Category: Scholarly Personal Narrative

Who Gets to Rest? Alonetude, Privilege, and the Limits of My Knowing

Reading Time: 16 minutes

When I wrote that I am a white, settler, cisgender woman, I meant it as an anchor. A statement of location. I have come to understand that location is not sufficient. Location without interrogation becomes a kind of self-congratulation: I named my privilege, therefore I am accountable. I am writing this post to refuse that easy resolution.


During my month by the Sea of Cortez, I was able to rest because I had the financial resources, educational background, documented health concerns such as depression and burnout, and the ability to travel for an extended period. These are advantages rooted in structural inequalities. According to research on labour precarity in Mexico’s service economy, the hospitality and domestic work sectors are characterized by low wages, irregular employment, and minimal social protections, particularly for women and migrants (Lara-Valencia, 2008). The people who cleaned my rental, served my meals, and maintained the beaches I walked on would not have access to thirty days of rest, whether in Mexico or elsewhere. I could rest because no one depended on my labour for their survival. I could rest because the colour of my skin meant that my presence in a small Mexican town, however brief, was not subjected to the same scrutiny as that of workers and migrants. I could rest because institutions would fund my healing if I could narrate it in the right way.


And I wrote a thesis about it. I theorized my rest. I called it alonetude. I used the language of resistance and structural critique. But the question that has haunted me since February is this: Whose rest am I centring when I refuse to acknowledge the labour that enabled mine? Who could not afford the thirty days? Who could not afford to return home to safety?


I did not ask the house cleaner in my rental in Loreto if she could rest. I did not ask the servers in the restaurants I frequented whether the gentle pull of the natural world was available to them, or whether they, like me, were scanning for threat. But for them, the threat was not the aftermath of institutional harm that could be healed. Their threat was ongoing, written into policy, into precarity without exit, into economies that depend on their constant availability and their invisibility.


I want to think carefully about what happens when alonetude encounters difference. What does it mean to rest when your rest has been criminalized? What does chosen solitude look like when solitude has been imposed through incarceration, through isolation, through confinement? How do we theorize the gentle pull of the natural world when the natural world is not safe, when the water at the shoreline is patrolled, when rest in public space is illegal? And perhaps most urgently: How do I theorize my own freedom when that freedom was built, in part, on the structured unfreedom of others?


The Researcher as a Particular Body


Emily Dickinson wrote, “I dwell in possibility,” and I think about that line often now. I dwelled in possibility. The possibility that rest was available to me, that thirty days of attention would transform understanding, that embodied inquiry could become scholarship. That possibility was not equally distributed. It came to me because of where I stood.


I am a Master’s student, which means I have had institutional affiliation, library access, and theoretical grounding. I am a woman with a work history that could be narrated as precarity (contract labour), but that also meant I had experience with educational institutions, how to navigate them, and how to speak their language. I am white, which meant that my depression, my burnout, my need for healing could be heard as legitimate. According to Robin DiAngelo (2018), white tears and white emotional distress often receive more institutional attention and validation than the structural realities experienced by people of colour. I wonder what my embodied knowledge would have been worth if I had not been white. I wonder if the sea would have been available to me in the same way.

My particular body, my particular access to resources, my particular legibility to institutions as someone worth studying, someone whose experience matters—these all shaped the knowledge I produced in Loreto. According to scholarship on academic privilege and precarity, the temporary precarity experienced by credentialed workers differs fundamentally from structural precarity, as they retain cultural capital and institutional pathways even after job loss (Skeggs, 2004). The thirty days by the sea produced knowledge from the standpoint of a white, settler, educated woman whose occupational harm was significant but whose educational credentials meant it was never permanent, never without the possibility of being legible to some institution that might employ her again. This is the standpoint that produced alonetude. And alonetude, because it emerges from that standpoint, might not be available to people who do not occupy it.


What I Cannot Know


Let me be direct about this. I cannot fully know how alonetude would function in the context of racialized precarity, of precarity without the buffer of education, without the buffer of citizenship documentation, without the buffer of whiteness. I can theorize it. I can read it. I can listen to others describe it. But I cannot know it as the thing-itself, the way I can know solitude as the thing-itself, because I have lived it as a consequence of choice rather than circumstance.

Situated knowledges asks that I remain accountable to what I see from where I stand, and to remain honest about what I cannot see, what falls outside my position. It asks that I resist the temptation to universalize from the particular, to speak as if everyone’s alonetude would look like mine.


And yet there is something troubling about remaining quiet. There is something troubling about the idea that because I cannot fully know, I should not think carefully about these intersections. So I want to do something else. I want to think about the gaps. I want to create space for the research and voices that should follow mine.


Precarity Without the Educational Buffer


One thing I know is this: my precarity was always legible as precarity. After nineteen years of contract labour in the academy, there was documentation. There was a narrative arc. There was a Master’s program I could enter, credentials I could accumulate, and a thesis I could write. There were institutions that would recognize my harm as worthy of study. According to scholarship on gendered precarity in academia, women contract workers are increasingly documenting and theorizing their experiences within institutional contexts, though their labour remains undervalued and their voices often marginalized within formal academic structures (Coulter & Ramirez, 2023).

What of the precarious academic worker who does not have a degree? What of the adjunct whose partner depends on their income, who cannot afford to step away, who cannot afford Mexico, cannot afford ten days, cannot afford the permission that illness grants? In Standing’s (2011) analysis of the precariat, he describes not just the structurally precarious but those whose precarity is compounded by other forms of social marginalization. Precarity can feel especially acute when you are racialized, undocumented, have disabilities that institutions do not recognize, or if your accent signals you as an outsider before you speak.


According to the 2023 University of California Graduate Student Experience Survey, graduate students of colour reported significantly higher levels of burnout compared to their white counterparts, particularly among Black, Indigenous, and immigrant scholars (Smith et al., 2023). The research also found that these scholars were less likely to take time away, less likely to access mental health resources, and more likely to attribute burnout to personal rather than structural causes. This last finding troubles me deeply. It suggests that the inversion I described in the main thesis—the move from “What is wrong with me?” to “What conditions produced this?”—is itself a privilege. It is the privilege of blaming the system rather than yourself, the privilege of being heard when you do, the privilege of having your structural critique validated rather than pathologized.


So what would alonetude look like for a racialized scholar whose burnout is compounded by the daily microaggressions of a predominantly white institution, by the expectation to represent entire communities, by the constant questioning of credentials? Would thirty days in Mexico be accessible? Would the nervous system recalibrate when the return destination is an institution that will immediately resume its harm? Would there be any point in seeking healing if the structures that produce the harm remain untouched?


I do not have the answer. But I name the question because to remain silent is to imply that alonetude, as I theorized it, is the complete answer. And I do not believe it is.


What Disability Teaches About Alonetude

I wrote in the main thesis about depression, about the nervous system’s capacity to register threat, about the body as an archive. But I wrote from a particular location within disability, or rather, I wrote without naming disability fully enough. Depression, for me, was something that happened to a functioning person. It was something I could recover from. It was occupationally induced, which meant it could be resolved by changing occupation.


Not all disabilities work that way. According to the Mayo Clinic, depression is a serious mental health condition that causes persistent feelings of sadness or loss of interest in activities. It is not weakness, and it is not something a person can simply overcome through willpower alone. It requires treatment, time, and support. But even more importantly, not all disabilities resolve. And not all relationships with solitude are healing.


Autistic scholars and disabled theorists have written extensively about how stimming (self-stimulatory behaviour) is often pathologized but is actually a crucial form of self-regulation and embodied presence. They have also written about the particular challenges of solitude for neurodivergent individuals, the way that alone time without structure can be destabilizing rather than restorative, and can amplify anxiety rather than quiet it. According to a comprehensive review by Rapaport and colleagues (2021), periods of reduced external demand or unstructured time can present both challenges and benefits for autistic adults, with some experiencing such periods as restorative and others finding them isolating or anxiety-inducing depending on their specific sensory and regulatory needs. The quiet I found in Loreto, the absence of demand, the freedom from performance—for some neurodivergent people, that would be torture. Sensory deprivation, the lack of structured input, the absence of stimulation that allows a neurodivergent nervous system to regulate—these would not be medicine. They would cause harm.


There is also the question of disability compounded by precarity. The disabled precarious worker. Someone navigating both the structural violence of precarity and the structural violence of living in a world not built for their body. Can they rest? Can they afford the thirty days, the medication adjustments, the therapy that helps make sense of what has happened? Or is their precarity of a kind that does not permit even the imagination of rest?


And then there is the complex relationship to the body itself. I wrote in the thesis that my body was an archive, that it had registered what had happened to me, and that the task was to listen to it, to let it grieve, to let it soften. But what of the body that has been violated, that has not just registered harm but carries the mark of harm, for whom the body itself is not a site of safety but of ongoing threat? What of the disabled person whose body, as disability scholar Jasbir Puar (2017) writes, is already marked as unliveable, already coded as disposable within ableist systems?


Disability scholars and activists have been teaching us for decades that accessibility is not about accommodation for the few. It is about recognizing that the norms we take for granted are not neutral. They benefit some people and exclude others. When I created my retreat, I shaped it around my own needs and experiences, focusing on solitude, presence, and connection to nature. But as research on disability and public space shows, many environments are not designed with disabled people in mind, actively excluding disabled people from the ability to rest, to be present, or to experience nature without pain or surveillance (Kapsalis et al., 2020). This raises an urgent question: What would alonetude look like if it were designed with disabled people, for disabled people, and by disabled people? I don’t have that answer. But the fact that I don’t have it matters. The fact that I cannot imagine it means I am not the person to theorize it.


Working-Class Precarity and the Right to Rest

I have been thinking about my mother. She is eighty years old and has worked her entire adult life. She has never had the luxury of a retreat. She has never had the economic means to not work. And when she has rested, when she has been ill, she has felt the weight of guilt—the same guilt I described in Phase One of the thirty days. But her guilt has had different consequences.


