This page defines the key terms and frameworks that run throughout this project. They are offered here as an entry point for readers coming to this work from outside the academy, and as a record of the conceptual architecture that holds it together.
Alonetude
Alonetude is the central concept of this project, and a term I coined. It describes a positive, integrated, and intentional relationship with being alone: the capacity to be fully present to oneself, in the world, without performance, without audience, and without apology.
Alonetude is distinct from loneliness, which is marked by unwanted isolation and a painful sense of disconnection, and from solitude in its classical sense, which carries connotations of romanticised withdrawal from the world. Alonetude is neither absence nor escape. It is a form of presence.
I argue that the capacity for alonetude is a human right, and that precarious labour systematically erodes it, making rest feel dangerous, guilty, or simply unavailable. The thirty days by the Sea of Cortez documented in this project were an attempt to recover that capacity.
See also: The Third Shore, Precarious Labour, Rest as Resistance, Slow Violence
The Third Shore
The Third Shore is the metaphor at the heart of this project. It names the space that exists beyond the institution (the first shore) and beyond isolation (the second shore): a place where one can be wholly oneself, in relation with the world, without the performance of either belonging or withdrawal.
It is the conceptual home of alonetude. The title of this blog, 30 Days by the Sea, and the subtitle, A Research Inquiry into the Third Shore, both point toward this idea: that rest, solitude, and self-possession are places one can arrive at and inhabit, not simply states one stumbles into.
Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN)
Scholarly Personal Narrative is the research methodology that shapes this entire project. Developed by Robert Nash (2004), SPN holds the researcher’s lived experience as legitimate data and storytelling as a valid form of rigorous academic inquiry.
In an SPN, the researcher does not stand outside their subject matter; they are located within it. The personal voice is the analytical voice. Vulnerability is not a weakness in the method; it is the method. This approach is particularly well-suited to research on the body, on burnout, and on the kinds of institutional harm that rarely appear in performance reviews or policy documents.
Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.
Precarious Labour / The Precariat
Precarious labour refers to employment that is unstable, contingent, and lacking in the protections associated with permanent work: no job security, no benefits, no continuity. In the Canadian post-secondary context, this describes the reality of sessional and contract instructors who may teach the same courses, at the same institution, for years or decades without ever achieving stable employment.
The Precariat, a term coined by sociologist Guy Standing (2011), names this as a distinct social class: people whose lives are defined by chronic insecurity and whose relationship to work offers no foundation for identity, future planning, or rest. I spent eighteen years as a member of this class within a Canadian university. This project documents, in part, what that costs the body.
Standing, G. (2011). The precariat: The new dangerous class. Bloomsbury Academic.
Institutional Gaslighting
Institutional gaslighting occurs when an organisation denies or reframes a worker’s lived reality. In the context of precarious academic labour, it describes the gap between a university’s public commitments to wellness, equity, and inclusion, and the private reality of the contract worker: anxiety, financial instability, and the physical depletion that comes from performing competence while experiencing chronic stress.
It appears in the form of “Mindfulness Month” emails, employee assistance programme referrals, and resilience workshops offered to workers whose contracts are renewed semester by semester. The message, delivered with care, is that if you are burnt out, something in you has failed. The structural causes remain unnamed.
Institutional Violence
Institutional violence refers to the systemic harm caused by institutional policies and practices, particularly those that erode the physical and psychological health of workers over time. It is structural rather than interpersonal: no single person is necessarily cruel, but the cumulative effect of insecure contracts, inadequate support, and chronic uncertainty constitutes a form of harm.
This concept connects to Rob Nixon’s notion of slow violence: harm that is gradual, dispersed, and largely invisible, accumulating in the body across years rather than arriving in a single identifiable event. The insomnia, chronic pain, and loss of bodily connection described in this project are understood here as somatic evidence of institutional violence, recorded in the body as data.
See also: The Body Keeps the Score, Slow Violence, Somatic Knowledge
Slow Violence
A concept developed by scholar Rob Nixon, slow violence describes harm that accumulates gradually and out of sight, over months or years, rather than erupting in a single visible event. It is violence that is difficult to photograph, difficult to legislate against, and easy to overlook.
