Reading Time: 32 minutes

What Was Found, What Was Made, What Remains

---

Concluding the Creative Thesis

30 Days by the Sea: A Research Inquiry into Alonetude

Amy Tucker

Master of Arts in Human Rights and Social Justice

Thompson Rivers University

Secwépemc Territory  |  Kamloops, British Columbia

March 1, 2026

---

Audre Lorde (1988) argued that tending to one’s own survival and well-being is a political act rather than a private luxury, a form of resistance against systems that benefit from the exhaustion and self-erasure of those they marginalize.

Keywords: alonetude, creative thesis, precarious academic labour, embodiment, human right to rest, scholarly personal narrative, body-based inquiry, arts-based research, healing, social justice

---

Part I: The Threshold Crossed

I went to Loreto for a reason I could barely articulate at the time. I had lost the capacity to feel the difference between exhaustion and living, and I needed to know whether that difference still existed.

After nineteen years of precarious academic labour, contract work that renewed semester by semester, sometimes week by week, always with the implicit understanding that gratitude was the appropriate response to continued employment, I was laid off due to unstable enrolments. The termination arrived less as a single event than as the final gesture of a system that had been slowly extracting my health, my time, my creative energy, and my sense of worth for more than two decades. By the time it ended, my body had been keeping score for so long that I could no longer read the tally.

So I went to the sea. I went to Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico, a small town on the Sea of Cortez where desert mountains meet turquoise water, and pelicans dive without needing permission. I went alone. I stayed for thirty days. And I documented what happened when a woman who had spent her adult life performing competence, availability, and resilience finally stopped performing anything at all. I called this practice alonetude (defined in this study as intentional, embodied solitude practised as a method of healing, reflection, and critical inquiry), and I wrote about it every day on a blog called The Third Shore.

This document is the concluding chapter of that creative thesis. It gathers what was found, names what was made, and offers what remains, offered as reckoning rather than resolution. A reckoning with the body. With the institution. With the structures that produce exhaustion and then pathologize the exhausted. With what it means to heal in public, through scholarship and art, and to insist that the personal is more than political: it is methodological.

Aquí estoy. Here I am. Still.

What I Carried

I arrived in Loreto on January 1, 2026, carrying a suitcase, a camera, books, and a body that had forgotten how to rest without guilt. The body is, as Bessel van der Kolk (2014) argues, an archive. Mine held nineteen years of contract uncertainty, of scanning inboxes for renewal notices, of performing wellness during semesters when depression had made getting dressed an act of will. My shoulders had been braced so long that I no longer noticed the bracing. My jaw ached from holding words I was unable to afford to say. My sleep had been fractured for years, my nervous system perpetually scanning for threat in the way that Stephen Porges (2011) describes as the body’s instinct to scan for safety, the body’s unconscious assessment of safety or danger operating below conscious awareness.

I also carried grief. My adult son was deep in addiction, and I had been witnessing his disappearance, what Pauline Boss (1999) names ambiguous loss, the grief that arrives when someone is physically present but psychologically gone. My mother, eighty years old in Lethbridge, was declining slowly, and I was learning that midlife is the season when you parent in both directions simultaneously. I carried the accumulated weight of generational care.

And I carried a question that had been forming for months, a question I had yet to articulate fully but that Byung-Chul Han (2015) would later help me name: What happens when the structures meant to sustain us are the very structures producing our exhaustion?

This inquiry enters an established conversation about the value of solitude in intellectual and creative life. Paul Tillich (1963) explored how solitude functions less as absence than as presence, a condition in which the self becomes available to itself. More recently, scholars in contemplative studies have examined how sustained aloneness supports reflection, creativity, and moral discernment. Alonetude extends rather than borrows from this tradition by situating solitude within the specific conditions of precarious academic labour and by proposing that chosen solitude can function simultaneously as a personal healing practice, a methodological approach, and a structural critique.

---

What the Sea Received

Title: What the Sea Receives

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

The sea received all of it. Water is metaphorically healing, yes, but because the sea requires no performance. It holds no evaluation. The tide comes in regardless of whether you are productive or paralyzed, published or precarious. The pelicans dive without concern for your curriculum vitae.

As described in the preceding artist statement, it is the gentle pull of the natural world that served as medicine. For thirty days, the Sea of Cortez offered it freely. I watched. I walked. I photographed. I wept. I wrote. And slowly, in increments so small they were sometimes invisible, my nervous system began to recalibrate.

Descansa, the sea seemed to say. Rest. And I did. And I wept. And both were holy.