I remember one winter when she had the flu. She was sixty-five. She lay on the couch in her living room in Lethbridge, and I called to check on her. She was apologizing. She was apologizing for being sick. Her partner needed to drive to work in Edmonton. The bills still needed to be paid. Her grandchildren would expect their grandmother to be at Christmas dinner, fever or no fever. Her boss—she was working part-time in retail at sixty-five—had not explicitly said she would lose her job, but that threat hung there, unspoken. Her rest meant someone else had to carry what she could not. Her rest was experienced as failure. It was experienced as a burden on others.


According to scholarship on the cultural dimensions of class experience, working-class people are often trained from early childhood to view rest as selfish, to see illness as an inconvenience rather than a legitimate need, and to internalize the belief that survival is achieved through constant, often invisible labour (Lareau, 2011; Skeggs, 2004). The guilt I felt in Phase One of my retreat, sitting still without producing anything, was a class guilt. It was the echo of messages internalized over a lifetime: your body is for working, your value is what you produce, your rest is someone else’s burden. But I had the resources to unlearn it in thirty days. I had institutional support. I had savings. I had a thesis project that gave my rest a name, a purpose, a legitimacy.


My mother did not have these things. And according to research on how economic precarity shapes health outcomes, particularly for aging women, the stress of persistent insecurity takes a measurable toll on physical and mental health, creating a cycle in which working-class women’s bodies literally cannot rest because the conditions that would allow rest do not exist (Case & Deaton, 2020).


And then there is the added layer for those whose precarity is racialized, whose class position is inseparable from their racial location. Angela Davis (1981) has written about how the racialized working class experiences precarity differently, how slavery and its aftermath have structured labour and rest in fundamentally different ways for Black Americans. According to research by Hae Yeon Choo and Myra Marx Ferree (2010), the opportunities for rest that are available to some people are fundamentally shaped by social inequalities. They write that some people’s ability to rest, to have leisure time, to experience freedom from labour, is structurally dependent on other people’s lack of rest, on their invisible labour, on their willingness to be exploited. This raises the painful question: who was resting while I rested by the sea? Whose labour made that possible? And whose labour made that labour possible?


This is the form of accountability that goes beyond naming my positionality. It is the accountability to ask: what would aloneness require to be genuinely available to those whose relationship to precarity is both occupational and structural, both contemporary and historical?


Alonetude and Care Responsibilities


In the main thesis, I mentioned that I was engaged in what Arlie Hochschild (1997) calls the “second shift”—parenting in both directions, caring for ageing parents while potentially supporting adult children. But I did not fully theorize the sex and gendered dimensions of that care, or how care responsibilities structure the availability of rest.


It is primarily women, particularly women of colour, who provide the majority of care work: childcare, elder care, and support work for disabled people. And this care work is among the most precarious, most underpaid, most invisible labour. A woman working multiple part-time care positions cannot access alonetude the way I could. She cannot leave her responsibilities for thirty days. According to research on temporal precarity and border communities, the lived experience of caregiving in precarious circumstances often involves what scholars call “temporal sequestration”—the condition in which responsibilities and structural circumstances rarely allow for extended rest or true presence, making moments of relief fleeting, fragmented, and incomplete (Avalos & Argueta, 2019). This might look like a quick bathroom break, a few minutes before work begins, or the brief pause before the next demand emerges. This is not alonetude. This is survival.


Arlie Hochschild (1997) describes what she calls “the time bind”—the way working parents, particularly mothers, are squeezed between the demands of employment and caregiving. She describes this squeeze as a form of structural violence. The solution, she argues, is not better time management for women. It is a structural change that redistributes care responsibilities and recognizes care as labour, as valuable, as deserving of resources and protection.
If we are to think seriously about alonetude and intersectionality, we must ask: what does it mean to rest when rest comes at the cost of someone else’s labour going unmet? What does it mean to take thirty days for myself when someone is depending on my care? And how do we create structures in which care is not the burden of individuals, particularly women, but is recognized as a collective responsibility?


Undocumented Precarity


I want to name something I have been avoiding. I cannot write about undocumented precarity from inside it. I can only write about it from the outside, with the awareness that my documentation—my citizenship, my credentials, my ability to move across borders—is granted to me through accidents of birth and structural privilege, and that it is violently denied to others.


But I cannot stay silent about it either. There are people in academic and academic-adjacent labour who are undocumented. They are adjuncts, research assistants, and graduate assistants. They are teachers. They are precarious in a way that cannot be resolved by a Master’s degree, cannot be cured by a sabbatical, and cannot be ameliorated by any amount of institutional goodwill, because the institution itself and the state in which it is embedded have deemed them deportable.


Precarity scholar Alicia Schmidt Camacho (2008) writes about how deportability structures the lives of undocumented people. It is not just economic precarity. It is ontological precarity. The undocumented person is always-already criminal, always-already outside the protection of law, always-already subject to removal. And in that context, rest is not an option. Alonetude, as I theorized it, assumes a body that can be alone without fear. It assumes a body that is not being tracked, not dependent on employment verification, and not vulnerable to deportation. It assumes a freedom that is itself a form of privilege.


What would rest look like for an undocumented graduate assistant working multiple jobs, always alert to the possibility of deportation, unable to travel beyond a certain radius, unable to be alone without fear? What would solitude mean when your very presence is rendered illegal? These are not rhetorical questions. These are questions that urgently need answers from those who live them.
This is perhaps where I must be most honest. I have no pathway to knowing undocumented precarity from inside. I can only name it, only insist that any theory of alonetude that does not address it is fundamentally incomplete. I can only call on those who live inside this precarity—if they choose to, if it is safe for them to do so—to theorize what rest, what solitude, what presence might look like when one’s very presence is rendered illegal.


What This Essay Is and Is Not


I want to be clear about what I am and am not claiming. I am not claiming to have solved the problem of intersectionality. I am not claiming that alonetude can be made equally available through a simple modification or expansion. I am not claiming that my naming of these gaps is the same as doing the work to address them.


What I am doing is refusing to let the main thesis stand on its own. I am refusing to let the acknowledgement of my positionality function as accountability. I am insisting that the gaps are real, that they matter, and that future research must be grounded in the lived experiences of those who occupy positions I do not.


I am also, importantly, insisting that I am not the right researcher for the next phase of this work. If alonetude is to become something that can hold intersectional complexity, it must be theorized by people with intersectional standpoints, by people whose precarity is not temporary, whose burnout is not legible to institutions as something worth studying, whose rest cannot be funded through personal savings because there are no personal savings to fund it. It must be theorized by disabled people, by working-class people, by people of colour, by undocumented people, by people navigating multiple and compounded forms of precarity.


The researcher-as-subject principle that grounds Scholarly Personal Narrative (Nash, 2004) says that I should write from my lived experience. My lived experience has now come to include this: the recognition that it is particular, located, and limited. And that its particularity has been elevated to a kind of universality in the original thesis. And that elevation itself—the ability to make my particular experience seem general, to speak as though my truth is everyone’s truth—is a form of power that I must reckon with.


Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) warns against research practices that take from communities without reciprocity, that extract knowledge without returning something of value. I worry that in writing a thesis about alonetude, in theorizing rest as a political practice, I may have extracted something—attention, resources, the legitimacy of studying my own experience—without offering anything back to those whose rest remains unavailable, whose alonetude is impossible because the conditions for it have not been created.


What I Can Offer


If I cannot theorize intersectional alonetude, what can I do? I can do what this essay is doing. I can name the limits of my knowing. I can insist on the incompleteness of my work. I can create space—textual space, theoretical space, institutional space, if I have any access to it—for other voices.
I can also commit to what Resmaa Menakem (2017) calls “cultural somatic practice,” the understanding that healing is not just individual but collective, that my freedom is implicated in systems that deny freedom to others, and that accountability means not just thinking differently but moving differently, building differently, organizing differently.


What might this look like concretely? It might look like creating access to rest within institutions, rather than requiring individuals to fund their own healing. It might look like advocating for paid sabbaticals for precarious workers, for genuine job security, for the structural conditions that would make rest a right rather than a privilege. It might look like examining how precarity is racialized, gendered, and classed, and designing structural responses that address these specific intersections rather than treating precarity as a monolithic problem. It might look like listening—genuinely, carefully, without the expectation that others will explain themselves to me—to people whose precarity does not permit alonetude, and asking them what they need, what rest might look like, what healing might require.

It might also look like being willing to not have all the answers. To sit in the discomfort of incompleteness. To resist the urge to synthesize and resolve. To let the questions remain open, productive, and generative.
Audre Lorde (1988) wrote that “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” That statement has anchored my entire thesis. But I must now add to it: caring for myself while others cannot care for themselves is not an act of political warfare. It is a privilege. And the work is not to hide that privilege, and not to give it up, for I have not and will not. But to use it to name, to witness, to create space, and to insist on structural change that might someday make alonetude available to those for whom it is currently impossible.


That work begins with this: the commitment to being incomplete, to remaining accountable, to listening to voices outside my standpoint, and to insisting that future scholarship on rest, on precarity, on healing, be grounded in the intersectional complexity that my own work, for all its care and intention, could not fully hold.


