical findings; Louv (2005) translates them for a general audience. Together they form the environmental psychology foundation of this project’s methodology.
United Nations. (1948). Universal Declaration of Human Rights. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the founding document of the international human rights framework, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948. It establishes a comprehensive set of rights as universal human entitlements. Article 23 establishes the right to work and to just and favourable conditions of work, including equal pay for equal work. Article 24 establishes the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours. Article 25 establishes the right to an adequate standard of living. These are the articles I return to when I need to ground the argument that what happened to me in seventeen years of sessional labour was a human rights matter, extending well beyond an employment grievance.
I situate this thesis within a Human Rights and Social Justice program at Thompson Rivers University, and that situating is intentional. Sessional academic labour, as I have lived it, violates Article 23’s provision for just and favourable work conditions and equal pay for equal work. The absence of the right to rest and recovery that Article 24 names is exactly what the thirty days in Loreto were attempting to address. Alonetude is, in part, a rights claim: the right to rest, to heal, to direct one’s own time and attention are entitlements that the institution’s labour practices systematically deny.
The UDHR is an aspirational framework, and its aspirations are routinely violated, including in Canada, as the 2023 UN Special Rapporteur’s visit documented. The distance between the Declaration’s ideals and the condition of sessional academic labour is precisely the space this thesis inhabits. Galtung (1969) and Nixon (2011) give me the theoretical vocabulary for naming the structural and slow violence that produces this distance. Standing (2011) and Slaughter and Rhoades (2004) explain the political economy that produces it specifically in the academy.
United Nations. (2023). End of mission statement by the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, including its causes and consequences, on his visit to Canada. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/09/canada-anchor-fight-against-contemporary-forms-slavery-human-rights-un
In September 2023, the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery visited Canada and released an end-of-mission statement documenting serious concerns about labour exploitation across multiple sectors. The statement drew attention to the gap between Canada’s international human rights commitments and its domestic labour practices, and it named categories of workers experiencing conditions the Rapporteur characterized as meeting or approaching the threshold of contemporary slavery.
I include this document because it places sessional academic labour within a broader national pattern of labour exploitation that the international community has formally noted, and because it demonstrates that Canada’s self-presentation as a rights-respecting society requires ongoing critical examination. This thesis is one contribution to that examination, from one specific position within one specific sector.
I want to be honest about what I am and am not claiming here. I am a settler woman with education, professional credentials, and relative privilege. The conditions of sessional academic labour, while genuinely harmful, are not equivalent to the severe forms of labour exploitation the Rapporteur was primarily documenting. I cite this statement to contextualize the human rights framing of the thesis, not to claim equivalence between my experience and that of the most vulnerable workers in Canada.
This document sits alongside the UDHR (1948) as the international human rights scaffolding for the thesis’s framing. Galtung (1969), Nixon (2011), Standing (2011), and Slaughter and Rhoades (2004) provide structural analysis of why the conditions they document persist.
Vaillant, G. E. (2012). Triumphs of experience: The men of the Harvard Grant Study. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
George Vaillant’s synthesis of the Harvard Grant Study, one of the longest-running longitudinal studies of adult development, offers findings that are both illuminating and limited for this research. The study followed a group of Harvard men from their undergraduate years beginning in 1938 through their lives into old age, and Vaillant’s central finding is that healthy, fulfilling later life is most strongly predicted by the quality of relationships and the capacity for mature adaptation: the ability to transform difficulty into growth, pain into creativity, and loss into compassion.
This finding resonates with everything this thesis argues about alonetude. The capacity to face difficulty honestly, to move through grief and fear rather than around them, to transform imposed isolation into chosen presence, is exactly what Vaillant’s longitudinal data identifies as the hallmark of flourishing over a lifetime. It is what Greenspan (2003) calls emotional alchemy, what Menakem (2017) calls clean pain, what Moustakas (1961) calls the creative potential of existential loneliness.
The serious limitation of this research must be named clearly: the Harvard Grant Study was conducted exclusively on privileged white men from elite educational backgrounds. Its findings cannot be straightforwardly generalized to women, to working-class people, to people of colour, or to people living with the structural conditions of precarity documented in this thesis. The capacity for mature adaptation is shaped by whether the material conditions of a person’s life support or undermine it. Waldinger and Schulz (2023), whose later work extends the study to more diverse populations, provide some corrections.
Vaillant is included here as contextual longitudinal grounding for the claim that the practices of alonetude matter over a lifetime, not only in the immediate context of a thirty-day retreat. His data support the investment.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
Bessel van der Kolk’s synthesis of thirty years of trauma research is the most widely read clinical text on trauma in the contemporary era, and the title says what the book demonstrates at length: the body keeps the score. Trauma is stored somatically, in the nervous system, the muscles, the visceral responses, the patterns of holding and bracing that the body develops to survive overwhelming experience. Healing requires the body alongside and beyond the mind.
Van der Kolk’s work provided the clinical-scientific foundation I needed for the claim that what happened to me in seventeen years of sessional labour registered in my body, and that healing it would require the body as much as the intellect. The nervous system dysregulation Porges (2011) describes, the incomplete discharge responses Levine (2010) theorizes, the racialized somatic patterns Menakem (2017) documents: all these clinical frameworks are grounded in the neurobiological architecture van der Kolk spent his career mapping.
He surveys a range of therapeutic approaches and consistently emphasizes that healing must be both bottom-up and top-down: it must move through the body rather than only through cognition. The body-based practices of the retreat, the sea swimming, the daily walking, and the sensory engagement with the landscape are consistent with van der Kolk’s evidence about what the nervous system needs to heal. I was following something deeper than a therapeutic protocol. I was following my body’s insistence, and van der Kolk explains why my body was right.
The limitation of his framework for this research is its individualized, clinical focus. He treats trauma as something that happened to individuals and requires individual treatment. Menakem (2017) adds the explicitly racialized and collective dimensions his work leaves absent, and the structural analyses of Bourdieu (1991), Galtung (1969), and Lorey (2015) explain why the conditions producing trauma are systemic rather than personal.
van Gennep, A. (1960). The rites of passage (M. B. Vizedom & G. L. Caffee, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1909)
Arnold van Gennep identified the three-phase structure that underlies rites of passage across human cultures, and Turner (1969) developed his framework into the theoretical architecture I draw on most directly. Van Gennep named the phases: separation, the removal from ordinary social structure and identity; liminality or transition, the threshold state in which ordinary social roles and hierarchies are suspended; and incorporation, the re-entry into social structure in a new role or identity.
I include van Gennep alongside Turner because together they establish that transitional rituals are a universal human need and that the threshold state is not an absence of structure but a necessary condition for genuine transformation. The retreat to Loreto follows this three-phase structure with a clarity I did not plan but now recognize: I left Canada, I departed the institutional role; I crossed the threshold into thirty days of liminal space; I will return changed.
The Key Concept of the Third Shore in this bibliography draws on both van Gennep and Turner. The third shore is liminal space: the shore that is neither the departure point nor the destination, that belongs fully to neither the old life nor the new one, that is entirely and only the threshold itself. Bachelard (1969) gives this threshold phenomenological depth; Tillich (1963) gives it spiritual depth; Turner gives it anthropological structure.
Van Gennep engages with Turner (1969), Bachelard (1969), Tuan (1977), Tillich (1963), and Moustakas (1961) throughout this bibliography.
Waldinger, R. J., & Schulz, M. S. (2023). The good life: Lessons from the world’s longest scientific study of happiness. Simon & Schuster.
Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz present the Harvard Study of Adult Development’s findings for general readers, extending and diversifying the findings of the Grant Study documented by Vaillant (2012). Their central finding, confirmed across multiple longitudinal studies and now including a more demographically diverse sample, is that the quality of close relationships is the single strongest predictor of health, happiness, and longevity. Warmth and connection sustain the body as well as the spirit.
I include this work alongside Vaillant (2012) to ground the thesis’s claims about relational well-being in the most current and broadly applicable longitudinal research available. I also include it because it creates productive tension with the thesis’s celebration of solitude, which I want to hold to be honest. Waldinger and Schulz’s data confirm that relational connection matters enormously for human flourishing. Alonetude does not argue against this. Alonetude argues that genuine connection requires the capacity for genuine presence, and that the capacity for genuine presence requires the capacity to be alone.
Winnicott (1958) makes this developmental argument: the ability to be alone grows from the internalization of a secure relational holding environment, and it enables rather than replaces intimate connection. Alonetude restores the capacity for genuine presence, which is the precondition for the kind of relationship quality Waldinger and Schulz are documenting as protective. The thirty days by the sea were preparation for a better connection, not retreat from it.
Their work is also a useful corrective to the individualistic bias that can creep into solitude research. Long and Averill (2003), Storr (1988), and Moustakas (1961) all celebrate solitude in ways that could be read as prioritizing inner life over relational life. Waldinger and Schulz restore the balance.
Wang, C., & Burris, M. A. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment. Health Education and Behavior, 24(3), 369–387. https://doi.org/10.1177/109019819702400309
Caroline Wang and Mary Ann Burris developed Photovoice as a participatory action research methodology in which community members use cameras to document their own realities, generate critical dialogue, and reach policymakers. The methodology is grounded in Freire’s (1970) critical consciousness approach, in the feminist validation of lay ways of knowing, and in the documentary photography tradition’s history of social advocacy. Its three goals are to enable people to record and reflect on their community’s strengths and concerns, to promote critical dialogue through group analysis of photographs, and to reach those with the authority to make change.
Photovoice is the direct methodological ancestor of my photographic research practice, and I am in its debt. At the same time, this thesis extends Photovoice’s principles in a direction Wang and Burris did not anticipate: the solo, auto-photographic documentation of one person’s healing. Photovoice was designed for community-based participatory research with groups; I am working alone. The communal analysis and collective advocacy that give Photovoice its full power have no direct equivalent in solo practice.
Oliver’s (2001) witnessing framework bridges this gap. She proposes that the solo practitioner who makes images addressed to a future viewer is creating the intersubjective witnessing relationship that community Photovoice creates through group dialogue. The photograph speaks; the viewer inherits an obligation to respond. This is Azoulay’s (2008) civil contract understood through Oliver’s ethics. Together, Wang, Burris, Oliver, and Azoulay form the ethical architecture for my visual methodology.
The feminist and Freirean grounding of Photovoice also resonates throughout with Richardson and St. Pierre’s (2005) legitimation of personal voice as a scholarly method. Both reject the fiction that lay knowledge is less rigorous than professional knowledge. Both insist that those closest to an experience have the most legitimate claim to describe and analyze it.
Wilson, S. (2008). Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods. Fernwood Publishing.
Shawn Wilson is Opaskwayak Cree, and his book Research Is Ceremony offers a framework for Indigenous research that begins from a premise fundamentally different from Western epistemological standards: the purpose of research is to honour and maintain relationships. Wilson proposes that the inquiry process itself, conducted with proper respect, reciprocity, and accountability to the web of relationships it touches, constitutes a sacred act. Research is ceremony because it is a way of being in relationship with the ideas, the places, and the people involved in the inquiry.
I approach this text with genuine humility and careful attention to the limits of my position. Wilson’s framework is not mine to claim as methodology. I am a settler researcher, and the obligations this framework names, obligations of reciprocity and relational accountability to the communities and territories involved in research, are ones I need to receive rather than adopt. Smith (2021) makes this distinction clearly: decolonizing research requires understanding what the researcher is accountable to, not only the methods she uses.
What Wilson’s framework offers me is a way of thinking about the retreat’s daily practices that sits alongside and deepens the Western methodological vocabulary I primarily use. The tidal observations, the painted stones, the photographs, the writing before dawn: these can be understood, in Wilson’s terms, as ceremonial rather than extractive. As acts of relationship with the landscape, with the self, with the ideas developing in the inquiry. As a way of being in relation rather than a way of gathering data.
Wilson sits alongside Smith (2021) as part of the decolonial methodological framework that holds me accountable to the land and the peoples whose territory I conducted this research on. He is in dialogue with Freire (1970), Richardson and St. Pierre (2005), Nash (2004), and the contemplative practices engaged through Karr and Wood (2011) and Tillich (1963).
Winnicott, D. W. (1958). The capacity to be alone. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 39, 416–420.
Donald Winnicott wrote a short article with a paradoxical title, and the paradox is the heart of the argument: the capacity to be alone is first developed in the presence of another. The infant who is alone while the mother is nearby, Winnicott argues, is achieving something fundamental: the internalization of a holding environment stable enough that aloneness does not feel threatening. From this foundation, the individual develops the capacity for genuine solitude, the ability to be with oneself, to experience one’s own feelings and impulses, to do nothing in a productive way, to be fully present without an audience.
Winnicott proposes that this capacity for solitude is the foundation for both the richest forms of creative experience and the capacity for genuine intimacy with others. The person who cannot be comfortably alone cannot be fully present with others either, because the anxiety of aloneness infiltrates the relationship and prevents real contact. The capacity to be alone is the precondition for full relational life.
I return to Winnicott throughout this bibliography because alonetude is, at its most fundamental psychological level, the practice and the restoration of exactly this capacity. What institutional precarity systematically erodes, through the perpetual monitoring, performance, and self-regulation it requires, is the internal holding environment that makes genuine solitude possible. When I arrived in Loreto, I was barely able to sit with myself without the noise of institutional anxiety filling the space. Thirty days of intentional practice, supported by the stability of the sea and the desert and a small room of my own, rebuilt something that had been gradually dismantled over the years.
Winnicott is in dialogue with Moustakas (1961), Long and Averill (2003), Tillich (1963), Storr (1988), Menakem (2017), and Bachelard (1969) throughout this bibliography. Together, they trace the psychological, phenomenological, theological, and somatic dimensions of the capacity this thesis is attempting to recover and theorize.
Key Concepts
These are the concepts that anchor this research. Some of them are terms I have borrowed from scholars who came before me. Some of them are concepts I am proposing for the first time. All of them name something I lived before I found language for it.
Alonetude (Tucker, 2026)
Alonetude is the concept at the centre of this thesis, and it is my original contribution to the scholarship of solitude. It names the agentic transformation of structurally imposed isolation into intentional, embodied, healing presence with oneself: full presence to oneself without performance, audience, or apology. I define it as distinct from loneliness, which is painful and involuntary, and from idealized solitude, which is peaceful and freely available to those with structural security. Alonetude acknowledges that the aloneness many of us experience is produced structurally, through precarious employment, institutional betrayal, displacement, or systemic harm, and that transforming this imposed aloneness into something generative constitutes both survival and resistance. The word came to me in Loreto. I have spent the rest of the thesis learning what it means.
Somatic Knowledge (Levine, 2010; van der Kolk, 2014; Merleau-Ponty, 1962)
Somatic knowledge is knowledge held in the body: sensory, felt, and pre-verbal. It is what the nervous system records and carries, what the muscles hold, what the breath expresses before the mind has formed a thought. Merleau-Ponty (1962) established the philosophical foundation: the body is knowing before it is said. Van der Kolk (2014) demonstrated it clinically: trauma is stored in the body and requires the body’s participation in healing. Levine (2010) developed the therapeutic practice of the body releasing what it holds through movement, sensation, and the gradual completion of interrupted responses. For this thesis, somatic knowledge is both subject and method. I studied what my body knew, and I used my body as the primary instrument of inquiry.