A Note on Who I Am and Where I Stand

I am a white, settler, cisgender woman. I am a contract academic worker with 19 years of experience, now completing a Master of Arts in Human Rights and Social Justice at Thompson Rivers University on Secwépemc Territory. I write from within the very conditions I am studying. My body has been a site of precarious labour and its aftermath. My experience of exhaustion, recovery, and alonetude is simultaneously my subject of inquiry and my method of knowing. I hold both the specific vulnerability of a contingent worker and the specific privilege of someone with the education, means, and mobility to spend thirty days by the sea. I name both because both are true, and because the scholarly personal narrative tradition (Nash, 2004) asks us to be accountable to the lived ground of our knowing.

---

Part II: Findings, What the Body Learned

This research documented a thirty-day solo retreat through daily written reflection, contemplative photography, and theoretical analysis, producing an integrated qualitative record of embodied experience. The thirty-day retreat unfolded in four distinct phases, each documented through daily blog entries that combined the Scholarly Personal Narrative methodology with contemplative photography, creative writing, and interdisciplinary theoretical engagement. The phases arrived without being planned in advance. They emerged, as qualitative data does, through the process of attending to what was actually happening rather than imposing a predetermined framework onto experience.

Robert Nash (2004) describes Scholarly Personal Narrative as a methodology that positions lived experience as legitimate scholarly data when properly theorized within academic frameworks. Nash (2004) often describes Scholarly Personal Narrative as involving three interwoven voices operating simultaneously: the personal voice that speaks authentically from lived experience, the scholarly voice that contextualizes experience within theoretical frameworks, and the universal voice that connects individual experience to broader human concerns. While related to personally-grounded traditions, this study adopts Nash’s Scholarly Personal Narrative framework, which explicitly integrates personal experience, theoretical analysis, and universal insight. This methodology guided every blog entry. What follows are the findings that emerged when those three voices were permitted to speak together across thirty days. The four phases that emerged from this documentation are summarized in Table 1.

Table 1

Four Phases of the Alonetude Retreat

Phase	Days	Embodied Experience	Theoretical Framework
1. Arrival and Disorientation	Days 1–7	Guilt at stillness; body bracing against perceived threat; inability to rest without productive justification; scanning for danger in a safe environment; early photographs of weathered objects and thresholds	how the nervous system responds to safety and threat (Porges, 2011); the body’s instinct to scan for safety; the quiet way nature restores us theory (Kaplan & Kaplan, 1989); liminality (Turner, 1969)
2. Softening and Grief	Days 8–18	Tears arriving unbidden; dreams returning; body softening; dark emotions emerging; grief for lost years surfacing once the nervous system registered safety; photographs of absence and shadows	Dark emotions (Greenspan, 2003); emotional alchemy; embodied trauma (van der Kolk, 2014); ambiguous loss (Boss, 1999); emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983)
3. Clarity and Naming	Days 19–25	Structural critique emerging from personal experience; naming precarity as a system rather than personal failing; refusing self-blame; photographs of gathering, arrangement, and quiet order; writing with increasing directness	Burnout society (Han, 2015); academic capitalism (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004); situated knowledges (Haraway, 1988); radical rest as resistance (Hersey, 2022; Lorde, 1988)
4. Integration and Departure	Days 26–31	Carrying practice forward; alonetude as portable rather than place-dependent; colour returning to visual practice; goodbye as continuation; photographs of fragments in new context; return home to Harrison Hot Springs	Wholehearted living (Brown, 2010); contemplative photography (Karr & Wood, 2011); human rights integration (UDHR; ICESCR); self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000)

Note. Phases emerged inductively from daily documentation rather than being imposed predetermined. The transitions between phases were gradual rather than discrete, with considerable blurring between adjacent stages. UDHR = Universal Declaration of Human Rights. ICESCR = International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

Phase One: Arrival and Disorientation (Days 1–7)

The first week was the hardest. Less because anything felt wrong than because nothing was required of me, and I was uncertain how to inhabit that freedom. Nineteen years of precarious academic labour had trained my nervous system to equate stillness with danger. When there was nothing to do, my body interpreted the lack of demand as a threat.

Porges (2011) explains this through the concept of the body’s instinct to scan for safety, the autonomic nervous system’s below-conscious evaluation of environmental safety. In environments characterized by chronic uncertainty, the system defaults to the body’s alert state (the fight-or-flight response) or, when activation is unsustainable, to dorsal vagal shutdown (the freeze response characterized by numbness, disconnection, and the flat affect that can resemble depressive states). After decades of contract labour, where each semester brought the question of whether employment would continue, my body’s instinct to scan for safety had been calibrated to threat. Safety felt unfamiliar. Rest felt suspicious.