References


Acker, J. (1973). Women and social stratification: A case of intellectual sexism. American Journal of Sociology, 78(4), 936–945. https://doi.org/10.1086/225415
Avalos, M. A., & Argueta, M. (2019). Temporality and precarity: Understanding time in border communities. Journal of Borderlands Studies, 34(3), 423–442. https://doi.org/10.1080/08865655.2017.1370145
Camacho, A. S. (2008). Migrant imaginaries: Latino cultural politics in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. New York University Press.
Case, A., & Deaton, A. (2020). Deaths of despair and the future of capitalism. Princeton University Press.
Choo, H. Y., & Marx Ferree, M. (2010). Practicing intersectionality in sociological research: A critical assessment of the literature on inequality and precarity. Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 35(4), 785–810. https://doi.org/10.1086/651220
Coulter, N., & Ramirez, H. (2023). Gendered precarity in the academy: Documenting women’s contract labour. Feminist Review, 134, 45–62. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-023-00397-2
Davis, A. Y. (1981). Women, race, & class. Random House.
DiAngelo, R. (2018). White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. Beacon Press.
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. (1997). The time bind: When work becomes home and home becomes work. Metropolitan Books.
Kapsalis, A., Walker, T. D., Blackburn, B., & Woolfrey, B. (2020). Public lands, access, and disability: What research on disability and public space tells us about inclusive recreation. Journal of Outdoor Recreation, Education, and Leadership, 12(2), 93–106.
Lareau, A. (2011). Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life (2nd ed.). University of California Press.
Lara-Valencia, F. (2008). Labor precarity and environmental inequality in the U.S.–Mexico border region. Environmental Justice, 1(3), 157–165. https://doi.org/10.1089/env.2008.1.157
Lorde, A. (1988). A burst of light: Essays. Firebrand Books.
Mayo Clinic. (n.d.). Depression (major depressive disorder). Retrieved from https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/symptoms-causes/syc-20350057
Menakem, R. (2017). My grandmother’s hands: Racialized trauma and the pathways to mending our hearts and bodies. Central Recovery Press.
Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.
Puar, J. K. (2017). The right to maim: Debility, capacity, disability. Duke University Press.
Rapaport, C., Oswald, T. M., & Quadflieg, S. (2021). Autistic camouflaging: A review of the literature and directions for future research. Autism in Adulthood, 3(1), 60–73. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2020.0026
Skeggs, B. (2004). Class, self, culture. Routledge.
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.

Ambiguous Loss: Grief Without Closure

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Keywords: ambiguous loss, grief without closure, Pauline Boss, frozen grief, scholarly personal narrative, embodied knowing

What This Essay Names

Some losses do not arrive with a body to bury, an ending to mark, or a moment in which the world agrees that something has ended. The person is still there but has been transformed by addiction, illness, or estrangement. The relationship is still present, but no longer holds. The identity one expected to grow into has been foreclosed but never formally given up. The grief is real, but the social rituals that allow grief to be witnessed are unavailable because no death has occurred.

I call this what Pauline Boss called it: ambiguous loss. Naming matters because without a name, grief has nowhere to go.

Defining Ambiguous Loss

Ambiguous loss, as defined by Pauline Boss (1999), is grief that accompanies losses that are unclear, unresolved, and without the finality of death. Bloom (2007) refines the definition of grief without closure, as the conditions for closure do not exist.

The boss distinguished two forms:

  • Physical presence with psychological absence — the person is still there but is transformed beyond recognition (the parent with dementia, the loved one displaced by addiction, the partner withdrawn into untreated illness).
  • Psychological presence with physical absence — the person is gone but remains alive in the relational imagination (the missing person, the estranged family member, the unrealized self).

I would add a third form, drawn from my own corpus and from the literature on precarious belonging:

  • Foreclosed possibility — grief for an identity, vocation, or future that was made impossible by structural conditions rather than by death (the academic career that contingent labour foreclosed; the rest that precarity made unavailable; the self that compliance with institutional demands required one to abandon).

How the Senses Relate

Ambiguous loss operates across four interlocking registers:

  • Relational — the relationship persists in some form, even as what it once was has ended. The grief cannot be resolved because the loss cannot be located.
  • Temporal — the loss does not end. It accompanies the person across years, present in each encounter, and refuses the closure that ritual provides.
  • Social — the loss is not witnessed. The community does not gather. The cards are not sent. The grief is borne alone because no public event has named it.
  • Political — many ambiguous losses are produced by structural conditions (precarity, displacement, addiction, exclusion) rather than by chance. To name them as losses is also to name the conditions that produced them.

These four senses converge on a single recognition: ambiguous loss is grief that cannot be metabolized through the usual channels because those channels require a closure that the loss does not contain.

Where I Have Lived Inside Ambiguous Loss

I have already written about ambiguous loss in several places. With my mother (Bloom, 2007), the loss of the daughter she thought she was raising and the daughter I became. With a loved one displaced by addiction (Boss, 1999), the grief of watching the person I knew become someone else while remaining physically present. With the foreclosed possibility of stable academic work, a loss for which there is no ritual because nothing visibly ended.

What links these is the absence of a moment to mourn. The relationship continues. The work continues. The person continues. The loss is real, but the world offers no occasion to register it.

Alonetude, as I have come to define it, is in part a practice for being with ambiguous loss. The intentional, embodied solitude of alonetude makes room for grief that has nowhere else to go. The slowness, the unhurried witness of one’s own company, becomes the ritual that the world withholds.

Why the Name Matters

To name a loss as ambiguous is to claim that it is a loss. Without the name, the grief becomes evidence of personal weakness (“why can’t you move on?”) rather than evidence of a real and ongoing absence. Institutional gaslighting, which I have written about in a companion essay, often relies on the unnameability of ambiguous loss: if the grief cannot be named, the conditions that produced it cannot be named either.

The work of naming ambiguous loss is, therefore, not only personal. It is part of the larger work of insisting that what we have lost counts as loss, even when the world has provided no ritual for its witnessing.

References

Bloom, S. L. (2007). Loss, trauma, and resilience: Therapeutic work with ambiguous loss. Psychiatric Services, 58(3), 419–420.

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

Boss, P. (2006). Loss, trauma, and resilience: Therapeutic work with ambiguous loss. W. W. Norton.

A Note to the Broader Precariat

The precariat I document in this project is shaped by my specific location. I offer this as one situated, theorized account, with the explicit hope that it invites other accounts, from other bodies, in other contexts.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Many Bodies, Same Ground

On the limits of any one account, and the invitation that follows from those limits.

Weathered stone discs arranged in a group beneath a tree, resting on pine needles and dry earth in afternoon light.
Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

The precariat I document in this project is shaped by my specific location: white, settler, Canadian, English-speaking, working within a particular institutional culture at a particular historical moment. I know that. I want to say it plainly here, in a post of its own, because it matters to the meaning of everything else.

Fractured Ground

A dark crystalline rock fragment resting on a wooden surface, its fractured edges catching the light.
Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

Precarious academic labour looks different across national contexts, languages, genders, races, and institutional cultures. A contract instructor in Mexico navigates different structures, different protections or their absence, different relationships between labour, identity, and institutional belonging, than a contract instructor in Canada. A sessional lecturer in the United Kingdom faces different union landscapes, different visa conditions, and different histories of what the university is and who it serves. A contingent faculty member in the United States works within a different legal framework and a different geography of precarity than someone at a Brazilian federal university or a South African college under austerity. The structural conditions are related but far from identical, and collapsing them into a single story would harm each.

What Endures

A large weathered rock formation standing at the shore under an open sky, its surface layered and worn by time.
Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

What is shared across these contexts is real and significant: the insecurity, the chronic self-monitoring, the way worth becomes tied to the next contract, the exhaustion of performing enthusiasm for an institution that holds you at arm’s length, the particular loneliness of caring deeply about work that the system treats as interchangeable. These are patterns that cross borders. This project names them from one body, in one country, in one language.

Your account is the one this one cannot give. I hope you write it.

What is different across these contexts is equally real and equally significant. I offer this project as one situated, documented, and theorized account, grounded in the specificity of where I stood and what I carried. It is the beginning of an argument, and beginnings require continuation. The next study needs more voices, more bodies, more contexts, in other languages and other institutional landscapes, with methodologies capable of holding that breadth without flattening it.

If you are reading this and you recognize something here, I am glad the account reached you. If you are reading this and thinking, “but it was different for me, my country, my language, my body,” then I want you to know that difference is exactly what this project is calling for. Your account is the one that this one cannot give. I hope you write it.

Carried Here

A pale flat stone with golden and cream tones resting in dark sand, smooth-edged and quietly present.
Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

Still Standing

A stone cairn balanced carefully in the night outside a lit building, stones stacked in quiet equilibrium.
Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

The stones hold each other. That is enough to begin.

Still: A Door at King’s College and the Geography of Academic Precarity

Reading Time: 6 minutes

I stood in the corridor of the Foundation Year Program at the University of King’s College in Halifax and read a door. Two posters were taped to its panels, framing the nameplate of Dr. Maria Euchner, Senior Fellow in the Humanities and Associate Director, FYP (Academic). The poster on the left read, in heavy black type: “First-Year Fellows Don’t Make a Living Wage.” The poster on the right read: “Overworked.” Underpaid. Disposable. Above the word “Overworked,” a hand had written “STILL” in blue marker, underlined twice.

I have spent years thinking about precarity in higher education. I have written about it as my doctoral committee at Royal Roads University helped me sharpen my argument. I have lived it as a contract academic at Thompson Rivers University for nearly two decades. I thought I understood the architecture. Standing in front of that door, I felt the weight of the word Still. That single adverb, written by hand, did more theoretical work than most of the literature I have cited.

Still, Dr. Euchner’s Door, Foundation Year Program, University of King’s College, Halifax

A door at King's College with two union posters reading First-Year Fellows Don't Make a Living Wage and STILL Overworked. Underpaid. Disposable.
Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

What the Door Said

The posters were produced by the University of King’s College Teaching Association (UKCTA), the union representing Faculty Fellows and Senior Fellows in the Foundation Year Program. Faculty Fellows are appointed to three-year non-renewable contracts. Senior Fellows are appointed to two-year non-renewable contracts. According to a position posting for the role, the starting salary for a Faculty Fellow in the Humanities was $52,343 to $56,627 as of July 1, 2022, with future scales tied to bargaining (University of King’s College, 2026). The duties listed include four to eight hours of tutorials per week, eight hours of lecture attendance, weekly office hours, bi-weekly essay grading, and an average reading load of sixty pages per day, four days per week.