Slow Violence (Nixon, 2011)
Slow violence is Rob Nixon’s term for violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, dispersed across time and space, leaving no single dramatic moment and no obvious perpetrator. It produces preventable suffering without the spectacle that draws attention and demands accountability. Environmental harm, colonial dispossession, and institutional precarity are all forms of slow violence in Nixon’s sense. What happened to me over seventeen years of sessional labour was slow violence: attritional, cumulative, invisible, and extremely difficult to name and challenge precisely because it lacked spectacle. This thesis is an attempt to represent slow violence through the methods most adequate to it: Scholarly Personal Narrative, photography, and the patient documentation of what a specific body experienced across a specific span of time.
Institutional Gaslighting (Tucker, 2026)
Institutional gaslighting is my term for the systematic denial, minimization, or reframing of a person’s experience by an institution in ways that cause the person to doubt their own perception of reality. Where individual gaslighting operates through intimate relationships, institutional gaslighting operates through official documents, policy language, diversity commitments, and HR processes that simultaneously produce harm and deny its existence. The equity statements in my contracts that described conditions I was experiencing as harmful without acknowledging the harm. The collegial rhetoric presented structural exclusion as personal opportunity. Ahmed (2012) describes the non-performative diversity commitment; Fricker (2007) names the testimonial injustice; I am naming the cumulative, disorienting effect of both operating simultaneously over seventeen years.
Institutional Violence (Galtung, 1969; Bourdieu, 1991)
Institutional violence is harm produced through institutional structures, policies, and cultures rather than by individual actors. Galtung’s (1969) structural violence names it in peace research terms: systems that produce preventable suffering without identifiable perpetrators. Bourdieu’s (1991) symbolic violence names the mechanism through which dominated groups internalize their own domination and come to accept the conditions of their harm as natural. For this thesis, institutional violence names the harm of the sessional labour system as a whole: a structure that systematically produces precarity, isolation, and the erosion of professional identity, without any single person being responsible and without any single event being the cause.
Third Shore (Tucker, 2026)
The Third Shore is both a place and a concept. The literal place is the shoreline of the Sea of Cortez at Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico, where I spent 30 days in intentional healing solitude in January 2026. The concept draws on van Gennep’s (1960) liminality and Turner’s (1969) threshold theory to name the space between departure and arrival: the threshold where old identity dissolves, and new inquiry begins. I had left the first shore of my institutional life. I had not yet arrived at whatever shore comes next. For thirty days, I lived on the third shore, the one that exists only in the crossing, the one that belongs to the transitional space itself. Bachelard (1969) gives this threshold phenomenological depth; Tillich (1963) gives it spiritual resonance; the Sea of Cortez gives it a body.
Positionality
Positionality is the researcher’s location within social, historical, and institutional structures, and the ways that location shapes what is seen, what is asked, and what is possible to know. Haraway (1988) argues that all knowledge is situated: produced from a particular body in a particular place with stakes, and more rigorous rather than less rigorous for acknowledging this. My positionality includes settler status on Indigenous land, with Mi’kmaq ancestry acknowledged without claim; neurodivergent identity; French Acadian and first-generation Austrian heritage; seventeen years as a sessional instructor in Canadian higher education; and the positionality of a person documenting her own healing. Each of these shapes what I can see and know from where I stand. Acknowledging this is an act of intellectual honesty, not a qualification of the research’s validity.
Ambiguous Loss (Boss, 1999)
Ambiguous loss is Pauline Boss’s term for loss that happens without clear confirmation, closure, or social recognition, loss that cannot be properly mourned because it has no official moment, no acknowledged end, no sanctioned ritual of letting go. The losses of sessional academic life are almost entirely ambiguous in this sense: the professional community never formally had, the career trajectory never officially promised, the institutional belonging perpetually implied and perpetually withheld. There is no event to grieve, no moment at which the loss becomes formal and therefore mournable. Alonetude creates the conditions for grieving what ambiguous loss has prevented from being grieved: it is the ritual that institutional culture never provided.
Future Research Directions
These are the questions this research opened that I could not answer, or that require forms of inquiry I could not do alone. I offer them as invitations.
Alonetude across the lifespan
How does the capacity for intentional solitude shift as we age? What conditions help adolescents, people in mid-life, and elders develop and sustain it? Winnicott (1958) and Long and Averill (2003) suggest that the quality and meaning of aloneness change significantly across developmental stages, and this deserves systematic study.
Alonetude and gender
Women’s access to alonetude is shaped by caregiving labour, domestic expectations, and the internalized imperative to be available to others. I want to pursue a feminist inquiry into gendered barriers to intentional solitude, drawing on hooks (1984), Hochschild (1983), and Noddings (2013).
Institutional recovery and the body
What does recovery from institutional harm look like somatically, over time? This thesis documents one trajectory. A comparative and longitudinal study drawing on Menakem (2017), Levine (2010), and Porges (2011) would deepen and diversify the framework.
Precarious academic labour and psychological safety in Canada
The link between sessional employment structures and psychological harm in Canadian higher education requires systematic empirical attention. Edmondson (1999), Maslach et al. (2001), Freyd (2008), and van der Kolk (2014) together provide the framework; the Canadian data are still being gathered.
Alonetude as pedagogy
Can alonetude be taught? What structures might support students and educators in developing a sustainable relationship with solitude and presence? Freire (1970), Noddings (2013), and Nash (2004) offer starting points for this inquiry.
Place-based inquiry and what the body remembers
Further work using slow, place-anchored, body-centred methods in desert, coastal, and transitional ecologies could extend the sensory ethnography developed here. Pink (2013), Kaplan and Kaplan (1989), and Merleau-Ponty (1962) provide the methodological and philosophical grounding.
Cross-cultural dimensions of alonetude
How is intentional, expansive solitude understood and practised across different cultural traditions? Indigenous, East Asian, and contemplative traditions offer rich comparative frameworks, and I am aware that alonetude, as I have theorized it, reflects a particular cultural formation that other traditions may challenge and enrich.
Mi’kmaq-Acadian historical scholarship
My own ancestry raised questions about the Mi’kmaq-Acadian relationship before and after the Grand Dérangement that I remain unqualified to answer. I hope to pursue this inquiry through appropriate collaboration with Mi’kmaw scholars and communities rather than as a solo settler project. Faragher (2005) and Paul (2006) frame the terrain; the inquiry itself belongs in a relationship.
Books
O’Brady, C. (2020). The impossible first: From fire to ice—Crossing Antarctica alone. Scribner.
I came to The Impossible First through the lens of endurance rather than adventure – drawn less to O’Brady’s record and more to the interior architecture of a solo human moving through an environment that offers zero relational feedback. His fifty-four-day crossing of Antarctica without resupply or assistance became, for me, a study in what happens to the self when all external scaffolding is stripped away. The book arrived at a moment when I was asking whether thirty days of sea swimming could teach me anything comparable at a far humbler scale.
O’Brady structures the narrative around the idea that the impossible is a mindset before it becomes a geography. His central framework – the “impossible first” as a psychological proposition rather than a logistical achievement – aligns with the somatic turn in my research: the body as the instrument through which belief is revised. He describes dissociation, hallucination, grief, and euphoria as sequential stages of radical physical commitment, and his account of “the cave” – a mental retreat technique he developed mid-crossing – resonates with the embodied regulation strategies I track in Porges (2011) and Levine (2010). The book makes no claim to be research, and I read it as phenomenological testimony rather than theory.