Title: Still Here

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

I documented this in early blog entries through language that surprised me with its honesty. I wrote about the guilt that arrived when I sat without producing anything. I photographed weathered objects, worn shoes, abandoned bags, and driftwood arranged by no one, because these objects held the quality of having endured without performance. They had been shaped by time and elements rather than will. They were still here. They were enough.

Victor Turner (1969) describes liminality as the threshold state between what was and what will be, a space characterized by ambiguity, disorientation, and the dissolution of previous identity structures. The first week in Loreto was deeply liminal. I was no longer an instructor (the institution had ensured that), and still becoming whatever I was becoming, suspended between identities in a small town where no one knew my professional history and no one cared.

The shoreline became a metaphor and a method. Where desert met sea, where sand became water, where solid ground gave way to something that moved, these edges held the quality of my own transition. I began to call this space the third shore: beyond loneliness, beyond solitude, but the liminal territory between them where the labour of transformation occurs. The term third shore refers to the liminal space between loneliness and solitude, a conceptual terrain where imposed isolation can be transformed into chosen presence. In this thesis, the third shore functions both as a metaphor and as a methodological site, a place where personal narrative, visual practice, and structural analysis meet.

Title: The Third Shore

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

Phase Two: Softening and Grief (Days 8–18)

Around the eighth day, something shifted. My body, having spent a week registering the absence of institutional threat, began to soften. And with the softening came grief.

Title: The Door That Has Outlasted Its Institution

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

This was a demanding process. On Day 17, I was watching pelicans fish, and suddenly I was weeping, the kind of crying that starts somewhere below the ribs and moves through the whole body, the kind that makes you sit down because standing requires more structure than you currently have.

Miriam Greenspan (2003) names grief, fear, and despair as dark emotions, beyond negative: purposeful, carrying information the body needs us to know. She writes that the dark emotions become toxic through our strategies of avoiding rather than through their presence: suppressing, denying, transcending prematurely, and escaping. The emotions themselves are neutral. Essential. Diagnostic. Greenspan offers a process she calls emotional alchemy, moving through seven steps: intention, affirmation, bodily sensation, contextualization, non-action, action, and transformation.

What I was grieving was complex. I was grieving the lost years, the decades spent overworking, taking on multiple contracts because I feared having none, trying to be everything for everyone while the institution offered nothing in return but the implication that I should be grateful for the opportunity. I was grieving what Arlie Hochschild (1983) calls the accumulated toll of emotional labour, the invisible work of managing feelings, performing wellness, maintaining the appearance of someone who was coping when coping had become its own full-time occupation.

Finalmente segura para sentir. Finally safe enough to feel.

Title: Presence Registered

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

The photographs from this phase documented absence: shadows on sand, empty doorways, objects at rest. The camera became what Ariella Azoulay (2008) describes as a civil instrument, one that witnesses conditions rather than producing beauty. Each image was a quiet refusal to look away from what had been endured.

Phase Three: Clarity and Naming (Days 19–25)

Once the grief had been met rather than avoided, something unexpected happened: clarity arrived. It was the clarity of better questions rather than settled answers. The question shifted from the one I had been asking myself for years, What is wrong with me?, to the one that structural analysis demands: What conditions produced this outcome, and who else is affected?

This shift is the central methodological commitment of the thesis. It is the inversion that transforms personal narrative into structural critique, that moves individual suffering from the domain of pathology to the domain of politics. Byung-Chul Han (2015) provides the theoretical architecture for this inversion through his concept of the burnout society, a society in which the imperative to achieve replaces external discipline with internal compulsion, producing subjects who exploit themselves more effectively than any external authority could. The achievement-subject, Han argues, is simultaneously a perpetrator and a victim, an exploiter and an exploited. The violence is auto-aggressive.

Guy Standing’s (2011) concept of the precariat, a new social class defined by chronic insecurity, lack of occupational identity, and truncated access to rights, gave me language for my structural position within the academy. I was far more than a contract worker; I was a member of a structurally produced class whose insecurity was functional rather than incidental, serving the institution’s need for flexible, disposable, and infinitely replaceable labour. Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades (2004) name this system academic capitalism, the regime in which universities operate as market actors, treating knowledge and labour as commodities to be extracted rather than cultivated.

The blog entries from this phase became more direct. I named what had happened to me as structural harm rather than personal failure. I examined Erving Goffman’s (1959) distinction between frontstage performance and backstage reality, recognizing how decades of performing competence and wellness had depleted the very resources those performances were designed to protect. I wrote about the invisibility of precarious academic work: the grading done at midnight, the courses prepared without compensation, the emotional labour of caring for students while the institution extended care to no one, least of all those doing the work.