Set this beside the most recent calculation from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) Nova Scotia office. Saulnier and Williams (2024) calculated the 2024 living wage for Halifax at $28.30 per hour, the highest rate in Atlantic Canada. The CCPA methodology assumes a household with two adults, each working thirty-five hours per week to support two children, which translates into roughly $51,506 in annual earnings per adult before taxes. The arithmetic is uncomfortable. A first-year Faculty Fellow at the 2022 salary floor of $52,343, working a load that almost certainly exceeds thirty-five hours per week once preparation, marking, reading, and committee work are honestly counted, is hovering at the line. The poster is correct. When the actual hours are accounted for, the line is behind them.

A tentative agreement was reached and ratified in early April 2026, after conciliation talks broke down and a strike appeared imminent (Chiasson, 2026; Taylor, 2026). The strike was averted. The structural questions on that door remain.

The Word That Did the Work

The word “Still” was what stopped me. The literature on contingent and contract academic labour returns again and again to the same pattern: a campaign, a report, a brief moment of public attention, and then quiet. The poster on the right side of Dr. Euchner’s door was familiar; this poster had been up before. The handwritten Still in blue marker suggested that the same poster, or one very much like it, had been put up before. The fight had been waged. The conditions had shifted too little for the poster to come down.

Time itself becomes a feature of precarity. In my dissertation at Royal Roads, Through Our Eyes: A Photovoice Study of Interconnected Precarity, Belonging, and Possibility in Higher Education, I argue that contract faculty and international students are bound together by parallel vulnerabilities. I call this interconnected precarity. The institutional logic that recruits international students for tuition revenue and discards them at graduation is the same logic that hires Faculty Fellows for teaching capacity and discards them at the end of the contract. The pattern is rhythmic. The bodies rotate through. The titles remain. The students change, the Fellows change, and yet the work and the conditions of the work persist. Still.

The Titles and the Trap

I have been developing a concept in a separate manuscript, recently advanced to conditional acceptance at Group and Organization Management, that I call malperformative inclusion. It names a particular institutional move: an organization performs the gestures of inclusion through titles, ceremonies, publicity, and acknowledgement programs, while the underlying structures continue to exclude. The performance is included only in the form. It is inclusion that performs the function of exclusion under another name (Tucker, in press).

The title “Faculty Fellow” is prestigious. It carries the resonance of Oxford and Cambridge collegiate traditions, of community, of belonging. It signals scholarly seriousness. It tells parents, applicants, and donors that the people teaching the foundational program are valued members of an intellectual community. The reality, laid out in plain language on paper taped to a door, is that the Fellowship is a non-renewable contract, that the salary in the first year falls at or below the regional living wage, and that the position will end on a fixed date with no path to continuation. The title performs inclusion. The contract performs disposability. This is what I mean by malperformative inclusion. The door named it more economically than my chapter does.

A Door Is a Photograph Is a Method

I look at this door, and I see a photovoice frame. Photovoice is a participatory research methodology developed by Wang and Burris (1997) in which participants use photographs to document conditions of life that conventional reporting cannot reach. The image becomes a means of testimony. It carries information that paragraphs cannot, because the image asserts: this is here, this is now, this is real.

The Faculty Fellows had no need for a researcher to come and document their conditions. They produced their own photovoice frame. They printed the words. They taped them to a door at the height of an adult reader. They wrote Still by hand. The hand-lettered word is the methodological signature. It says: a person did this. A person stood in this hallway and amended the original poster because, despite its accuracy, it was no longer accurate enough. Conditions remained unchanged. The poster required updating. Still.

The Faculty Fellows at King’s are doing the same work with paper and tape. The door is the camera. The corridor is the gallery. The asterisk citing Living Wage Canada is the methodological footnote. I find this beautiful and devastating in equal measure.

What I Take With Me

I take three things from this door into my own work and into my dissertation defence in the coming weeks.

The first is that precarity is rarely solved by a single agreement. The strike was averted at King’s College. I am genuinely glad. I also know from my work with the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of British Columbia (FPSE) and my role as Chair of the Non-Regular Faculty Committee that aversion is a pause, and that resolution requires more. Three-year and two-year non-renewable contracts will continue to shape the working lives of those who teach in the foundational humanities program at one of Canada’s oldest universities. The poster must be taken down by the institution; the workers alone cannot remove it.

The second is that scholarly personal narrative is appropriate and, at times, necessary in such moments. I write in this voice because the door is in the first person. The hand that wrote Still is a worker’s hand, personal and deliberate, distinct from any institution’s. Theory should answer in kind.

The third is that the Foundation Year Program’s foundation rests on the labour of people paid at or below the living wage in the city where they live. The undergraduate students who arrive for their first year of university, often on student loans and family sacrifice, are taught by scholars whose own household economies are governed by precarity. Interconnected precarity is concrete, immediate, and present. It is the floor and the ceiling of the same building.

I left the corridor. I carried a photograph of a door. I carry it still.

References

Chiasson, N. (2026, April 8). Strike looming for some staff at Kings College in Halifax. Country 103.5 / Acadia Broadcasting. https://hotcountry1035.ca/2026/04/08/strike-set-for-some-staff-at-kings-college-in-halifax/

Saulnier, C., & Williams, R. (2024). 2024 living wages for Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Nova Scotia. https://www.policyalternatives.ca

Taylor, E. (2026, April 9). Strike avoided at University of King’s College after deal reached. Country 103.5 / Acadia Broadcasting. https://hotcountry1035.ca/2026/04/09/strike-avoided-at-university-of-kings-college-after-deal-reached/

Tucker, A. (in press). Malperformative inclusion as institutional practice [Commentary]. Group and Organization Management.

Tucker, A. (in progress). Through our eyes: A photovoice study of interconnected precarity, belonging, and possibility in higher education [Doctoral dissertation, Royal Roads University].

University of King’s College. (2026). Faculty fellowship in the humanities [Position posting]. https://ukings.ca/campus-community/employment/faculty-fellowship/

University of King’s College Teaching Association. (2026, April 9). Statement on tentative agreement. UKCTA.

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

3 Minute Thesis: Alonetude at Thompson Rivers University

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I stood at the podium with three minutes to explain thirty days, nineteen years, and the question that has been living in my body for longer than I can name.

The 3 Minute Thesis competition at Thompson Rivers University, March 2, 2026. Secwépemc territory. One slide. One photograph I took beside the Sea of Cortez. One question on the screen behind me:

What happens when we stop running from silence and let it teach us how to heal?

Amy Tucker presenting Alonetude research at the 3 Minute Thesis competition, Thompson Rivers University, March 2, 2026. She stands at a microphone gesturing toward a slide that reads: Alonetude: The Healing Practice of Chosen Solitude.
Photo: Deiveek | Thompson Rivers University Photography | 3MT, March 2, 2026

I had three minutes. I had the whole project behind me: thirty days, eighty-one blog entries, thousands of kilometres of nervous system regulation, grief held and released, stones collected, pelicans watched, tears cried into salt water. I had a methodology grounded in the body. I had a word I invented, alonetude, and the conviction that it names something real.

Three minutes to say: precarious academic labour goes beyond economics. It lives in the body. It reshapes the nervous system. It forecloses the capacity for rest. And rest, genuine rest, embodied and unhurried, is a human right under international law, a matter of human dignity.

Three minutes to say: I went to Loreto, México, for thirty days alone. I brought my research questions, my sixty-year-old body, and one orange suitcase. I stayed until the sea taught me something a desk could never have offered.

I have no distance on exactly how it went. I was inside it. I could feel the room listening. I could feel myself steady in a way I was unsteady a year ago, or six months ago, or even four months ago when I sat alone in the casita watching the sun set over the Sea of Cortez, wondering if any of this would ever be finished.

It is finished. And it is being heard.

Alonetude: The Healing Practice of Chosen Solitude.

Three minutes. Nineteen years. Thirty days by the sea. One breath before I spoke.

Thompson Rivers University | 3 Minute Thesis | March 2, 2026 | Kamloops, BC | Secwépemc Territory

Who Gets to Decide What Land Means

Reading Time: 7 minutes

This piece belongs to A Human Geography of the Self, a series that reads my own life through the concepts geographers use to understand how people and places make one another. It draws on my creative doctoral and master’s work, and on nineteen years of teaching.

“A discipline can be used to wound, and a discipline can be turned toward repair. Geography has been both.”

I teach on Secwépemc Territory, and most days I begin a class by saying so. For years, I said the words the way one recites a courtesy, a small formal nod before the real work began. Then I started reading the history of my own adjacent discipline, the history of geographic thought, and the acknowledgement stopped feeling like a courtesy. It started feeling like a reckoning. Because the question underneath those words, the question of who gets to decide what a piece of land means, who lives there, who belongs, what it is for, turns out to be the question geography spent much of its early life answering in the worst possible way. A discipline can be used to wound, and a discipline can be turned toward repair. Geography has been both. I want to tell that story honestly, because it is a human rights story, and because I am standing inside it.

When Geography Ranked the World

There was a long period when geography taught that the land decides. The doctrine was called environmental determinism (the belief that climate and terrain directly shape human character, ability, and the worth of whole peoples). It sounds abstract until you see what it was used to do. Bhagat and Kenis (2026) describe environmental determinism as geography’s contribution to Social Darwinism and the marker of the discipline’s entry into modern science in the late nineteenth century. They trace how its proponents argued that temperate climates produced superior societies, a view, they write, that was used to justify colonial domination and racial hierarchies (Bhagat & Kenis, 2026). The argument ran that Northern European peoples were energetic and provident because of their climate, while peoples of other regions were cast as their lesser opposites, and the supposed science of geography then certified the ranking as a natural fact (Bhagat & Kenis, 2026).