The limitation here is O’Brady’s tendency toward brand-building rhetoric that can flatten genuine complexity into motivational arc. His framework of “mindset” sometimes elides the structural privilege – financial, physical, logistical – that made his crossing possible. I hold this alongside Strayed (2012) and Goggins (2018), all three of whom share a genre investment in transformation-through-suffering that requires critical reading alongside the somatic and feminist scholarship in this bibliography. Still, O’Brady’s testimony of what a body can carry across an empty continent remains one of the most visceral accounts of embodied threshold I have encountered.
O’Brady, C. (2023). The 12-hour walk: Invest one day, conquer your mind, and unlock your best life. Scribner.
I read The 12-Hour Walk as a methodological provocation. O’Brady’s premise – that a single day of unstructured solo walking, without destination or device, can function as a threshold experience – mirrors the structure of my own thirty-day practice. What interests me is the scaling: he argues that transformation belongs at the day-length interval, accessible to ordinary bodies and lives, rather than reserved for polar crossings. That democratic claim matters to this research.
The book is structured as both memoir and invitation, with each chapter alternating between O’Brady’s own experience and a framework for the reader’s walk. His account of sustained solitude as a practice of self-encounter connects to my reading of Estes (1992) and hooks (1994) – the argument that meaningful contact with the self requires deliberate structural conditions, including silence, duration, and the absence of performance. The twelve-hour container strips away the metrics of achievement and leaves the walker with nothing but presence, which is, O’Brady argues, precisely the point.
The text is more prescriptive than I would like in an ideal source – it carries the weight of self-help genre conventions that can feel reductive alongside the theoretical rigour of this bibliography’s scholarly core. Yet O’Brady’s personal narrative sections offer genuine phenomenological texture, and his account of the psychological shift that occurs around the six-hour mark – when the mind exhausts its habitual loops and begins something quieter – is consistent with the polyvagal patterns Porges (2011) describes as ventral vagal settling. I use this book as testimony, held in tension with more rigorous frameworks.
Strayed, C. (2012). Wild: From lost to found on the Pacific Crest Trail. Alfred A. Knopf.
Wild is the book I kept returning to before I understood why. Strayed’s account of walking 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail – grieving, unprepared, physically depleted – arrived for me as evidence that the body could carry what the mind had given up on. I read it alongside Herman (1992) and Levine (2010) and recognized in Strayed’s narrative a somatic processing arc that those theorists describe in clinical terms: the body moving through trauma rather than around it.
Strayed does what the best creative nonfiction does – she holds complexity without resolving it into lesson. Her mother’s death, her heroin use, her disintegrating marriage: these are carried into the wilderness and refuse to disappear there. What the trail offers is duration, physical demand, and a kind of enforced presence that becomes, in time, something like repair. The book is also a meditation on solitude and female embodiment in hostile terrain, a dimension that resonates with my own experience of being a woman alone in the ocean.
I am aware that Wild has become a cultural phenomenon in ways that can domesticate its radicalism – the trail as retreat, the memoir as commodity. I read it alongside Haraway (2016) and Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) as a reminder that form is always already political, and that first-person testimony of the body in landscape carries both truth and construction. Strayed belongs in this bibliography as a practitioner of what Nash (2004) calls scholarly personal narrative, even if she would resist the academic framing.
McDougall, C. (2009). Born to run: A hidden tribe, superathletes, and the greatest race the world has never seen. Alfred A. Knopf.
I came to Born to Run through the back door of injury. A recurring shoulder problem during my swim practice sent me searching for writing about the relationship between barefoot mechanics, natural movement, and pain-free endurance – and McDougall’s book was everywhere. What I found was less a running manual and more an ethnographic adventure, structured around the Tarahumara people of Mexico’s Copper Canyon and their capacity for joyful, effortless ultra-distance running.
McDougall’s central argument – that human bodies are evolutionary running machines whose capacities have been suppressed by modern footwear and sedentary culture – connects directly to the biophilia and nature-deficit frameworks I engage through Wilson (1984) and Louv (2005). His account of the Tarahumara runners carries an anthropological dimension that I read carefully: McDougall is a Western journalist writing about an Indigenous community’s embodied practices, and the text requires critical reading for the ways it can exoticize what it admires. I hold this tension throughout, using the physiological arguments while remaining alert to the ethnographic limits.
The book’s most useful contribution to my research is its account of joyful exertion – running as play rather than punishment, endurance as pleasure rather than suffering. This reframes the therapeutic dimension of my swim practice away from a recovery-and-resilience narrative and toward something closer to restoration of a natural capacity. McDougall reads alongside Easter (2021) and Goggins (2018) as a counterpoint: where Goggins frames discomfort as conquest, McDougall frames it as homecoming. Both have a place in understanding what thirty days of cold water can offer a body.
Goggins, D. (2018). Can’t hurt me: Master your mind and defy the odds. Lioncrest Publishing.
I read Can’t Hurt Me with a researcher’s ambivalence. Goggins’s account of transforming a childhood defined by poverty, abuse, and racism into a career as a Navy SEAL and ultramarathon runner is one of the most extreme cases of somatic self-overhaul I have encountered outside clinical literature. His “40% rule” – the claim that when the mind signals exhaustion the body is only forty percent depleted – is a framework I tested against my own cold-water practice, and found both illuminating and incomplete.
Goggins offers a theory of the body that is almost the inverse of Porges (2011): where polyvagal theory frames safety and regulation as the foundations of growth, Goggins frames perpetual discomfort and self-directed hostility as the engines of transformation. The tension between these positions is productive for my research. I use Goggins as a limit case – a demonstration of what the body can survive when the mind refuses to negotiate – rather than a model for therapeutic practice. His account of dissociation during ultra-events maps onto Levine (2010)’s trauma-physiology descriptions in ways he would likely reject.
The book’s significant limitation is its lack of integration with trauma theory or feminist body scholarship. Goggins’s framework is built on a logic of conquest and self-domination that I find philosophically incompatible with the relational, restorative ethics of my research. I include him here because his testimony is real, his physiological claims are largely supported by exercise science, and because a bibliography about the limits of human endurance would be intellectually dishonest without a voice that pushes against the therapeutic consensus. He reads as a necessary interlocutor for O’Brady (2020), Easter (2021), and Jurek (2018).
Easter, M. (2021). The comfort crisis: Embrace discomfort to reclaim your wild, happy, healthy self. Rodale Books.
The Comfort Crisis arrived in my reading life at exactly the right moment: I had begun my swim practice and was trying to understand why sustained discomfort was producing something that felt more like clarity than suffering. Easter’s argument – that modern comfort has eliminated the productive stress that shaped human physiology and psychology over millennia – provided a cultural and evolutionary frame for what I was experiencing in the water.
Easter grounds his argument in a thirty-three-day solo expedition in Arctic Alaska alongside evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and interview with researchers working at the edges of stress physiology. His concept of “misogi” – a Japanese practice of undertaking one genuinely difficult challenge per year – maps onto my own thirty-day structure as a kind of annual recalibration of the nervous system. He engages the science of hormetic stress, the physiological principle that controlled doses of difficulty produce adaptive responses in the body and brain, which connects directly to the cold-water immersion research I draw on from environmental psychology and somatic literature.