Phase Four: Integration and Departure (Days 26–31)

The final phase was characterized by integration rather than resolution. Alonetude, I understood now, was a practice rather than a destination, portable, repeatable, available anywhere one was willing to turn toward oneself with intention and without judgment. On Day 27, I photographed in colour, departing from the black-and-white aesthetic that had defined the retreat. Colour arrived when I was ready to receive it. A flash of orange fruit. A red Volkswagen. Bougainvillea against a desert wall. Andy Karr and Michael Wood (2011) describe this in their work on contemplative photography, the practice of seeing with fresh perception, of receiving visual experience as it presents itself rather than imposing narrative upon it.

Title: The Colour That Arrived

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

On Day 28, I wrote about the quiet permission of invisibility, the discovery that being unseen in a small Mexican town, where no one knew my professional history, had allowed me to encounter myself without the armour of institutional identity. On Day 29, the shore began to speak: I photographed bricks embedded in sand, feathers after ascent, footprints being erased by tide, bone fragments that might be smiling. These images were the healing itself, made visible through a methodology that treats art-making as a form of knowledge production (Leavy, 2015).

Title: Without Concern for Your Curriculum Vitae

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

On Day 31, I said goodbye to Baja and returned to Canada. On February 1, I arrived at Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia, and practised alonetude in community, carrying the discipline of chosen presence into shared space. The practice had become what Brené Brown (2010) might recognize as an expression of wholehearted living: the willingness to be imperfect, to set boundaries, and to let go of who you thought you were supposed to be in order to become who you are. The evolution of the nervous system response across the retreat is documented in Table 2.

Title: Still Here (Harrison)

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, February 2026

Table 2

Nervous System Transitions Across the Retreat

Nervous System State	Retreat Phase	Embodied Indicators	Photographic Register
Involuntary weeping, fatigue, deep sleep, appetite changes, and dreams returning	Phase 1: Arrival	Braced shoulders, clenched jaw, fractured sleep, guilt at rest, scanning	Weathered objects, harsh contrast, thresholds, fixed frame perspectives
Dorsal vagal (freeze/grief)	Phase 2: Softening	Involuntary weeping, fatigue, deep sleep, appetite changes, and dreams returning	Shadows, absences, empty spaces, under-exposure, blur, ground-level
Emerging genuine safety (safety/connection)	Phase 3: Clarity	Steady breathing, released jaw, clearer thinking, capacity for structural analysis	Gathered objects, arrangements, quiet order, clearer compositions
genuine safety (social engagement)	Phase 4: Integration	Softened expression, laughter returning, capacity for colour, readiness for community	Colour photography, found colour, playful compositions, environmental witnesses

Note. nervous system states are described as documented through Scholarly Personal Narrative methodology, based on Porges (2011). States are dynamic and overlapping rather than discrete categories. Photographic register describes the predominant visual qualities of images produced during each phase, functioning as embodied data within arts-based research methodology (Leavy, 2015).

Part III: Reflections, The Researcher as Subject

On Methodology as Medicine

Healing was beyond what I expected the methodology to do. I expected it to document. But Scholarly Personal Narrative does something that more detached methods cannot: it requires you to stay in your own experience rather than hovering above it with analytical distance. Nash (2004) insists that the researcher acknowledge their positioning rather than hiding behind passive constructions that imply objectivity. This insistence, stay in your body, write from where you are, resist pretending you are nowhere, turned out to be therapeutic in the deepest sense.

Donna Haraway (1988) describes this as the refusal of what she calls the god trick, the pretence of seeing everything from nowhere, the disembodied gaze that claims universality by erasing its own location. Haraway argues for situated knowledges: partial, accountable, embodied perspectives that gain their authority from within the partial rather than from the claim to see everything, the honesty of acknowledging what they see from where they stand. My thirty days by the sea provided knowledge in its purest form. I could only see from the shore I stood on. And that was enough.

On What Arrived Without Being Planned

None of the most important findings were anticipated. Weeping on Day 17 while watching pelicans arrive beyond planning. Splashes of colour on Day 27 arrived in greater numbers than planned. The question inverts itself from personal pathology to structural critique. These emergences are precisely what qualitative methodology is designed to honour, the recognition that the most significant data often arrives unbidden, in the spaces between intention and attention. Following the retreat, the daily blog entries were reviewed as a chronological research journal and interpreted thematically, with patterns and phases identified through repeated reading of the complete record.

Patricia Leavy (2015) argues that arts-based research generates knowledge unavailable through conventional methods precisely because artistic processes engage perception, intuition, and embodied knowing alongside analytical reasoning. The camera reached beyond mere recording of what I saw; it revealed what I was yet to say in words. The blog reached beyond documenting what happened; it produced understanding in the act of writing. Method became medicine because the method required presence, and presence is what trauma steals.