I find this painful to teach, and necessary. The determinist claim was never a neutral error. It was an instrument. It took the brutal arrangements of empire and dressed them as the simple working out of climate, so that conquest could present itself as destiny. Clément (2020), studying early French colonial geography, shows the machinery up close. He demonstrates how colonial geographers used environmental determinism to explain the lives of Indigenous peoples as a heavy dependence on natural conditions, and then classified those peoples according to their supposed ability to overcome the constraints of their environment (Clément, 2020). The result, he argues, was a science of othering, one whose racialised determinants worked to distance, inferiorise, and dispossess Indigenous peoples under the banner of progress (Clément, 2020). Reading him, I understood that deciding what land means and deciding who counts as fully human were, in this history, the very same act.

The Quiet Violence of a Naturalized Map

Here is the part that reaches me most directly, as someone who has lived a precarious working life and written about how systems decide a person’s worth. Determinism’s deepest trick was to make a human arrangement look like a fact of nature. When inequality is presented as the inevitable product of climate or terrain, it stops looking like a choice that someone made and someone benefits from. It starts looking like weather.

I know this move from the inside, in a far smaller key. For nineteen years as a contract academic, I was offered a story in which my insecurity was simply the climate of the profession, the natural order of the academic ecosystem, nobody’s decision and therefore nobody’s responsibility. Determinism in geography did the same thing at the scale of peoples and continents. It turned decisions into destiny. That is why the history matters as a human rights story rather than a dusty disciplinary debate. To refuse the claim that land determines what people are worth is to insist that the arrangements built on that lie can be questioned, named, and changed. The opposite of determinism, in the end, is accountability.

Turning the Discipline Toward Repair

The hopeful half of this story is that geography has spent decades trying to undo its own founding harm. Determinism was discredited within mainstream geography by the middle of the twentieth century, though, as Bhagat and Kenis (2026) carefully note, its reductive habits keep returning in new forms, including in popular bestsellers and in some climate narratives that once again make environment the master variable of human fate (Bhagat & Kenis, 2026). The work of repair, in other words, is ongoing rather than finished. It has a name now: the effort to decolonize geography, to dismantle the colonial assumptions built into the discipline and to centre the knowledge of the peoples it once objectified.

Radcliffe (2017) frames this decolonial turn as an ethical and political project rather than only an intellectual one. Decolonial approaches, she writes, treat Black and Indigenous experiences as rooted in colonial modernity, and they work to make visible the material and epistemic consequences of white supremacy in order to disturb the system that depends on it (Radcliffe, 2017). She is careful, though, and her caution is one I take personally. The enactment of decolonisation, she writes, requires caution, guidance, and humility, and remains always complex and highly contentious (Radcliffe, 2017). This is far from a project a settler scholar gets to declare complete and tidy.

De Leeuw and Hunt (2018) press exactly on that danger, and their warning has reshaped how I understand my own land acknowledgement. They argue that efforts to decolonize geography are inherently limited as long as colonization continues to structure the discipline and the academy, and they caution that decolonization too often proceeds by re-centring settler voices, engaging concepts of Indigeneity rather than Indigenous peoples themselves, their scholarship, and their lived knowledge (de Leeuw & Hunt, 2018). They ask a question I now sit with before every class: what does it mean to teach about decolonization on Indigenous land, through citational practices that still centre settler scholars over Indigenous ones (de Leeuw & Hunt, 2018)? They urge settler academics to politicize their own situated position on colonized land rather than to perform a reflexivity that changes nothing (de Leeuw & Hunt, 2018). That is a far harder and more honest instruction than the courtesy I once recited.

The Limit I Have to Name

There is a boundary I must mark clearly, because the whole integrity of this post depends on it. It would be a quiet act of appropriation to take this human rights story and fold it smoothly into my own narrative of healing, as though my recovery from precarity and fear sat on the same plane as Indigenous peoples’ struggle against dispossession. It sits at a different scale entirely, and the scholarship I am leaning on insists on the difference.

Tuck and Yang (2012) named this with a precision that has stayed with me for years. Decolonization, they argue, is beyond a metaphor; it means the repatriation of Indigenous land and life, and it resists being turned into a comfortable figure of speech for everyone else’s liberation (Tuck & Yang, 2012). They warn against what they call settler moves to innocence, the small manoeuvres by which settlers reach for the feeling of absolution while the material facts of land stay exactly as they were (Tuck & Yang, 2012). I cite them here as a brake on my own writing. This post can advance a human rights understanding of geographic thought. It earns nothing if it lets me feel absolved. The meaning of the land I teach on remains a matter for the Secwépemc people, beyond my gift to confer.

The Acknowledgement, Remade

So I still begin my classes by naming the territory. The words are the same. What has changed is everything underneath them. I understand now that I am standing in the long aftermath of a discipline that once decided, with the full authority of science, what land meant and who its peoples were permitted to be. I understand that the deciding was a weapon, that the weapon was disguised as fact, and that the work of taking the disguise off is unfinished and partly mine to carry.

Who gets to decide what land means? For too long the answer was whoever held the surveying instruments and the textbooks and the power to call their own ranking natural. The better answer, the one geography is still struggling toward, returns that authority to the peoples whose relationships with these lands long precede mine and will long outlast my tenure. I get to stand here as a guest and a witness. I get to teach the history honestly, including the parts that implicate the very ground I teach upon. And I get to say the territory’s name each morning as what it truly is: beyond a courtesy, a reckoning, and a small daily refusal of the old lie that land decides what people are worth.

References

Bhagat, A., & Kenis, A. (2026). The modern slavery-climate change nexus: Resurrecting environmental determinism, reinforcing saviourism and absolving the West. Antipode, 58(1). https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.70125

Clément, V. (2020). Geographical knowledge, Empire, and the Indigenous Other: Engaging a decolonising introspection into early French colonial geography. Area, 52(4), 741-749. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12617

de Leeuw, S., & Hunt, S. (2018). Unsettling decolonizing geographies. Geography Compass, 12(7), Article e12376. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12376

Radcliffe, S. A. (2017). Decolonising geographical knowledges. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42(3), 329-333. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12195

Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1-40.

Academic Lens

This post narrates the history of geographic thought as a human rights story, grounded in peer-reviewed journal scholarship. Bhagat and Kenis (2026) supply the historical arc and the crucial argument that environmental determinism functioned as a justification for colonial domination and racial hierarchy, while also documenting its persistent return in contemporary climate and development narratives. Clément (2020) provides the close historical case, demonstrating how colonial geographers deployed determinism to classify, dehumanize, and dispossess Indigenous peoples under the rhetoric of progress. The post’s pivot from diagnosis to repair draws on the decolonial turn in the discipline: Radcliffe (2017) frames decolonization as an ethico-political project requiring humility, and de Leeuw and Hunt (2018) supply the essential settler-accountability caution, warning that decolonial work too easily re-centres settler voices and engages concepts of Indigeneity rather than Indigenous peoples themselves. Tuck and Yang (2012) anchor the ethical limit through their concept of incommensurability and their critique of settler moves to innocence, which disciplines the writer’s positionality and prevents the appropriation of Indigenous struggle into a settler narrative of healing. Read through Scholarly Personal Narrative (Nash, 2004), the post enacts an accountable settler pedagogy: it uses the land acknowledgement as both frame and subject, modelling the move from recited courtesy to situated reckoning that de Leeuw and Hunt call for, while refusing the absolution that Tuck and Yang foreclose. The brief analogy to academic precarity is deliberately subordinated and explicitly marked as incommensurable, illustrating determinism’s core mechanism, the naturalization of human arrangements, without equating the two scales of harm.

The Map I Carried of Myself

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Content Warning: This piece discusses childhood exposure to parental alcoholism and violence. The material avoids graphic detail, yet it addresses fear and hypervigilance that some readers may find difficult.

This piece belongs to A Human Geography of the Self, a series that reads my own life through the concepts geographers use to understand how people and places make one another. It draws on my creative doctoral and master’s work on alonetude: intentional, embodied solitude as a healing practice.

“I knew the house the way a sailor knows a coast: where the safe water was, and where the rocks waited.”

I am eight years old, lying very still in my bed, and I am reading the house. The furnace clicks. A floorboard settles in the hall. Somewhere below me a cupboard closes, and from the exact weight of that sound I can tell you what kind of evening this will be. I have a map in my head, drawn in a child’s careful hand, and on it every room carries a colour. The kitchen after a certain hour is red. The space behind the couch is green. The route from my bedroom to the back door, the one that avoids the third stair because the third stair speaks, is a thin safe line I could walk in the dark. I knew the house the way a sailor knows a coast: where the safe water was, and where the rocks waited.

I have spent a good part of my adult life trying to understand that map, and why I have never quite been able to put it down. The vocabulary I needed, it turns out, was waiting in human geography all along. Geographers have a name for the inner picture each of us carries of the places we move through. They call it a mental map or a cognitive map (an internal, personal representation of an environment that we build from experience and then use to find our way and to decide where it is safe to go). The map I drew of my childhood house was a cognitive map of the most urgent kind. I want to tell you about the field that studies such maps, and about what it has helped me understand.

The Maps We Carry Inside

For a while in the middle of the last century, a current within the discipline called behavioural geography set out to study exactly this: how people come to know the environments they live in, and how that knowledge shapes what they do next. Argent and Walmsley (2009), reviewing the rise and quiet fall of this approach, describe its central conviction plainly. Behavioural geography rested on the idea that we could understand people and places better by attending to the psychological processes through which individuals come to know the world around them (Argent & Walmsley, 2009). It held that human beings construct images of the environment in their minds while they move through it, and that these images go on to influence their behaviour (Argent & Walmsley, 2009). My eight-year-old self was doing fieldwork in precisely this sense, building an image of my home and letting that image govern every step I took.