The book’s limitation is its tendency toward the prescriptive: Easter’s framework can slide into a masculinized survivalism that sits uneasily alongside the feminist and trauma-informed scholarship in this bibliography. I read it alongside Herman (1992) and Porges (2011) as a corrective – the question of who gets to embrace discomfort and under what conditions is never innocent, and bodies with trauma histories require a different relationship with difficulty than Easter assumes. Still, his synthesis of evolutionary biology and lived experience offers some of the most accessible and well-sourced popular writing on embodied stress I have found.
Krakauer, J. (1997). Into thin air: A personal account of the Mount Everest disaster. Villard Books.
Into Thin Air is a book I have carried for years before this research made its place in the bibliography legible. Krakauer’s account of the 1996 Everest disaster – in which eight climbers died during a single summit day – is, on its surface, a story about catastrophic system failure at altitude. But I return to it as a phenomenology of what happens to perception, judgment, and relationship when the body is pushed far beyond its regulatory capacity.
What Krakauer documents – without the theoretical framework to name it – is a complete dysregulation of the nervous system under hypoxic stress: the flattening of emotional response, the distortion of time, the collapse of the boundary between self and environment. These are the same physiological states Porges (2011) describes as dorsal vagal shutdown, and Levine (2010) describes as freeze response. Reading Krakauer alongside somatic literature transforms the book from disaster journalism into an extreme case study of embodied threshold. His account of carrying a dying teammate across the South Col is one of the most visceral descriptions of dissociated determination I have read.
The ethical dimension of the Everest industry is also present in Krakauer’s account, and I read his reckoning with privilege, commercialisation, and risk alongside the structural critiques in this bibliography. He asks, implicitly, who has the right to place their body in extreme environments and at what cost to others – a question that resonates, at a very different register, with my own positioning as a settler researcher in Indigenous waters. I use this book as a limit case, a meditation on what happens when embodied practice loses its ethical mooring.
Lansing, A. (1959). Endurance: Shackleton’s incredible voyage. Hodder & Stoughton.
I came to Endurance through the back catalogue of polar literature and found in it something I had been looking for: a detailed, granular account of what collective survival under conditions of radical uncertainty looks like from the inside. Lansing reconstructed the 1914–1916 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition through interviews with survivors and their diaries, producing a narrative that reads as both journalism and phenomenology.
What matters to my research is Shackleton’s leadership as a regulatory practice. He kept twenty-eight men alive for nearly two years on ice and open ocean through what Lansing documents as a relentless attunement to morale – monitoring affect, redistributing hope, naming fear without amplifying it. This is, in Porges (2011)’s terms, a sustained co-regulatory practice: one person’s nervous system holding the window of tolerance open for a group. I read this alongside the relational dimensions of hooks (1994) and Herman (1992) as a demonstration that regulation is always communal before it is individual.
Lansing’s account is also a meditation on the ocean as an adversarial environment that demands complete somatic presence – there is no distraction possible when the sea is actively trying to kill you. This resonates with my own much gentler experience of the Atlantic: the water’s demands strip away the performative self and require a quality of presence that is, paradoxically, both terrifying and clarifying. Endurance belongs in this bibliography as the foundational polar narrative, the one all subsequent accounts of human endurance in extreme environments – O’Brady, Jurek, Goggins – are in dialogue with, acknowledged or otherwise.
Jurek, S. (2018). North: Finding my way while running the Appalachian Trail. Little, Brown Spark.
North arrived in my reading through the ultramarathon literature but stayed for different reasons than I expected. Jurek’s account of his 2015 attempt to break the speed record on the Appalachian Trail – 2,168 miles in under forty-six days – is ostensibly a story of athletic achievement. But the book is actually, beneath the metrics, a marriage memoir and a meditation on what happens to the self when it pushes past the point where identity holds.
Jurek documents the progressive dissolution of self under extreme sustained effort in ways that map onto the phenomenological literature I engage throughout this bibliography. By day thirty, he writes, the categories of pain and pleasure had merged into something undifferentiated: beyond suffering, into a kind of undivided presence in which the distinction between the runner and the running had collapsed. This resonates with what the phenomenological tradition calls flow, what Porges (2011) might call deep ventral vagal settling, and what I recognize from my own swim practice as the state the water eventually allows when I stop fighting it.
The book’s limitation is its relative inattention to the social and ecological dimensions of moving through a landscape. Jurek is focused inward – the external environment functions primarily as resistance to be overcome. I read him alongside Louv (2005) and Wilson (1984) as a counterpoint: what would it mean to run the AT as a practice of relationship with the landscape rather than a test of will against it? That tension – between the body as machine and the body as being-in-relation – runs through this entire section of the bibliography and finds no easy resolution.
Roll, R. (2012). Finding ultra: Rejecting middle age, becoming one of the world’s fittest men, and discovering myself. Crown Archetype.
Finding Ultra is a book about a specific kind of second act: Roll’s transformation, at age forty, from a sedentary entertainment lawyer with an alcohol problem into an elite ultra-endurance athlete. I came to it because the timeline resonated with my own – the sense that the body, at midlife, can still become something radically other than what it has been – and stayed for his account of what the shift required of him beyond the physical.
Roll’s framework is built around the convergence of plant-based nutrition, plant-based spirituality (he is a longtime meditator), and extreme physical demand. His argument that the body’s capacities are fundamentally limited by what we believe about it aligns with the somatic literature I engage through Porges (2011) and Levine (2010) – the claim that physiology is downstream of belief, and that belief is revisable through embodied experience. His account of his first ultra-triathlon finish reads, in this light, as a kind of somatic counter-narrative to the story his body had been telling him for decades.
The book’s limitation is its inspirational-memoir register, which can flatten the complexity of what transformation actually requires. Roll’s privilege – financial, temporal, familial – is present but underexamined; the question of who has access to radical physical reinvention is largely bracketed. I read him alongside Herman (1992) and Easter (2021) as a reminder that the relationship between embodied practice and psychological change is never simple and always contextual. He is most useful here as testimony: a first-person account of what the body can become when the story about it changes.
Honnold, A., & Roberts, D. (2015). Alone on the wall. W. W. Norton & Company.
I came to Alone on the Wall through the film Free Solo and stayed in the literature because Honnold’s account of free soloing – climbing sheer rock faces without ropes or protection – raises questions about the nervous system that I found nowhere else quite so precisely. His book, co-written with climbing historian David Roberts, alternates between Honnold’s first-person accounts of major free solo ascents and Roberts’s contextualising chapters on the history and culture of the practice.
What interests me is Honnold’s description of his relationship with fear – or rather, his account of its absence. He undergoes fMRI scanning that shows reduced amygdala response to threat stimuli, suggesting a neurological baseline that differs from the general population. Rather than suppressing fear, he appears to have restructured his threat-appraisal system through decades of graduated exposure. This maps onto the polyvagal framework in Porges (2011) in a direction I had previously associated only with trauma – the nervous system’s plasticity running in both directions, toward dysregulation and toward extraordinary regulation alike.
The ethical and philosophical questions the book raises are ones I hold without resolution. Honnold’s practice involves a complete willingness to die in service of perfect presence – a radical somatic commitment that sits at the far edge of what I am exploring in my swim practice. I read him alongside Krakauer (1997) as a meditation on the relationship between extreme embodied commitment and the dissolution of the performative self, and alongside Porges (2011) and Levine (2010) as evidence that the nervous system is more plastic, more trainable, and more philosophically interesting than most popular psychology acknowledges.
Davidson, R. (1980). Tracks. Jonathan Cape.
