Where this page fits: This is the canonical short-glossary entry point for terms used throughout the project. For longer, essay-length treatment of the same concepts, see Key Concepts. For citations, see References.
This guide introduces the key concepts, frameworks, and terms used throughout 30 Days by the Sea, a creative thesis blog documenting a 30-day solo retreat on the Sea of Cortez in Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico. Written by Amy Tucker as part of a Master of Arts in Human Rights and Social Justice at Thompson Rivers University, the blog weaves together personal narrative, contemplative photography, academic theory, and bilingual (English/Spanish) writing.
Core Concepts
Alonetude
The central concept of the blog and the research. Alonetude is defined as intentional, embodied solitude practised as a method of healing, reflection, and critical inquiry. It is distinct from loneliness (which is imposed) and from ordinary solitude (which may be passive). Alonetude is active, it involves choosing to turn toward oneself with presence and without judgment. The blog explores four types: restorative, creative, political, and ceremonial. The word itself is original to this research.
The Third Shore
Both the name of the blog and a key metaphor. The third shore refers to the liminal space between loneliness and solitude, a conceptual territory where imposed isolation can be transformed into chosen presence. It is where the labour of personal transformation occurs. The image comes from the literal shoreline in Loreto, where desert meets sea, solid ground gives way to water, and one condition ends and another begins.
Precarious Academic Labour / Academic Precarity
A structural condition in which academic workers, particularly contract instructors, are employed semester-to-semester or course-by-course, without job security, benefits, or stable income. The blog documents 19 years of this experience. Precarious academic labour is a system of institutional harm rather than a personal failure, one that extracts health, time, and creative energy from workers while demanding gratitude in return.
Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN)
The primary research methodology of the blog, developed by scholar Robert Nash (2004). SPN positions lived experience as legitimate scholarly data when properly theorized within academic frameworks. It involves three interwoven voices: the personal (authentic lived experience), the scholarly (theoretical analysis), and the universal (connecting individual experience to broader human concerns). SPN asks the researcher to stay in their own body and write from where they are, resisting false claims of objectivity.
The Body as Archive
Drawing on Bessel van der Kolk’s work (The Body Keeps the Score, 2014), the blog treats the body as a holder of experience, trauma, and institutional harm. Braced shoulders, fractured sleep, a clenched jaw, these physical symptoms are understood as data, the body’s record of what has been endured. Healing, in this framework, requires attending to the body alongside and beyond the mind.
Theoretical Frameworks
Polyvagal Theory / Nervous System Regulation
Developed by Stephen Porges (2011), this theory describes how the autonomic nervous system unconsciously scans the environment for safety or threat, a process called neuroception. After years of precarious employment, the body’s threat-detection system becomes calibrated to danger, making rest feel unsafe. The blog tracks the nervous system’s gradual shift across four phases: from bracing and scanning, through grief, toward clarity, and finally integration.
The Burnout Society
A concept from philosopher Byung-Chul Han (The Burnout Society, 2015). Han argues that contemporary society replaces external discipline with internal compulsion, people exploit themselves more effectively than any external authority could. The achievement-subject is simultaneously perpetrator and victim. This framework helps the blog name burnout as a structural outcome rather than personal weakness, arising from systems that demand constant performance and productivity.
The Precariat
A term from sociologist Guy Standing (The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, 2011). The precariat is a social class defined by chronic insecurity, lack of occupational identity, and truncated access to rights. In the academic context, contract workers form part of this class, their insecurity is functional and deliberate, serving institutions’ need for flexible, disposable labour.
Academic Capitalism
Named by Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades (2004), this refers to the regime in which universities operate as market actors, treating knowledge and labour as commodities to be extracted rather than cultivated. It is the structural backdrop against which precarious academic labour occurs.
Situated Knowledges
A concept from Donna Haraway (1988). Situated knowledges argues that all knowledge comes from somewhere specific, from a body standing in a particular place, with a particular history and set of social positions. It is a rejection of the “god trick”, the false claim of seeing everything from nowhere. The blog’s shadow-portrait photographs are a visual expression of this: the researcher present in the frame without performing for it.
Dark Emotions / Emotional Alchemy
From Miriam Greenspan (Healing Through the Dark Emotions, 2003). Greenspan names grief, fear, and despair as dark emotions: purposeful and diagnostic rather than simply negative. They become toxic only when avoided or suppressed. Emotional alchemy is her process for moving through them: intention, affirmation, bodily sensation, contextualization, non-action, action, and transformation. The weeping that arrives unbidden in Week 2 of the retreat is understood through this lens.
Ambiguous Loss
A concept from Pauline Boss (1999). Ambiguous loss describes grief that arrives when someone is physically present but psychologically absent, as with addiction. The blog references this in relation to the author’s adult son’s addiction, naming it as one of the weights carried into the retreat.
Emotional Labour
From sociologist Arlie Hochschild (The Managed Heart, 1983). Emotional labour is the invisible work of managing feelings and performing wellness, maintaining a professional face of competence and care when personal resources are depleted. The blog identifies this as a central form of uncompensated work in precarious academic roles.
Liminality
From anthropologist Victor Turner (1969). Liminality describes a threshold state between what was and what will be, characterized by ambiguity, disorientation, and the dissolution of previous identity structures. The first week of the retreat is framed as deeply liminal: no longer an instructor and still becoming whatever comes next, suspended in a place where no one knows your professional history.
Radical Rest as Resistance
Drawing on Tricia Hersey (Rest Is Resistance, 2022) and Audre Lorde (1988), this framework positions rest as a political act: a form of resistance against systems that benefit from the exhaustion and self-erasure of marginalized people. Lorde’s argument that “caring for myself is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” is a foundational principle of the blog.