What strikes me, reading Argent and Walmsley (2009), is their insistence that behavioural geography was far from a crude stimulus-and-response model. They take care to separate it from any mechanical account that would reduce a person to a switch tripped by the world. Behaviour, they argue, emerges from a dense weave of attitudes, beliefs, values, perceptions, and images, and from the way people make decisions within the constraints their society imposes (Argent & Walmsley, 2009). I find that distinction tender and true. My vigilance was beyond a reflex. It was an interpretation, a child reading meaning into footsteps and shadows, building a theory of where harm lived and acting on it. That is cognition, beyond instinct. It was the work of a small geographer doing her best to survive her terrain.

The maps people carry are seldom neutral. Thompson (2020), writing about how migrants imagine the places they might move to, describes mental maps as something other than fixed cartographic representations. They are, she writes, the imaginative ways individuals and groups understand spatial meaning in the world (Thompson, 2020). Everyone, she notes, carries around imperfect mental images of place, and recalls them when a decision must be made, using their spatial information to choose, though seldom in a purely rational way (Thompson, 2020). My map was imperfect in exactly her sense. It was saturated with feeling, weighted toward danger, drawn by a nervous system that preferred a hundred false alarms to a single missed one. It was the imaginative work of a child making spatial meaning out of fear.

When Home Is the Place You Map for Danger

Here I have to say the hard thing plainly, because the whole point of this map is that I drew it inside the one place that is supposed to need no map at all. We are taught that home is refuge. The geographers who study this have spent decades showing how often that teaching conceals the opposite.

Warrington (2001), in a study that has stayed with me, describes the geographies of domestic violence as a series of enlarging yet restricted spaces. Although the social construction of home is as a place of safety and support, she writes, in reality it can be a place of violence, where those who live in fear become spatially restricted to the home itself or to its immediate environs (Warrington, 2001). She found that even those who break free and reach a place of refuge continue to live spatially restricted lives, still mapping their world around a danger that follows them (Warrington, 2001). When I read Warrington, I understood that the thin safe line I walked to the back door was geography in her exact sense: a life narrowed and organized by the need to stay out of harm’s way inside my own home.

The philosopher Joshua Price (2002) sharpens this further, and his words gave me language for a feeling I had carried wordlessly for decades. The home, he argues, is ideologically understood as a place of safety and refuge, and that very ideology cloaks the violence that happens within it (Price, 2002). He writes about how a person living with the threat of violence works constantly to arrange the domestic space so as to avoid setting off the one who might harm them, living, as one woman in his study put it, as though walking a tightrope where one small slip brings danger (Price, 2002). That tightrope is a map. It is the same map I drew. To live in such a home is to become a cartographer of another person’s moods, charting the daily weather of a house so that you might survive it.

This is why I name my childhood vigilance as intelligence rather than as damage. I was reading my environment with great accuracy under conditions that demanded it. The map I carried was a rational instrument, a means of moving through dangerous terrain, and giving it that dignity is the beginning of being able, slowly, to set it down.

The Geography Closest In

There is one more turn I want to make, because the map I carried lived beyond my mind. It lived in my body. My shoulders still rise toward my ears at the sound of heavy footsteps. My breath still catches when a door closes hard. The cognitive map of threat was written into a startle, a scanning gaze, a tightened stomach, long before I had any words for it.

Geographers have come to take this seriously too. Bondi (2005), writing on what she and others call emotional geographies (the study of how feeling shapes, and is shaped by, our experience of space and place), traces how feminist geographers challenged the old assumption that women’s fear was irrational, and showed instead that fear is generated by and expressive of wider social relations rather than being merely a private interior state (Bondi, 2005). Fear, in this work, permeates environments as much as it fills a single frightened mind (Bondi, 2005). My map was emotional geography in exactly this sense. The feeling and the floor plan were one thing. The danger I charted was real, structural, and located, beyond a flaw in my imagination.

I went to Loreto, decades later, to begin redrawing this map. Thirty days alone by the Sea of Cortez, learning to let a room be only a room, to let silence be safety rather than the held breath before a storm. The old map has yet to fully fade, and I have made a kind of peace with its persistence. It kept a child alive. I can honour it for that and still, morning by morning, sketch the lighter map beside it, the one where the safe water spreads wider every year, and the rocks draw back toward the far edge of the chart.

I knew the house the way a sailor knows a coast. I am learning, now, to know safety the same way.

References

Argent, N., & Walmsley, D. J. (2009). From the inside looking out and the outside looking in: Whatever happened to “behavioural geography”? Geographical Research, 47(2), 192-203. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-5871.2009.00571.x

Bondi, L. (2005). Making connections and thinking through emotions: Between geography and psychotherapy. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30(4), 433-448. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2005.00183.x

Price, J. M. (2002). The apotheosis of home and the maintenance of spaces of violence. Hypatia, 17(4), 39-70. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2002.tb01073.x

Thompson, M. (2020). Mental mapping and multinational migrations: A geographical imaginations approach. Geographical Research, 58(4), 388-402. https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-5871.12435

Warrington, M. (2001). “I must get out”: The geographies of domestic violence. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 26(3), 365-382. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-5661.00028

Academic Lens

This post translates the concept of the cognitive map from behavioural geography into a Scholarly Personal Narrative account of childhood hypervigilance, grounding the personal in peer-reviewed journal scholarship rather than a survey textbook. Argent and Walmsley’s (2009) retrospective supplies the disciplinary foundation, defining behavioural geography as the study of how people build mental images of their environment and act upon them, and crucially distinguishing it from reductive stimulus-response behaviourism, which licenses the reading of childhood vigilance as interpretation rather than mere reflex. Thompson’s (2020) account of mental maps as imaginative, affectively weighted, and imperfect representations extends the concept beyond wayfinding toward the emotionally saturated map this post describes. The argumentative centre draws on feminist geographies of the home: Warrington (2001) reframes domestic violence as a spatial condition of enlarging yet restricted space, and Price (2002) exposes the ideological cloaking by which the home’s reputation as refuge conceals the violence within it, together giving scholarly form to the experience of mapping one’s own house for danger. Bondi (2005) supplies the emotional-geographies frame, situating fear as a spatial and relational phenomenon rather than a private irrationality, which connects this post to the wider Geography of Fear series and to the feminist insistence that the body is the nearest scale at which space is lived. Read through Scholarly Personal Narrative (Nash, 2004), the cartographic metaphor operates as both lived memory and analytic claim: the map is the argument.

Alonetude as Possibilism

Reading Time: 8 minutes

This piece belongs to A Human Geography of the Self, a series that reads my own life through the concepts geographers use to understand how people and places make one another. It draws on my creative doctoral and master’s work on alonetude: intentional, embodied solitude as a healing practice.

“The environment confines, and yet it leaves me room to act. That narrow room is where a life gets made.”

I am standing at the edge of the Sea of Cortez on my third morning in Loreto, ankle deep, watching the light come up pink over the Sierra de la Giganta. The water is colder than it looks. There is a wind from the north that I had no part in choosing, a tide that arrived on its own schedule, a stretch of rocky shore that decides where I can enter and where I cannot. I have come here alone for thirty days, and the sea in front of me is utterly indifferent to my plans. It will be what it is. The question I carried into the water that morning, the question that became this whole essay, was simple and very old: how much of what happens to me here will the sea decide, and how much will I?

That question has a long history in geography. For a discipline that spends its days studying the relationship between people and the earth, the oldest argument of all is about who holds the power in that relationship. Does the environment shape us, set our limits, write our fate? Or do we shape it, choosing our lives from within whatever the land offers? I want to tell you about that argument, because I have come to believe that the small, private practice I named alonetude (the intentional transformation of imposed aloneness into chosen solitude) is one quiet answer to it.

The Oldest Argument in Geography

For a long stretch of the discipline’s history, the dominant answer was that the environment decides. This view came to be called environmental determinism (the belief that climate and terrain directly govern human character, culture, and capacity). Judkins, Smith, and Keys (2008) trace its high point to roughly 1890 to 1920, when geographers asserted that environmental factors were the determinative cause of cultural practices, moral values, and the ultimate capabilities of any given population. It was, they show, a logic that ranked peoples by their climates and lent a scientific gloss to colonial hierarchy. Determinism was never merely a flawed idea. It was a tool that decided what land and its peoples were permitted to mean.

The reaction against it gave us a second answer. Judkins and colleagues (2008) describe the arrival, after 1920, of what they call cultural possibilism, a framework that reduced the environment from a dictate to a force of constraint and enablement, preserving only a muted sense of influence. Possibilism holds that the environment sets limits and offers materials, while human beings choose among the possibilities those materials allow. The founder of the view, Paul Vidal de la Blache, put it plainly in a line that Kriesel preserves: nature provides materials that have their limitations, and that “lend themselves to certain uses rather than to others. To this extent nature does make suggestions, and at times restrictions” (as cited in Kriesel, 1968, p. 562). The sea makes suggestions. The sea imposes restrictions. Within them, I act.

I love that Vidal de la Blache used the word suggestions. Standing in that cold water, I could feel the truth of it in my own body. The sea was suggesting. The wind was restricting. Neither was commanding. The space between suggestion and command is exactly the space where a self lives.

Confining, and Yet Not Determining

The phrase that has stayed closest to me through the writing of this piece comes from a presidential address that the geographer Risa Palm delivered to the Association of American Geographers in the mid-1980s. Human geographers, she argued, should understand the interactions between people and environment as “neither random nor law-given but rather the combination of historical circumstance of both long and short duration, confining and yet not determining human behavior” (Palm, 1986, p. 469). I have read that line more times than I can count. Confining, and yet not determining. Six words that hold the whole of what I went to Loreto to learn.