I came to Tracks through the film before I came to the book, and found the book to be what the film could only gesture toward: a record of interior transformation rendered in prose that is spare, honest, and uninterested in sentimentality. Davidson’s account of her 1,700-mile solo walk across the Australian desert with four camels and a dog named Diggity is, at its surface, a feat of endurance. Beneath the surface it is a sustained inquiry into what the self becomes when it is stripped of the social performance structures that normally organize it.
What makes Tracks essential reading for this project is Davidson’s attention to the phenomenology of sustained aloneness in a vast, indifferent landscape – her account of how attention reorganises itself, how the categories of effort and rest begin to blur, how the boundary between the self and the environment gradually softens without disappearing. These are the same shifts I track in my own swim practice, at a radically different scale, and Davidson’s prose gives me language for what I experience as almost pre-linguistic. She is writing what Haraway (2016) would call a situated knowledge – a knowledge that could only come from inside a specific body moving through a specific place over a specific duration.
The book is also a document of what it costs to do something the culture around you cannot quite make sense of. Davidson navigates the desert and the media attention that accompanied her – National Geographic funded the trip in exchange for photographs – and her reckoning with the economy of the gaze, the way being watched transforms the watched, runs throughout the book in ways that resonate with my own questions about research, performance, and authenticity. I read Tracks alongside Nash (2004) and Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) as evidence that the most rigorous scholarship sometimes arrives in literary form, without footnotes, and without apology.
Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions.
Braiding Sweetgrass arrived in my reading through the land acknowledgement work I undertook alongside this research, and it changed the philosophical terrain beneath my feet. Kimmerer, a botanist and member of the Potawatomi Nation, weaves Indigenous plant knowledge with Western scientific ecology in a form that is itself a methodological argument: the two ways of knowing are presented as complementary intelligences rather than competing truth claims. Her prose is luminous, and the book has become one of those rare texts that functions simultaneously as scholarship, testimony, and gift.
What Kimmerer gives this project most directly is her concept of reciprocity as an ecological and ethical foundation – the argument that the land is a subject with whom we are in relationship rather than a resource to be accessed or an environment to be used. This reframes my swim practice from a therapeutic extraction – I go to the sea to receive something – toward a relational encounter in which something is also offered in return. Her grammar of animacy, derived from Potawatomi linguistic structure, suggests that the water is a living being to whom I have obligations, a framing I hold alongside Wilson (1984)’s biophilia hypothesis and Louv (2005)’s nature-deficit work as a more ethically complex account of the human-nature relationship.
The limitation I hold alongside this text is the same one I carry throughout this bibliography when engaging Indigenous scholarship: the responsibility to receive the work on its own terms rather than to appropriate its framework for settler research purposes. Kimmerer’s generosity in sharing this knowledge is a gift that carries obligations, and I read her alongside Haraway (2016) and the land acknowledgement literature in this project as a continuous reminder that the relationship between Indigenous knowledge, settler research, and the land itself requires ongoing ethical attention.
Solnit, R. (2000). Wanderlust: A history of walking. Viking.
I came to Wanderlust looking for a history and found a philosophy. Solnit’s wide-ranging account of walking – as a physical act, a political practice, a mode of thought, an aesthetic form, a means of encounter with landscape, and a technology of selfhood – gave me a conceptual architecture I had been assembling haphazardly from memoir and somatic theory. She moves from Rousseau’s walking to the Situationist dérive to the feminist walker to the Sierra Club hiker with an ease that reflects genuine intellectual range, and the book remains one of the most cited works in the scholarship of embodied landscape practice.
What matters most to this project is Solnit’s argument that walking – and by extension any sustained embodied movement through landscape – produces a specific kind of thought that is unavailable in other conditions: associative, unhurried, responsive to the particular. This resonates with what I notice in the water: the forty-minute swim produces a quality of mind that the desk cannot. Solnit traces this phenomenology through a history of walkers who made it their practice – Wordsworth, Thoreau, Virginia Woolf – and her account of walking as the condition for the great Romantic poetry of interiority connects directly to the literary traditions I work within through Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) and Nash (2004).
The book’s limitation for my purposes is its relative inattention to the body’s physiological experience of movement – Solnit is primarily a cultural historian and her walking is largely ambulatory and temperate rather than somatic and demanding. I read her alongside Easter (2021), Goggins (2018), and the cold-water immersion literature as a reminder that the phenomenology of gentle walking in familiar landscape is meaningfully different from the phenomenology of sustained physical demand in an inhospitable environment. Both produce valuable kinds of consciousness; they are related but distinct. Solnit covers the former with unmatched depth; the rest of this section of the bibliography fills in the latter.
Williams, F. (2017). The nature fix: Why nature makes us happier, healthier, and more creative. W. W. Norton & Company.
The Nature Fix gave me the empirical architecture that Louv (2005) gestures toward but leaves unbuilt. Florence Williams – a journalist and contributing editor at Outside magazine – spent years embedded with researchers in Finland, Japan, South Korea, and the United States studying measurable effects of nature exposure on human physiology and cognition. The result is a book that is both rigorously sourced and compellingly readable, moving between field research and personal testimony with the skill of a writer who understands that data and story are complementary rather than opposed modes of knowing.
What Williams offers this research is specificity: the Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku – forest bathing – and the physiological research it has generated (reduced cortisol, lowered blood pressure, enhanced NK cell activity, improved mood regulation) provides a scientific foundation for the claims I make about cold-water sea swimming that first-person phenomenology alone cannot supply. She also engages the question of mechanism – why nature produces these effects – in ways that connect directly to Porges (2011)’s polyvagal framework and Ulrich (1983)’s attention restoration research, giving the whole section of this bibliography a more cohesive empirical spine.
The limitation Williams herself names is the gap between laboratory-measurable effects and the full quality of what nature contact provides: she is candid that the metrics capture a slice of something that exceeds measurement. I read this alongside Herman (1992) and Mertens (2008) as a methodological invitation: what the empirical research cannot measure, the phenomenological and narrative methods of this project are better positioned to address. Williams and I are working on different parts of the same question, and together our approaches offer a more complete account than either alone.
Films
Chin, J., & Vasarhelyi, E. C. (Directors). (2018). Free Solo [Film]. National Geographic Documentary Films.
Free Solo arrived for me as a film about attention before it was a film about climbing. I watched it twice before beginning this research – once as a viewer and once as a researcher – and the second viewing revealed something the first had obscured: that what the film is really documenting is the construction of a self capable of a specific kind of sustained, death-stakes presence. Honnold’s preparation for the free solo ascent of El Capitan is, in methodological terms, a multi-year somatic training program with no margin for dysregulation.
The film’s contribution to this bibliography is its visual argument – something that written accounts of extreme embodied practice cannot fully make – that the body in genuine high-stakes commitment looks entirely different from the body performing commitment. Honnold’s movement on the wall has a quality of ease, fluency, and presence that the camera captures in ways that written memoir cannot. This matters for my research because it grounds the abstract claims of polyvagal theory and somatic psychology in visible, verifiable form: this is what a regulated nervous system looks like under extreme demand.
The film also raises unresolved questions about the costs of radical somatic commitment to relational life. The scenes between Honnold and his partner, Sanni McCandless, document the tension between a life organized entirely around a single embodied practice and the claims of intimacy and relationship. I read this alongside hooks (1994) and Herman (1992) as evidence that no embodied methodology is ever simply personal – it is always also relational, and the ethics of that relationship require attention.
Vallée, J.-M. (Director). (2014). Wild [Film]. Fox Searchlight Pictures.
I watched the film adaptation of Strayed’s memoir after rereading the book with this research in mind, and found it a useful complement rather than a substitute. Vallée’s directorial approach – fragmented flashback structure, minimal dialogue, emphasis on the physical texture of the trail – attempts to render on screen what Strayed renders in prose: the non-linear, associative quality of memory under physical duress. The film does this imperfectly but interestingly, and the gaps between what the book says and what the film can say illuminate something about the limits of each medium.