Where I Stand and What I Carry

I must name what is true about my position. I am a white, cisgender, settler woman who had enough resources to spend thirty days in Mexico healing from institutional harm. Indigenous peoples on the very land where I live, the Secwépemc Territory, may lack such mobility options while navigating compounded harms of colonial dispossession, environmental racism, and institutional exclusion. Precariously positioned Mexicans in Loreto may serve tourists like me while carrying their own invisible burdens.

Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) warns against research practices that take from communities without reciprocity. While this personally-grounded work focuses on my own experience, it must contribute to broader conversations about labour rights, institutional accountability, and collective healing rather than centring individual self-improvement divorced from structural change. My solitude was chosen. Many people’s isolation is imposed. The distinction matters enormously, and this thesis refuses to collapse them into a single category. Alonetude names the labour of transforming imposed aloneness into chosen presence, but the fact that such labour is necessary is itself an indictment of the structures that produced the imposition.

This research reflects the perspective of a single researcher and is shaped by particular social, geographic, and institutional conditions that remain unevenly shared. These constraints are part of the situated knowledge this work produces rather than limitations that undermine it, but they should be held in view as readers consider how these findings might speak to experiences beyond this one.

Title: Situated at the Edge

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

Part IV: A Human Rights Reckoning

From Personal Pathology to Structural Critique

The most important finding of this thesis reaches beyond solitude. It is about the inversion, the moment when the question shifts from “What is wrong with me?” to “What conditions produced this outcome, and who else is affected?”

This inversion is the methodological heart of human rights inquiry. Human rights frameworks ask far more than for individuals to heal themselves from structural violence. They ask structures to account for the harm they produce. When a worker collapses from exhaustion, the human rights question reaches beyond whether they should have practised better self-care but whether the conditions of their employment violated their fundamental rights to health, rest, and dignified labour.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR; United Nations, 1948) establishes in Article 1 that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity. Article 23 affirms the right to just and favourable conditions of work. Article 24 establishes the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours. Article 25 guarantees the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being.

The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR; United Nations, 1966) operationalizes these declarations through binding obligations. Article 7 requires just and favourable conditions of work, including safe and healthy working conditions and reasonable limitation of working hours. Article 9 establishes the right to social security. Article 12 recognizes the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.

My experience, nineteen years of precarious academic employment culminating in occupational burnout, depression, and institutional termination, is far more than a personal narrative. Read through the lens of international human rights law, it may constitute a pattern consistent with potential violations of labour and health rights, requiring structural remedy. Table 3 maps these conditions against the relevant international human rights instruments.

Table 3

Human Rights Violations in Precarious Academic Labour

Right Violated	Legal Source	How Violated	Evidence from Retreat
Chronic stress, burnout, and depression are produced by insecure employment; occupational trauma unrecognized as workplace injury	ICESCR Article 12; WHO Constitution	Body bracing documented in Phase 1; weeping in Phase 2, indicating stored body-based trauma; depression worsening, requiring medication adjustment	Body bracing documented in Phase 1; weeping in Phase 2 indicating stored body-based trauma; depression worsening requiring medication adjustment
Body bracing documented in Phase 1; weeping in Phase 2, indicating stored body-based trauma; depression worsening, requiring medication adjustment	UDHR Article 24; ICESCR Article 7	Constant availability expected; rest experienced as guilt; boundaries punished through non-renewal of contracts	Guilt at stillness in Phase 1; inability to rest without productive justification; seventeen days required before the nervous system registered safety
Right to decent work	ICESCR Article 7; ILO Decent Work Agenda	Structural critique emerging in Phase 3; naming precarity as system failure; recognizing that gratitude was demanded in exchange for exploitation	Structural critique emerging in Phase 3; naming precarity as system failure; recognizing that gratitude was demanded in exchange for exploitation
Right to dignity	UDHR Article 1; ICCPR Preamble	Institutional disposability; treatment as an extractable resource; termination after decades of service	Phase 4 integration: refusing to internalize disposability as personal failure; reclaiming worth beyond institutional validation
Right to social security	ICESCR Article 9; UDHR Article 22	Institutional disposability; treatment as an extractable resource; termination after decades of service	Contract labour excludes access to employment insurance, a stable pension, benefits, and structural vulnerability by design

Note. ICESCR = International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (United Nations, 1966). UDHR = Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948). ICCPR = International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (United Nations, 1966). ILO = International Labour Organization. WHO = World Health Organization. These frameworks establish that the conditions described in this thesis constitute potential human rights violations requiring structural remedies rather than individual coping strategies.