In this project, slow violence names the incremental physical and psychological cost of eighteen years of precarious academic employment: the way insecurity accumulates in the nervous system, the way rest becomes impossible, the way the body slowly forfeits its capacity for stillness when it has been trained for decades to equate rest with danger.
Somatic Knowledge
Somatic knowledge is the understanding held in and by the body. This project treats the body as an archive: a record of everything that has happened to it, including what institutions prefer to leave unnamed. Physical symptoms such as insomnia, chronic pain, and a diminished capacity for stillness are understood here as forms of knowledge, as evidence that carries the same scholarly weight as a citation or a dataset.
This framework draws on the work of Bessel van der Kolk, whose research demonstrates that traumatic and chronic stress leave lasting physiological traces, and on the Polyvagal Theory of Stephen Porges, which describes how the nervous system learns states of threat or safety that can persist long after the original conditions have changed.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score. Viking.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory. W. W. Norton.
Rest as Resistance
Drawing on the work of Tricia Hersey (2022), rest as resistance reframes rest as a political and spiritual act rather than a reward for productivity or a sign of weakness. In the context of a labour system that profits from exhaustion, choosing to rest, to stop, to be still, is a form of refusal.
This concept is woven through the thirty days documented in this project. The daily act of sitting by the sea, of writing without agenda, of allowing the body to be unproductive, is understood here as both a personal act of recovery and a political statement about what labour has the right to take from a person.
Hersey, T. (2022). Rest is resistance: A manifesto. Little, Brown Spark.
Academic Capitalism
A term from Slaughter and Rhoades (2004) describing the transformation of post-secondary institutions from public goods into market-driven enterprises. Under academic capitalism, universities operate increasingly like corporations, prioritising revenue generation, enrolment targets, and institutional brand over the well-being of workers or the integrity of the educational mission.
The widespread reliance on sessional and contract instructors is one of the most visible consequences of this shift: a flexible, cheap labour force that can expand or contract with enrolment without the cost of tenure, benefits, or long-term commitment.
Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Relational Accountability
A framework developed by Shawn Wilson (2008) that positions research as an act of relationship rather than extraction. In an Indigenous research paradigm, knowledge is understood as relational: it belongs to the connections between people, places, and ideas, and the researcher is accountable to those relationships, not only to the academy.
In this project, relational accountability shapes the ethical decisions made about whose stories are told and how. The use of pseudonyms for family members, the omission of crisis data that belongs to others, and the ongoing acknowledgement of the lands on which this work takes place are all expressions of this framework.
Wilson, S. (2008). Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods. Fernwood Publishing.
Epistemic Justice / Epistemic Violence
Epistemic justice, developed by philosopher Miranda Fricker (2007), concerns the right to be recognised as a knower: someone whose experience, testimony, and understanding count as valid knowledge. Its opposite, epistemic injustice, occurs when a person is systematically denied that recognition, often along lines of power, gender, race, or institutional status.
Epistemic violence extends this: it names the harm done when a person’s knowledge of their own life is actively overwritten by institutional or dominant narratives. When a university implies that a contract instructor’s exhaustion is a personal failing rather than a structural outcome, it commits a form of epistemic violence. Scholarly Personal Narrative is, in part, a response to this: a method that insists on the researcher’s right to name their own experience.
Sensory Ethnography
Sensory ethnography, developed by Sarah Pink (2013), is a research approach that takes seriously the full range of sensory experience as a site of knowledge: sound, smell, texture, temperature, and movement, alongside sight. In this project, photographs, written observations, and embodied reflections are all understood as forms of sensory ethnographic data, capturing the felt reality of thirty days by the sea in a way that a conventional academic argument cannot.
Pink, S. (2013). Doing visual ethnography (3rd ed.). SAGE Publications.