What the film adds to the book is Reese Witherspoon’s physical performance, which makes visible the somatic argument that Strayed’s prose makes verbally. The moments when Witherspoon’s body simply moves through landscape – without dialogue, without flashback, without narration – are the moments the film is most fully itself. These sequences function as what Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) call writing as inquiry: the medium discovering its subject through the act of its own making.
The film’s limitation is the tendency of the Hollywood adaptation frame to arc toward redemption in ways the book resists. Strayed’s prose holds the mess; the film, through its casting and its music choices, leans toward triumph. I use this gap as a methodological note: the same embodied story can be told in ways that close down or open up its complexity, and the choices made in that telling are always also ethical choices. This resonates with the SPN methodology I draw from Nash (2004) and the textual ethics I engage through Richardson and St. Pierre (2005).
Curran, J. (Director). (2013). Tracks [Film]. See-Saw Films.
Tracks is the film in this section I return to most often, and the one that sits closest to the centre of my research. Based on Robyn Davidson’s 1980 memoir of her 1,700-mile solo walk across the Australian desert with four camels and a dog, the film adaptation foregrounds the quality of solitude in landscape that Davidson’s book also documents – but through the medium of image, it makes visible something the book can only describe: the gradual dissolution of the performed self under sustained contact with an enormous, indifferent environment.
What the film captures, and what connects it to the somatic and ecological frameworks throughout this bibliography, is the phenomenology of radical aloneness in a non-human landscape: the way attention reorganises itself when there is no social audience, no screen, no schedule. Davidson’s experience – documented in the film through Mia Wasikowska’s largely interior performance – is the closest cinematic analogue I have found to what I am attempting to describe through thirty days of sea swimming. The environment is different; the quality of enforced presence is recognisable.
The film’s engagement with Davidson’s relationship to the Pitjantjatjara elder Mr. Eddie, who assists her passage through sacred country, raises questions about settler access to Indigenous land and knowledge that the film handles with more care than many in this genre. I read it alongside the land acknowledgement scholarship in this bibliography and my own positioning as a settler researcher in Mi’kmaq and Monqui and Cochimí territory. Davidson’s account of moving through country with permission and relationship, rather than across it as conquest, is one model of what ethical embodied research in landscape might look like.
Lowell, J., & Mortimer, P. (Directors). (2017). The Dawn Wall [Film]. Red Bull Media House.
I came to The Dawn Wall through Free Solo and found it, in many ways, the more philosophically complex of the two films. Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson’s 2015 free ascent of the Dawn Wall on El Capitan – considered the hardest rock climb ever completed – is remarkable enough. But what the film centres is the nineteen-year backstory: Caldwell’s hostage situation in Kyrgyzstan, the loss of his index finger, the dissolution of his first marriage, and his eventual understanding that the Dawn Wall project had become, for him, a mode of meaning-making that was inseparable from the climb itself.
The film’s contribution to this bibliography is its portrait of embodied practice as a container for psychological integration. Caldwell’s relationship with the wall – which he mapped, memorised, and attempted over years – functions in the film as what Herman (1992) would call a narrative of mastery: a story the body tells itself to rewrite the story of what happened to it. The Dawn Wall became, for Caldwell, the site of his own reconstitution, and the film documents that process with a patience and complexity that the adventure-film genre rarely allows.
I read this film alongside Porges (2011) and Levine (2010) as a visual case study in somatic integration following extreme trauma, and alongside Honnold and Roberts (2015) as a contrast: where Honnold’s practice is oriented toward the elimination of fear, Caldwell’s is oriented toward its transformation. Both are legitimate; both illuminate different dimensions of what sustained embodied commitment can do for a nervous system that has been broken and is working toward wholeness.
Zhao, C. (Director). (2020). Nomadland [Film]. Searchlight Pictures.
Nomadland belongs in this bibliography for reasons that sit at the intersection of methodology and subject matter. Zhao’s film – based on Jessica Bruder’s 2017 nonfiction book – follows Fern, a woman in her sixties who begins living in her van after the economic collapse of her Nevada town, through the landscapes and communities of contemporary American nomadism. What the film documents is a form of embodied dwelling that is both compelled and chosen, both loss and freedom.
Zhao’s directorial approach is itself a methodological statement: she cast many actual van-dwelling nomads alongside Frances McDormand, blurring the line between documentary and fiction in ways that resonate with the blurred genre boundaries of SPN methodology. The film’s epistemology is relational and emergent – it discovers its subject through sustained presence rather than imposed narrative arc. This resonates with Richardson and St. Pierre (2005)’s account of writing as inquiry and with the methodological commitments of this entire project.
The film’s subject – women in later life who have given up fixed dwelling to move through landscape with minimal possessions – connects to the themes of impermanence, presence, and the sufficiency of the moment that run through my swim practice. Fern’s relationship with the American West is, in ecological terms, what Louv (2005) and Wilson (1984) describe as nature-contact as psychological necessity: she is most fully herself when she is moving through open country. I use this film as a meditation on the relationship between belonging, landscape, and the kind of self that emerges when the social scaffolding of fixed address is removed.
Chin, J., & Vasarhelyi, E. C. (Directors). (2015). Meru [Film]. Music Box Films.
I watched Meru after Free Solo and found it the more emotionally available of the two films. Where Free Solo documents a solo act of precision, Meru documents something relational: the 2011 first ascent of the Shark’s Fin route on Meru Peak in the Indian Himalayas by three climbers – Jimmy Chin, Conrad Anker, and Renan Ozturk – whose friendship, injury, and grief are as central to the film as the climbing itself. The route had defeated every previous attempt; the ascent took five days of continuous commitment on a wall that offers no retreat.
What makes Meru significant for this bibliography is its portrait of how extreme embodied commitment functions differently in the context of relationship. Where Honnold and Roberts (2015) and O’Brady (2020) offer accounts of the solo practitioner, Chin, Anker, and Ozturk demonstrate what co-regulation under radical stress looks like: the way one person’s panic can be held by another’s steadiness, the way shared suffering can deepen rather than damage intimacy, the way the decision to continue is negotiated between bodies rather than made in isolation. This is Porges (2011)’s co-regulation rendered in ice and granite.
The film is also a meditation on risk, grief, and the ethics of return. Anker had survived the 1999 Everest disaster that killed his mentor and climbing partner Alex Lowe; Ozturk had suffered a near-fatal skiing accident in Wyoming and was still recovering when the Meru attempt began. Their presence on the wall is inseparable from their history of loss, and the film makes visible what somatic theory describes abstractly: the body’s way of carrying what has happened to it into the next thing it attempts, and the particular courage of continuing to attempt difficult things after being badly hurt.
Mortimer, P., & Rosen, N. (Directors). (2021). The Alpinist [Film]. Roadside Attractions.
The Alpinist is the most philosophically troubling film in this section, and the one I return to most frequently. It documents Marc-André Leclerc, a young Canadian climber who was, at the time of filming, completing routes that elite alpinists described as impossible – alone, in winter, without publicity, and without any apparent interest in recognition. The film catches him in a moment before the world fully catches him: within two years of the main footage, Leclerc would disappear on a solo winter climb in Alaska.
What the film makes visible is a relationship with embodied practice so complete that it has become, for Leclerc, essentially identical with existence itself. He climbs the way others breathe – without deliberation, without calculation of consequence, without the instrumental framework that structures most discussions of endurance and achievement. His nervous system, as best the film can document, has reorganised itself entirely around the demands of extreme alpine terrain. This sits at the very far edge of what Porges (2011) describes as autonomic regulation, and raises genuine questions about the distinction between transcendence and dissolution.