Palm reached this through a study of how Californians responded to the risk of earthquakes, a hazard that confines a life absolutely and yet leaves people with real and varied choices about how to live alongside it. Her insistence on holding agency (the human capacity to act and to produce effects in the world) together with structure (the durable conditions that constrain and enable that action) is what geographers call the structure and agency relationship. She refused to let either pole win. The earth confines us. We are far from helpless within the confinement. Both truths hold at once, and the honest work is to live inside their tension rather than collapsing it toward fate or toward fantasy.

This is the geography of my own history, and I want to be careful and truthful here. For nineteen years I have worked as a contract academic, semester to semester, never certain whether the next term would hold a place for me. Precarity is a confining structure. It is real, it is external, and it would be a lie to pretend that wanting my situation otherwise could dissolve it. The determinist temptation, in a precarious life, is to let the structure narrate everything, to conclude that the system has already decided my worth and my exhaustion. Palm’s six words are my refusal of that conclusion. The contract confines me. It has never fully determined me. Alonetude is the name I give to what I do in the room that confinement leaves open.

From Constraint to Possibility

If Palm taught me to hold confinement and freedom together, the sociologists Richard York and Jordan Fox Besek gave me a way to feel the difference between a condition and a sentence. Writing in Sociological Inquiry, they distinguish determinism from what they call potentiality. A determinist account looks for the single cause that dictates an outcome. A potentiality account, by contrast, “recognizes biology as intertwined with other factors, leading to alternatives and options as much as to constraints” (York & Besek, 2019, p. 326). Conditions, on this view, are “part of what makes human history, but they are not the master influence. They interact with many other forces, providing potential pathways for societies” (York & Besek, 2019, p. 327).

Potential pathways. When I read those words, I understood what my thirty days by the sea had been for. I had gone to Loreto carrying a determinist story about myself, the story that a childhood organized around fear and a working life organized around insecurity had simply fixed me as a certain kind of anxious, over-functioning person. York and Besek let me see that story for what it was: a monocausal explanation, the very thing potentiality refuses. My history was real. It was a condition rather than a master. It opened pathways as much as it closed them. The thirty days were a long walk down a pathway my conditions had left open all along, one I had been too depleted to see.

This is the heart of why I call alonetude a kind of possibilism. The sea imposed cold, wind, tide, and rock. Precarity imposed insecurity and a thinned-out sense of welcome in my own profession. My early life imposed a nervous system trained toward threat. These were my milieu, in Vidal de la Blache’s sense, the given conditions of my situation. And the daily practice of alonetude, the morning swim, the slow walk along the malecón, the writing done before the heat arrived, was the work of choosing a life from within them. I had no power to choose the sea. I could choose to turn it into a place that held me.

What the Water Gave Back

There is a danger in this kind of essay, and I want to name it so I avoid it. To celebrate human agency too loudly is to drift back toward the romantic illusion that we can conquer any circumstance through sheer will, an illusion that is just determinism wearing the opposite mask. Palm guards against this. So do York and Besek. Conditions are real. Some confinements stay confining no matter how I narrate them. A contract that ends still ends. A cold sea is still cold. The point of possibilism is never that constraint dissolves. The point is that constraint and choice arrive together, braided, and that a life is made in the braiding.

I think this is why open water has taught me more about possibilism than any book. When I swim out past where I can stand, I enter an environment that confines me utterly. The water sets the temperature, the swell, the limit of how far and how long. And yet within that confinement I am intensely, gloriously free: free in my stroke, my breath, my pace, my decision to turn back or to go on. The swimmer’s body knows what the geographers argued about for a century. The water suggests. The water restricts. Within the suggestion and the restriction, I am the one who swims.

On my last morning in Loreto I went into the Sea of Cortez one more time, into the same cold that had asked me the question on my third day. The sea had decided nothing about me in thirty days. It had only offered conditions, a milieu of salt and light and solitude, and left me to make of them what I could. What I made was a self a little more able to rest, a little more able to believe that being alone could be a chosen good rather than a sentence served. That is alonetude. That is possibilism, lived in the first person, at the edge of a sea that confined me and, in confining me, set me free to choose.

References

Judkins, G., Smith, M., & Keys, E. (2008). Determinism within human-environment research and the rediscovery of environmental causation. The Geographical Journal, 174(1), 17-29. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4959.2008.00265.x

Kriesel, K. M. (1968). Montesquieu: Possibilistic political geographer. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 58(3), 557-574. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1968.tb01652.x

Palm, R. (1986). Coming home. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 76(4), 469-479. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1986.tb00130.x

York, R., & Besek, J. F. (2019). Social evolution and environmental context: Explanative pluralism and potentiality. Sociological Inquiry, 89(2), 317-338. https://doi.org/10.1111/soin.12267

Academic Lens

This post grounds the concept of alonetude in the classical determinism and possibilism debate within human geography, drawing on peer-reviewed journal scholarship rather than a survey textbook. Judkins, Smith, and Keys (2008) supply the historical arc from environmental determinism to cultural possibilism, while Kriesel (1968) preserves Vidal de la Blache’s founding articulation of possibilism in the geographer’s own translated words. The argumentative spine comes from two complementary sources. Palm’s (1986) presidential address models the structure and agency synthesis that refuses both environmental fate and voluntarist fantasy, captured in her phrase “confining and yet not determining.” York and Besek’s (2019) distinction between determinism and potentiality reframes conditions as opening “potential pathways” rather than dictating outcomes, which provides the conceptual hinge by which a personal history becomes a milieu rather than a sentence. Read through Scholarly Personal Narrative (Nash, 2004), the post enacts its own argument: the first-person account of a thirty-day retreat performs the possibilist claim that a self is made through chosen action within given constraint. The open-water swimming passages extend the argument into embodied, more-than-textual knowledge, positioning the swimmer’s negotiated relationship with water as possibilism felt in the body.

Taking My Body Back

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Content Warning: This post contains reflections on body shame, institutional harm, and the experience of exhaustion. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.

I am taking my body back
from systems that treat endurance as a virtue
and exhaustion as a personal flaw.

I gave years to work without limits,
to teaching, care, and constant availability,
to building futures while postponing my own.
I called this commitment.
My body called it extraction.

When my body withdrew consent,
It was information,
never weakness.
It was a boundary where dignity begins.

Burnout is structural evidence,
never individual failure.

I am taking my body back
from productivity as worth,
from unpaid labour dressed as passion,
from the idea that rest must be earned.

This is reclamation,
rather than withdrawal.

My body carries the record
that policies ignore.
It remembers what institutions forget.

Taking my body back
is a human rights practice.
The right to health.
The right to rest.
The right to work without erasure.

I move more slowly now.
I listen longer.
I stop when stopping is required.

This is alonetude.
This is consent.
This is a refusal.

My body is no longer extractable.

Image: When the Body Withdraws Consent

Photograph from “Taking My Body Back”, image 1.

Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

Note. A single running shoe rests on volcanic sand, emptied of the body that once relied on it for endurance and escape. The shoe functions as an embodied artifact rather than a symbol, registering a moment of refusal. Its stillness marks the point at which movement ceased to be restorative and became extractive. In this inquiry, the object is treated as data within a Scholarly Personal Narrative methodology, documenting how prolonged institutional demands inscribe themselves onto the body and how withdrawal becomes a protective, rights-bearing response. The absence of motion here is evidence, never failure.

Shoe as Witness

I had no plan to photograph meaning. I noticed the shoe because it felt familiar.

It was worn, emptied, left behind without ceremony. No drama. No collapse staged for recognition. Just an object that had reached the end of what it could give. Standing there, I felt a quiet recognition settle in my body. This is what it looks like when consent is withdrawn.

There is vulnerability in admitting that stopping arrived beyond my choosing. For years, I believed endurance was a moral good. I learned to equate commitment with overextension, capacity with worth. That belief was reinforced daily by academic life, where staying available, absorbing uncertainty, and carrying invisible labour were treated as evidence of professionalism. When my body finally refused, I read it as failure. I had yet to understand that collapse can be a form of protection.

With some distance, perspective begins to shift. Burnout is never solitary in its emergence. It accumulates. It settles into muscle, breath, and gait. What I once framed as personal weakness now appears as a predictable response to prolonged insecurity and unrelenting demand. The shoe holds this point without argument. It records stopping as fact, without apology.

The action, small as it seems, was noticed. Pausing long enough to see the shoe as more than debris. Photographing it. Allowing it to stand as data rather than decoration. This is how my research is unfolding now, through attention rather than acceleration. Objects speak when I stop trying to outrun them.

Scholarly engagement lives quietly inside this moment. Trauma-informed scholarship reminds us that the body remembers what environments require us to override. Labour research names how systems normalize depletion while individualizing its consequences. Human rights frameworks affirm the right to rest, to health, to work that requires no self-erasure. No summoning of those texts was needed while standing there. They were already present, carried in my body, waiting to be acknowledged.

This image belongs to the same counter-archive as the stones, the shadows, the painted surfaces, the early mornings by the water. Together, they document something institutions rarely record: the moment a body stops agreeing to conditions that diminish it. They track fatigue, refusal, and the slow work of recovery.

In this work, taking the body back is understood as a human rights practice.

I am no longer interested in proving resilience. I am interested in listening to what the body says when it is finally allowed to speak.

This shoe tells that story better than I ever could.