Liminality
Drawn from the anthropological work of Victor Turner (1969), liminality describes a threshold state: the in-between space of transition, where the old structure has been left behind and the new one has yet to take shape. Turner described it as a period of disorientation that is also, potentially, one of profound openness and transformation.
The thirty days in Loreto occupy a liminal space in this project: between a career and whatever comes next, between exhaustion and recovery, between the person the institution required and the person the sea allowed. The threshold was chosen. The disorientation was part of the inquiry.
Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Aldine.
Burnout
In this project, burnout is understood not as an individual psychological condition but as a predictable structural outcome of sustained precarious labour. Drawing on Maslach, Schaufeli, and Leiter (2001), burnout is characterised by emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and a reduced sense of personal accomplishment.
Byung-Chul Han (2015) extends this, arguing that burnout is a defining illness of the achievement society: a culture that internalises the demand for productivity so thoroughly that the worker becomes their own exploiter. The result is collapse, not from external force, but from the inside out.
Han, B.-C. (2015). The burnout society. Stanford University Press.
Maslach, C., Schaufeli, W. B., & Leiter, M. P. (2001). Job burnout. Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 397–422.
Ambiguous Loss
Pauline Boss (1999) developed the concept of ambiguous loss to describe grief that lacks the clarity of a definitive ending: a loss that cannot be fully mourned because it is never fully resolved. A career that ends in precarity rather than retirement, a family member whose presence is physically or psychologically uncertain, a sense of professional identity that was never securely held to begin with.
This concept appears in the background of much of this project, naming the particular texture of grief that accompanies an exit that was both chosen and forced, an ending that held relief and loss simultaneously.
Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous loss. Harvard University Press.
This glossary will continue to grow as the project develops. Terms are defined as they are used in this work; they are offered as starting points for understanding rather than as final or authoritative definitions.
Geographic Context
This project traces a journey of approximately 3,000 kilometres: from Kamloops, British Columbia, in the interior of the Canadian plateau, to Loreto, Baja California Sur, on the shore of the Sea of Cortez in northwestern Mexico.
Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada sits at the confluence of the North and South Thompson Rivers, at an elevation of roughly 345 metres, surrounded by semi-arid benchlands and canyon topography. It is the traditional and unceded territory of the Secwépemc (Shuswap) people. The word Tk’emlúps, the Secwépemc name for this place, means “where the rivers meet.” It is a place defined by convergence. Thompson Rivers University, where this project was conceived and supervised, is located here.
Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico is a small coastal town on the eastern shore of the Baja peninsula, facing the Sea of Cortez (also known as the Gulf of California). It is one of the oldest permanently settled communities in the Californias, established by Jesuit missionaries in 1697 at the site of an earlier Indigenous settlement of the Cochimí people. The surrounding desert landscape, the sierra to the west, and the luminous blue of the sea to the east define its character. The Sea of Cortez was described by John Steinbeck as “the whole thing: the sea, the desert, and the sky.” In January 2026, it was the site of this inquiry.
The Cochimí people were the Indigenous inhabitants of the central Baja peninsula for thousands of years before European contact. They were hunter-gatherers whose intimate knowledge of the desert environment allowed survival in one of the most arid landscapes on the continent. The mission system established by the Jesuits, beginning in Loreto in 1697, decimated the Cochimí population through disease, displacement, and cultural destruction. I write from their territory with an awareness of this history, and with the same spirit of acknowledgement I bring to my work on Secwépemc land.
The Two Places: A Sense of Distance
The map below shows the geographic relationship between these two territories: the Canadian interior plateau and the Baja desert coast. The distance between them is part of the inquiry. To leave Kamloops in January, to cross the border and travel south through desert, to arrive at the sea, was to place the body in an entirely different climate, ecology, and sensory world. That displacement was intentional. The nervous system needed unfamiliar ground.
The Journey: Kamloops to Loreto (~3,000 km)
📍 Kamloops, BC — Secwépemc Territory
Departure
📍 Loreto, BCS — Cochimí Territory
The Third Shore
See also: Positionality & Ancestry, Land Acknowledgements