I hold this film alongside Krakauer (1997) and Goggins (2018) as a limit case – a portrait of embodied commitment so extreme that it provides a kind of negative space against which my own much more modest practice becomes legible. Leclerc is the figure beyond whom my research cannot follow without abandoning its ethical commitments to survival, relationship, and the value of the self that endures. His film belongs here as evidence that the questions this bibliography raises – about the body, about commitment, about presence – extend further than most of us will ever need to go, and that this extension is itself instructive.
Talks
Goggins, D. (2019). How to build mental toughness [Video]. YouTube.
I came to this talk through the book but found it useful as a standalone source because the spoken register makes visible something the book’s written bravado can obscure: Goggins’s genuine vulnerability beneath the performance of invulnerability. In conversation format – this particular talk is a long-form interview rather than a lecture – he is more unguarded about the cost of his methodology, and the moments when that guard drops are methodologically significant for my research.
The talk’s central contribution is its account of what Goggins calls the “accountability mirror” – a practice of radical self-confrontation that he frames as the foundation of all subsequent physical and psychological transformation. This resonates, in unexpected ways, with the reflective practice frameworks in Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) and Nash (2004): the argument that transformation requires a prior willingness to see the self clearly, however uncomfortable that clarity is. The form is different; the underlying epistemological commitment is recognisable.
I hold this talk in tension with the somatic and feminist scholarship throughout this bibliography. Goggins’s framework of self-domination requires critical reading alongside Herman (1992)’s account of what sustained self-assault – even self-directed – can do to a nervous system over time. I use it here as one voice in a productive disagreement about what the body can and should be asked to endure, and under what conditions difficulty becomes generative rather than harmful.
O’Brady, C. (2018). Change your mindset and achieve anything [Video]. TEDxPortland.
This TEDx talk is O’Brady’s most condensed articulation of the mindset framework he develops at length in his books, and I include it here because the twenty-minute format forces a clarity that the book format sometimes diffuses. His central claim – that the limits we encounter in physical and psychological life are primarily conceptual rather than physiological – is stated here with an economy that makes both its power and its limitations immediately apparent.
What is useful about the talk for my research is O’Brady’s account of the specific moment during his Antarctic crossing when he chose to continue after his body was signalling that continuation was impossible. His description of that threshold – the gap between what the body reports and what the mind decides – is a precise phenomenological account of what polyvagal theory describes as the override of dorsal vagal shutdown by ventral vagal agency. O’Brady would likely resist that framing; I find the resonance across these very different discourses useful for the interdisciplinary project of this bibliography.
The talk’s limitation is its format: the TED genre demands uplift, actionability, and the resolution of complexity into transferable takeaway. O’Brady delivers all three, and in doing so flattens some of the genuine phenomenological texture that his books preserve. I use this talk as an accessible entry point into his framework, held alongside the longer accounts in his books and in ongoing tension with the structural critiques offered by Herman (1992), Mertens (2008), and the feminist methodology literature throughout this bibliography.
Iyer, P. (2014). The art of stillness [Video]. TED.
Pico Iyer’s TED talk is the quietest source in this section and, in some ways, the most important. Where the endurance literature circles the question of what the body can do, Iyer addresses what the body can be still enough to notice. His argument – that in an accelerating world the most radical act is the cultivation of stillness – arrived for me as a reframing of what my swim practice was actually about. I had been theorizing it through exertion and threshold; Iyer reminded me that the water was also a place of arrival.
Iyer draws on his own practice of annual silent retreat at a Benedictine monastery in California alongside interviews with figures like Leonard Cohen, who spent five years at a Zen monastery on Mount Baldy. His central claim – that the point of stillness is the recovery of the dimension of the self that moving too fast forecloses – connects directly to Louv (2005)’s nature-deficit framework, Wilson (1984)’s biophilia hypothesis, and the contemplative traditions I engage through Merton (1968) and Palmer (2004) elsewhere in this bibliography. Iyer gives these threads a contemporary, secular, accessible articulation.
The talk’s limitation is its relative inattention to the structural conditions that make stillness possible. Iyer’s ability to spend months in Japan and at a Californian monastery is, like most practices described in this section, contingent on significant privilege – temporal, financial, geographical. I hold this alongside the equity and access critiques in Mertens (2008) and Herman (1992) as a reminder that the practices this bibliography describes are available to me in part because of conditions that are far from universal. The ethics of researching embodied practices from a position of privilege requires ongoing attention, and Iyer’s talk, for all its genuine insight, is itself a site of that reckoning.
Brown, B. (2010). The power of vulnerability [Video]. TEDxHouston.
I came to Brené Brown’s TEDxHouston talk through the shame research, and stayed because she named something I had been circling in my own practice without finding language for: the relationship between vulnerability and genuine connection, and the way the attempt to armour against the former forecloses the possibility of the latter. The talk is now one of the most-viewed TED lectures in history, which can make it easy to underestimate – it has become so familiar it can be consumed as affirmation rather than as provocation.
What Brown contributes to this bibliography is a social-psychological framework for why the embodied practices documented in the Books section of this chapter work the way they do. The logic of cold-water swimming, solo wilderness travel, and extreme physical commitment is, in her terms, a practice of deliberate vulnerability: a willingness to enter conditions where the outcome is genuinely uncertain and the armour has to come off. Her research on wholehearted living – the finding that people who report the most sense of belonging and connection are those who have made peace with vulnerability as a condition of their lives – connects directly to Herman (1992)’s account of recovery and hooks (1994)’s pedagogy of engagement.
The limitation is one Brown herself would acknowledge: the twenty-minute format forces compression that her longer books handle with more nuance, and the talk’s enormous popularity has generated a cultural tendency to deploy “vulnerability” as a performance rather than a practice – to commodify the very openness it advocates. I read this talk alongside Nash (2004) and Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) as a reminder that genuine vulnerability in scholarship, as in life, requires structural conditions – time, relationship, safety – rather than mere willingness, and that the presence of those conditions is always a matter of context and privilege as much as personal courage.
Waldinger, R. (2015). What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness [Video]. TEDxBeaconStreet.
Robert Waldinger’s TEDxBeaconStreet talk presents findings from the Harvard Study of Adult Development – a longitudinal study of human wellbeing running since 1938, which Waldinger directs. Its central finding, derived from tracking two cohorts of men from young adulthood through old age, is as simple to state as it is difficult to fully receive: the quality of human relationships is the strongest predictor of health, happiness, and longevity. More than wealth, fame, status, or physical vitality. Relationships.
I include this talk because it provides the most empirically grounded articulation of what hooks (1994), Herman (1992), and Porges (2011) argue from different disciplinary positions: that the fundamental unit of human flourishing is relational rather than individual. For a project grounded in a solo practice – thirty days of solitary sea swimming – this finding requires careful integration rather than dismissal. What the study actually shows is that quality of connection matters more than quantity or form, and that solitary practices engaged in the context of meaningful relationships produce different outcomes than those engaged as substitutes for them.
The talk’s limitation is its focus on male participants in the original cohort, which limits the generalisability of the findings and raises the kind of feminist methodological questions that Mertens (2008) and hooks (1994) would direct toward it. Waldinger acknowledges this directly. I hold it alongside the feminist and critical methodological literature in this bibliography as a reminder that even the longest-running study can encode the blind spots of its historical moment, and that the question of whose wellbeing gets studied, and how, is itself a question about power and value.