ACADEMIC LENS

The declarative act of “taking my body back” names what van der Kolk (2014) identifies as the central task of trauma recovery: re-establishing the embodied self’s sovereignty over its own experience, after prolonged periods in which institutional demands have overridden the body’s own signals of need, limit, and preference. Hochschild’s (2012) concept of emotional labour provides the structural analysis: the body was instrumentalized rather than simply used, its endurance treated as a renewable resource rather than a finite one with real costs. Nixon’s (2011) framework of slow violence names the mechanism: each individual demand seemed reasonable in isolation, while their cumulative effect constituted a sustained violation of the right to bodily integrity and rest. Menakem (2017) argues that recovery requires the intellectual understanding of harm alongside but the somatic reclamation of the body’s authority: learning to listen to, trust, and act on the body’s signals rather than overriding them in service of institutional legibility. The statement “I am taking my body back” is thus both personal and political: it refuses the institutional definition of the body as a tool for productivity and insists on its dignity as a site of knowledge, feeling, and inherent worth.

Las historias de vida de las piedras: trauma, alonetud y aprendizaje en el tiempo profundo

Las piedras hablan. The stones speak. A bilingual scholarly reflection on trauma, alonetude, and what it means to learn through geological time beside the shore of Loreto, Baja California Sur.

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Las piedras no tienen prisa. Tampoco el dolor.
Stones know no hurry. Neither is grief.

A Bilingual Scholarly Reflection on Geological Time, Trauma, and Alonetude

Las piedras hablan / The Stones Speak

I have been collecting stones since my first walk along this shore.

Gathering without purpose. Without cataloguing or arranging. Simply bending down, picking something up, turning it over in my palm, feeling its weight, its smoothness, its particular refusal to be hurried. Some I carry back to my room. Some I return to the water. Most I hold for a moment and set back down exactly where I found them.

This practice arrived unexpectedly. But here I am, two weeks into thirty days beside the Sea of Cortez, and the stones are teaching me something available through no other path.

Las piedras hablan. Pero no con palabras.

The stones speak. In a language beyond words.

Tiempo profundo / Deep Time

The stones on this shore are old in a way that rearranges something in the mind.

Geologists use the term deep time to describe the vast timescale of Earth’s history, a scale so large that human life occupies only a tiny fraction of it. The volcanic stone of the Sierra de la Giganta, rising at the edge of this bay, formed over millions of years. What I am holding in my hand has been shaped by water, wind, and heat across timescales I cannot fully imagine. And yet here it is. Smooth. Patient. Present.

Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1977) writes about the relationship between place and time, arguing that our sense of place deepens with duration, that the body learns a place slowly, through repeated contact and accumulating familiarity. The shore is teaching me this. Each morning, I walk the same stretch of beach, and it is never quite the same beach. The tide has rearranged it. The light falls differently. A stone I noticed yesterday has been turned over by water, offering me a different face.

El lugar me enseña paciencia. / The place teaches me patience.

This feels important. I have spent nineteen years in precarious employment, living inside what Rob Nixon (2011) calls slow violence: harm that unfolds gradually, accumulating across time without announcement. Slow violence has its own temporal logic. It teaches the body urgency. It teaches the nervous system that time is always running out, that the next contract may fail to arrive, and that rest is a risk. The body learns to treat duration as a threat.

The stones are teaching the opposite. They are evidence that time can accumulate as beauty rather than damage. That something can be shaped by forces larger than itself and emerge refined rather than broken.

Dark volcanic stones lining a sandy desert path in Loreto, Baja California Sur, stones forming twin borders through sparse desert scrub
A dramatic coastal rock formation beside the Sea of Cortez, where the body of the shore meets geological deep time
Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

El cuerpo como archivo / The Body as Archive

I have been thinking about what stones and bodies have in common.

Both are shaped by what they have been through. Both carry the evidence of their history on their surfaces and in their structures. A stone makes no decision toward smoothness. Smoothness is what the water makes of it, over time, through persistent contact. And a body makes no decision to brace. Bracing is what survival is made of, over the years, through persistent exposure to uncertainty.

Resmaa Menakem (2017) writes that trauma is stored in the body rather than only in the mind, passed between generations through nervous system inheritance. What the body learned to survive, it continues to enact, even when the original threat has passed. The stone cannot stop being smooth simply because the water has receded. And for a long time, stopping the bracing was beyond my reach simply because the contracts had stopped.

El trauma vive en el cuerpo. La curación también.

Trauma lives in the body. So does healing.

Bessel van der Kolk (2014) describes how the body keeps its own score, maintaining a somatic record of experiences the conscious mind may have rationalized or set aside. Healing extends beyond intellectual understanding of what happened. It is to give the body new experiences that gradually teach the nervous system a different story. New evidence. Repeated contact with safety. The slow accumulation of something other than harm.

Holding a stone, I notice something release in my shoulders.

Gaston Bachelard (1969) argues that we think with our hands as much as with our minds, that the imagination is deeply material rather than purely visual or verbal, rooted in touch, weight, and texture. There is a kind of knowing that arrives only through the hands. Picking up a stone, I feel it rather than think about it, receiving what it has to offer through the sensory channels that precede language.

There is a kind of thinking that happens only in the hands. The stone offers no argument. It simply offers itself, and the body receives it.

The layered face of a conglomerate rock, holding centuries of compression within its surface, near the Loreto shoreline
Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

Alonetud y piedra / Alonetude and Stone

The practice of picking up stones is a practice of alonetude.

Alonetude, as I am developing it, differs from both loneliness and the performed solitude of the retreat or the meditation app. It is a quality of presence, a willingness to be fully here with what is here, without an audience, without a purpose beyond the presence itself. It is the opposite of the hypervigilance that precarious labour instilled in me, the constant scanning, the waiting for the next demand, the inability to fully arrive in any moment because the next moment always carries a threat.

Estar sola, completamente presente. / To be alone, completely present.

When I pick up a stone, my full attention belongs to the stone. The stone requires my full attention, because presence itself requires it; once is simply what the encounter asks. I turn it over. I feel its weight shift. I notice the colour change where my warm hand has touched it. For these seconds, the sessional instructor waits for a contract to fall away. The researcher is anxious about the output falling away. I am a body in relation to a stone, and the stone is indifferent to all the rest.

This indifference is, strangely, a relief.

Philosopher Martin Buber (1970) distinguishes between I-Thou and I-It relationships, where genuine encounter requires full presence and mutuality. Most of my institutional life has been I-It: instrumental, transactional, surveilled. The stone cannot evaluate my performance. It cannot renew or decline to renew my contract. Its indifference holds no unkindness. It is entirely outside the economy of institutional assessment, and in that outside-ness, I find something I had almost forgotten how to feel.

La piedra no me juzga. / La piedra no me juzga. The stone withholds all judgment.

A translucent selenite crystal held in an open palm, a moment of solitary presence with stone, Loreto, Baja California Sur
Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

Las historias que cargamos / The Stories We Carry

Each stone has a history.

I know this intellectually, in the way geologists know it: that the smoothness of a river stone records the duration and force of the water that shaped it, that the colour of volcanic rock carries information about the temperature at which it formed, that the weight in my hand is a compressed record of pressures and processes that unfolded across scales of time I cannot inhabit.

But I also know it in another way. The way the body knows things.

Menakem (2017) writes about the concept of the somatic narrative: the story the body tells through tension, posture, gesture, and breath. The body’s story lives beyond words. It is told in holding patterns, in the places breath has learned to avoid, in the flinch that arrives before the threat is even named. To heal is to learn to read this narrative, to listen to what the body has been trying to say.

The stones, in their patient silence, are teaching me to practise this listening.

Clark Moustakas (1961) writes about loneliness as an inescapable dimension of human experience, one that contains within it the possibility of deep self-knowledge. Genuine solitude, for Moustakas, transcends the absence of others: it is the presence of oneself, a turning toward rather than a turning away. Picking up stones alone on a shore in Mexico, I am practising this turning. Meeting myself in the quiet that forms between me and the geological world.

Las historias de vida de las piedras son también las mías.

The life stories of the stones are also mine.

The Loreto shoreline at sunrise or sunset, showing the relationship between the stone beach, the sea, and the mountains
Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

Lo que me llevaré / What I Will Take With Me

I am going to take three stones home.

I have been choosing them carefully over the past two weeks. Neither the most beautiful nor the most dramatic. Three ordinary stones that fit together in my hand, that have become familiar to me through repeated handling, that carry now the warmth of my attention.

Robert Levine (2010) writes about the body’s capacity to complete interrupted experiences, the way trauma keeps a process alive that was never allowed to finish. Healing, in this framing, is completion: returning to something left unfinished and allowing it to resolve. I think of the past nineteen years as an interrupted experience. A process that never reached resolution because the conditions for resolution, security, time, witness, and safety, were never present.

These thirty days are the beginning of completion.

The stones will come with me as witnesses. Evidence that I was here. That something in me held still long enough to be shaped by something other than urgency. That the body can learn, slowly, the way stone is learned by water: through patient and repeated contact with what is real.

Estas piedras son testigos. / These stones are witnesses.

References

Bachelard, G. (1969). The poetics of space (M. Jolas, Trans.). Beacon Press. (Original work published 1958)

Buber, M. (1970). I and Thou (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Charles Scribner’s Sons. (Original work published 1923)

Levine, P. (2010). In an unspoken voice: How the body releases trauma and restores goodness. North Atlantic Books.

Menakem, R. (2017). My grandmother’s hands: Racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies. Central Recovery Press.

Moustakas, C. (1961). Loneliness. Prentice-Hall.

Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press.

Tuan, Y-F. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. University of Minnesota Press.

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

Academic Lens

This reflection engages what Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) describe as the essential function of Scholarly Personal Narrative: using the first-person account as a site of rigorous inquiry, where the researcher’s lived experience becomes both data and analysis. The stones function here as what Tuan (1977) calls place objects: material things that anchor us to a place and through that anchoring, to ourselves. The somatic learning described is aligned with Menakem's (2017) argument that healing must reach the body level beyond the cognitive, and with Bachelard's (1969) phenomenology of material imagination, the insight that we think with the substances of the world, and that stone in the hand is already a kind of knowing.

Translation note. Spanish language passages were generated using Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.

For a full list of all sources cited throughout this project, see the References page.