The Structural Inversion

The following table presents the central inversion of this thesis, the reframing that occurs when individual experience is read through structural analysis rather than personal pathology.

Table 4

The Structural Inversion: From Personal Pathology to Systemic Analysis

“She just needs to be more resilient.”	Structural Reframing (Human Rights Analysis)
“She needed therapy for her depression.”	The workload was structurally unsustainable; burnout is an institutional outcome rather than a personal failure (Han, 2015)
“She should have set better boundaries.”	Boundaries are punished in precarious employment through non-renewal; the demand for boundarylessness is structural violence (Standing, 2011)
“She needed therapy for her depression”	The depression was occupationally produced; the remedy is structural change alongside individual treatment (van der Kolk, 2014)
“She chose to go on retreat, that is self-care”	The retreat was necessitated by institutional harm; rest should exist beyond requiring private funding and personal crisis to access (ICESCR Article 7)
“She just needs to be more resilient”	Resilience narratives individualize structural problems; the question is why individuals must endure rather than whether they should have to (Berlant, 2011)
“She should be grateful for the opportunities she had”	Gratitude cannot be demanded in exchange for rights violations; exploitation holds no benignity through the expectation of thankfulness (Hochschild, 1983)

Note. This table illustrates the central analytical move of the thesis: reframing individual experience within structural critique. Each dominant framing locates the problem within the individual; each structural reframing locates the problem within institutional systems and policy failures. The inversion holds personal agency intact but refuses to let structural accountability be displaced onto individual coping.

Part V: Key Learnings

What This Research Taught Me

Table 5

Ten Key Learnings from the Alonetude Retreat

Learning	Explanation and Theoretical Grounding
1. The body is an archive.	Van der Kolk (2014) argues that trauma is stored in the body, in braced muscles, fractured sleep, and chronic activation. This thesis confirms that the body is also an archive of institutional harm, holding the cumulative weight of structural conditions that official records leave unnamed. My body had registered what had happened to me long before my mind could articulate it.
2. Rest is a human right rather than a reward.	Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948) establishes the right to rest and leisure, unconditionally, regardless of productivity, performance, or institutional approval. When rest requires private funding and personal crisis to access, the system has failed.
3. Grief is diagnostic.	Greenspan (2003) teaches that dark emotions carry information. The grief that surfaced on Day 17 was evidence of truth rather than weakness; it was the body’s truthful account of what had been lost. Grief for the years spent overworking, for the relationships deferred, for the creative life deferred, this grief was evidence of harm, as legitimate as any clinical assessment.
4. The question must invert.	The most significant shift in the retreat was the inversion from “What is wrong with me?” to “What conditions produced this?” This is the essential move of human rights inquiry: locating the problem in structures rather than individuals, in policy rather than personality.
5. Alonetude is labour.	Choosing to be alone, staying with discomfort, transforming imposed isolation into generative solitude, this is work. It requires intentionality, courage, and the material conditions (time, space, safety) that are themselves structurally distributed. Alonetude is active identity work rather than passive withdrawal.
6. Art makes knowledge that words cannot.	Patricia Leavy (2015) argues that arts-based research generates knowledge unavailable through conventional methods because artistic processes engage perception, intuition, and embodied knowing alongside analytical reasoning. The photographs in this thesis said things the written entries could only approach. Contemplative photography, painting, and found-object work produced findings that propositional language alone could carry only partially. Art is a research method, and its data is real.
7. Healing is beyond the individual’s responsibility alone.	When harm is structurally produced, healing must be structurally supported. Privatizing recovery, expecting individuals to heal themselves from institutional violence using their own resources, is itself a form of structural violence. The retreat I undertook was necessitated by institutional harm and funded through personal savings. That arrangement should be understood as a symptom of structural failure, and as an argument for collective institutional remedies.
8. Seeing slowly is a methodology.	Contemplative photography (Karr & Wood, 2011) and Photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1997) treat the act of looking as a form of inquiry. Slowing down visually, crouching in the sand, waiting for the light to shift, spending twenty minutes on a single feather, proved to be the same practice as healing. Both resist the urgency to make meaning before the experience has been fully received. The camera trained the researcher to be present before being analytical.
9. The personal is methodological.	Scholarly Personal Narrative methodology (Nash, 2004) insists that personal experience, properly theorized, constitutes legitimate scholarly data. This thesis demonstrates that the I in research carries analytical weight. The voice that says I was exhausted, I was laid off due to unstable enrolments, I went to the sea, is also the voice that reads Porges, cites Standing, and analyzes human rights law. The personal is the methodology, and the methodology is the scholarship.
10. The practice is portable.	Alonetude requires intentionality, presence, and the willingness to turn toward oneself without judgment. It can happen in five minutes on a park bench or in a quiet room after the children have gone to school. Thirty days in Mexico made the practice visible; the practice itself travels wherever the practitioner travels. It asks only for attention.