Contemplative Photography
A visual practice described by Andy Karr and Michael Wood (2011) as seeing with fresh perception, receiving visual experience as it presents itself rather than imposing narrative upon it. Throughout the blog, photography is treated as a research method in its own right, beyond illustration. Images of driftwood, shadows, worn objects, and thresholds are data, holding qualities the researcher needs to encounter.
Photovoice
A participatory research methodology developed by Caroline Wang and Mary Ann Burris (1997) in which people use cameras to document their lived realities and bring those into conversation with broader social analysis. The blog draws on Photovoice’s commitment that the person who lives a condition is best positioned to document it.
Arts-Based Research
A methodology described by Patricia Leavy (2015) that treats artistic processes as forms of knowledge production, generating understanding unavailable through conventional methods by engaging perception, intuition, and embodied knowing. In the blog, every photograph, painted stone, and piece of found-object art is considered a research finding.
Human Rights Terms
UDHR, Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Adopted by the United Nations in 1948. The blog references several articles: Article 1 (all human beings are born free and equal in dignity); Article 23 (right to just and favourable conditions of work); Article 24 (right to rest and leisure); and Article 25 (right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being). These are invoked to frame precarious academic labour as a structural condition, beyond individual misfortune but as a potential human rights concern.
ICESCR, International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
A UN treaty (1966) that operationalizes the UDHR through binding obligations. Referenced in the blog for its provisions on safe and healthy working conditions (Article 7), social security (Article 9), and the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health (Article 12).
The Structural Inversion
A core analytical move in the blog: the shift from asking “What is wrong with me?” to asking “What conditions produced this outcome, and who else is affected?” This inversion moves individual suffering from the domain of personal pathology to the domain of structural critique and human rights accountability. It is the methodological heart of human rights inquiry as practised in the blog.
Slow Violence
Referenced in post tags, slow violence describes harm that is incremental, cumulative, and often invisible, unfolding over time rather than in a single dramatic event. The erosion of health, identity, and creative capacity through years of precarious employment is understood as a form of slow violence.
Blog Structure and Categories
Posts in the blog are organized into the following categories:
- 30 Days by the Sea, Daily entries from the Loreto retreat (Days 1–31), documenting the lived experience of alonetude in real time.
- Academic Life & Labour, Posts exploring precarious employment, institutional harm, and the structural conditions of contract academic work.
- Bilingual Writing, Posts written in Spanish, or combining English and Spanish. Spanish is used as an act of reclamation and cultural connection.
- Memory & Vignette, Short prose pieces exploring childhood memories, family relationships, and formative experiences.
- Poetry, Poems that address themes of identity, labour, grief, belonging, and healing.
- Reflections, Thematic essays and meditations on the research and the retreat experience.
- Scholarly Personal Narrative, Posts that explicitly combine personal voice with academic theory and analysis.
Recurring Themes and Motifs
Endurance Without Performance
A quality the author repeatedly finds in objects, worn shoes, driftwood, an ancient mission door, a weathered stump. These are things that have been shaped by time and forces outside their choosing, and are simply still here. They become mirrors for a kind of presence the researcher is trying to learn: beyond intact, beyond broken, just here.
Ver Lentamente (Seeing Slowly)
A Spanish phrase meaning “to see slowly.” It describes the photographic and healing practice at the centre of the blog: resisting urgency, waiting for the light to shift, spending time with a single object. Seeing slowly is both a method and a form of self-care, it is the same practice as healing, requiring presence before analysis.
Shadow Studies
A category of self-portraiture in the blog. Rather than photographing her face, the author photographs her shadow on sand or water, presence documented through mark rather than performance, proof of location without self-surveillance. These images are a visual expression of situated knowledges: I am here, I am looking, and here is the evidence.
Environmental Witnesses
A term coined in the blog for non-human elements, rocks, birds, tides, trees, that co-document the research by holding qualities the researcher needs to see. Pelicans diving without concern for their curriculum vitae; a stump enduring at a lakeside; stones shaped by deep time. These are understood as research collaborators.
Descansa / Rest
Descansa is Spanish for “rest.” The word appears throughout the blog as both a personal instruction and a political statement. The blog insists that rest is a right rather than a reward to be earned through sufficient productivity, but a human right, something the body and the person are entitled to unconditionally. The inability to rest without guilt is treated as evidence of institutional harm rather than personal weakness.
Aquí Estoy / Here I Am
A recurring Spanish phrase meaning “here I am” or “I am here.” It appears at key moments of arrival, presence, and self-recognition throughout the blog. It is an assertion of existence and self-worth that requires no institutional validation, a quiet refusal of disposability.
Key People and Place
Amy Tucker
The author and researcher. A white, settler, cisgender woman; a contract academic worker with 19 years of experience; a Master of Arts student in Human Rights and Social Justice at Thompson Rivers University on Secwépemc Territory. She writes from within the conditions she studies, acknowledging both her vulnerability as a contingent worker and her privilege as someone with the means to undertake a month-long retreat.
Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico
The site of the 30-day retreat (January 1–31, 2026). A small town on the Sea of Cortez, where desert mountains meet turquoise water. The landscape, pelicans, volcanic sand, tide-worn stones, ancient mission churches, becomes both subject and collaborator in the research.
Secwépemc Territory
The Indigenous territory on which Thompson Rivers University is located, in Kamloops, British Columbia. Named in the blog as part of the researcher’s land acknowledgment and positionality statement, situating the research within Indigenous sovereignty and the ongoing conditions of settler colonialism.