Note. These learnings emerged inductively from thirty days of daily documentation using Scholarly Personal Narrative methodology (Nash, 2004), contemplative photography, and interdisciplinary theoretical engagement. They represent the primary findings of this creative thesis.

What Alonetude Is and Is Beyond

Table 6

Alonetude: Clarifying the Concept

Alonetude IS	Alonetude IS BEYOND
Both body-felt practice and a critical analytic lens	Loneliness rebranded with a gentler name
The labour of transforming imposed aloneness into chosen presence	Passive withdrawal or avoidance of difficulty
Both body-felt practice and a critical analytic lens	Both body-felt practice and a critical analytic lens
Situated within institutional and political architectures that produce separation	An individual coping strategy that excuses institutions from accountability
Accessible through four typologies: restorative, creative, political, and ceremonial	A single, fixed practice with prescribed steps
Portable, adaptable, available in five minutes or thirty days	Requiring a retreat, financial resources, or geographic relocation
A rights-bearing practice grounded in the right to rest, health, and dignity	A luxury available only to those with privilege

Note. Alonetude is the original theoretical framework introduced by this thesis. The four typologies, restorative, creative, political, and ceremonial, are described in the thesis and are complementary rather than mutually exclusive.

Part VI: Artist Statement

Seeing Slowly: Photography and Visual Art as Research Methodology

Ariella Azoulay (2008) argues that the camera is a civil apparatus and a contract rather than merely a mechanical device for producing images, a civil instrument for negotiating relations between people and their conditions.

In this study, photographs and artworks function as primary research rather than illustrative data within an arts-based methodology. This thesis treats visual art, photography, drawing, watercolour, painted stones, mixed-media assemblage, and found-object work as a form of scholarly argument rather than an illustration, but as a primary mode of knowledge production. Every image in The Third Shore blog is research data. Every painted stone is a finding. Every photograph of a shadow on sand, a worn shoe, or an empty doorway constitutes evidence within an arts-based research methodology that recognizes what words alone cannot capture. The visual materials were organized chronologically alongside the daily written entries and revisited during the analysis stage to identify recurring motifs, transitions, and emergent themes.

On the Photographic Practice

The photographic practice developed during the retreat is characterized by deliberate imperfection. I shoot primarily in black and white, employing high- and low-contrast, minimalist compositions, intentional under- and over-exposure, blur, grain, fixed-frame perspectives, and ground-level handheld techniques. These are methodological choices rather than aesthetic failures. Each technical decision serves a purpose within the research inquiry.

High contrast serves the thesis because the experience being documented is one of extremes, the sharp edges between institutional performance and private collapse, between exhaustion and emerging rest. Blur serves the thesis because some experiences resist clarity, and the attempt to render everything in sharp focus is itself a form of violence against the imprecise, provisional quality of healing. Ground-level perspectives serve the thesis because the researcher’s position during much of the retreat was literally low, sitting on rocks, crouching by the waterline, lying on sand, and the camera should document the body’s actual position rather than the elevated position of an observer who stands above experience.

Sarah Pink (2013) argues that visual research methods must attend to the sensory, embodied dimensions of experience rather than treating images as mere records of what was seen. My photography practices what Pink calls sensory ethnography, an approach that attends to how seeing, hearing, touching, and moving create knowledge. The camera is an extension of the body rather than separate from itn of the body’s attention, pointing where the nervous system directs it, pausing where the breath pauses, holding still when stillness arrives.

On Subject Matter

I arrived in Loreto without a shot list. I arrived with a camera and a body that had forgotten how to rest, and the subjects found me before I found them. What I photographed across thirty days was received rather than chosen, the way a driftwood piece arrests you mid-stride, the way a shadow falling across wet sand demands that you stop and look. This responsiveness is entirely intentional. It is the point.

The subjects that recurred throughout the retreat shared a quality I came to recognize as endurance without performance. Worn objects. Threshold spaces. Things shaped by forces outside their choosing that were, nonetheless, still here. A piece of driftwood smoothed by decades of tide and sand. An abandoned structure behind a rusted fence, its walls intact, its institution gone. A spent half-citrus on dark stones, its geometry still legible even after everything extractable had been taken. I was drawn to these subjects precisely because of their ordinariness. They were doing nothing for the camera. They were simply present. And presence, I was learning, was the practice.

There is a particular challenge in photographing stillness when you have spent your adult life in motion. The academic precariat persists. It holds no luxury of stopping. You teach while grieving, grade while ill, prepare courses that may never be offered again, and show enthusiasm for institutional initiatives unlikely to survive the next budget cycle. The body becomes accustomed to perpetual forward movement, to the posture of someone who is always almost catching up. To stop and look at a stone, to crouch in the sand and wait for the light to shift, to spend twenty minutes photographing the way a feather rests against gravel; this is an act of resistance that the body resists before the mind can name it. The first week, I photographed quickly. I was efficient. I had somewhere to be, though I had nowhere to be. By the second week, I was beginning to slow. By the third, I understood that the slowing was the subject.

Wang and Burris (1997) developed Photovoice as a participatory research methodology in which people use cameras to document their lived realities and bring those realities into conversation with broader social analysis. While this thesis is personally-grounded rather than participatory in the traditional sense, it draws on Photovoice’s central commitment: that the person who experiences a condition is also the person best positioned to document it. My camera shared my experience rather than translating it for an outside audience. It participated in the experience itself, shaping what I noticed, directing where I crouched and waited, insisting that I remain in contact with the physical world when the easier option was retreat into abstraction.

The non-human world proved to be an unexpectedly generous research collaborator. The tide comes in regardless of whether you are productive or paralyzed; these were observations the natural environment offered freely to anyone willing to sit still long enough to receive them. Rachel and Stephen Kaplan’s (1989) concept of the gentle pull of the natural world (the capacity of natural environments to hold attention gently, without cognitive demand, allowing depleted attentional resources to replenish) describes precisely what I experienced when I stopped trying to photograph something significant and simply began attending to what was there: the way light moved across the Sea of Cortez at six in the morning, the arrangement of stones someone had made and left without signature, the blue of a sea-tumbled glass fragment resting in pale gravel as though it had always been there and had never needed to be anywhere else.

I want to say something honest about self-portraiture, because it is the category that surprised me most. I have always found my own face an uncomfortable subject. The face performs. It knows it is being watched and arranges itself accordingly. But the shadow performs nothing. A shadow is simply the mark of having been present: a body in light, documented through the absence rather than through the appearance of light. When I began photographing my shadow on the sand, I understood that this was the closest I could come to honest self-documentation, the researcher present in the frame without the researcher having to manage the frame. Donna Haraway (1988) argues that all knowledge is situated, that every act of seeing comes from somewhere, from a body standing in a specific place, casting a shadow in a particular direction. The shadow studies that emerged throughout the retreat arose from intentional positioning rather than camera shyness. They were a methodological commitment: I am here, I am looking, and here is the proof of my location.

By the final days, when colour arrived and the visual practice began to admit warmth, the subject matter had shifted alongside my relationship to it. The ordinary remained ordinary. The shore was still the shore. But I was looking at it differently: more slowly, more steadily, with less urgency to make it mean something before I had finished seeing it. This is what ver lentamente, seeing slowly, requires: more sustained attention to the subjects already present rather than more interesting subjects. It is, I believe, both the most humble and the most demanding photographic practice I know. And it turns out to be the same practice as healing. You cannot rush either. You can only remain.

References

Azoulay, A. (2008). The civil contract of photography (R. Mazali & R. Danieli, Trans.). Zone Books.

Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press.

Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous loss: Learning to live with unresolved grief. Harvard University Press.

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.

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday.

Greenspan, M. (2003). Healing through the dark emotions: The wisdom of grief, fear, and despair. Shambhala Publications.

Han, B.-C. (2015). The burnout society (E. Butler, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 2010)

Haraway, D. J. (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

Hersey, T. (2022). Rest is resistance: A manifesto. Little, Brown Spark.

Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.

International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. (1966, December 16). United Nations Treaty Series, 993, 3. https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/international-covenant-economic-social-and-cultural-rights

Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.

Karr, A., & Wood, M. (2011). The practice of contemplative photography: Seeing the world with fresh eyes. Shambhala Publications.

Leavy, P. (2015). Method meets art: Arts-based research practice (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Lorde, A. (1988). A burst of light: Essays. Firebrand Books.

Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.

Pink, S. (2013). Doing visual ethnography (3rd ed.). SAGE Publications.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton.

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

Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy: Markets, state, and higher education. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples (2nd ed.). Zed Books.

Standing, G. (2011). The precariat: The new dangerous class. Bloomsbury Academic.

Tillich, P. (1963). The eternal now. Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Aldine.

United Nations. (1948). Universal declaration of human rights. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

Wang, C., & Burris, M. A. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment. Health Education & Behaviour, 24(3), 369–387. https://doi.org/10.1177/109019819702400309