Title:
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The Unsaid and the Walking Away: Seventeen Stories About Horses, Violence, Trauma and Women
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This thesis stories a quest for meaning and knowledge through the use of
first-person action research. It starts, essentially with an issue of
silence, a silence caused perhaps by trauma, and follows how I found
myself writing a story. It then shows the development of my use of story
as an inquiry method and as a way of discovering voice and saying what
initially feels unsayable and unspeakable. The thesis is written in the
form of stories and follows the trajectory of my ideas and inquiry, from
the sublime experience of dressage practice and working with horses,
through growing up within the context of terrorism and colonial
occupation, to working with the issue of violence against women. I seek
throughout the thesis to develop form that mirrors the issues I am
exploring and so seek to capture and present the emergent quality of my
knowing, rather than pretend that my research had a linear and easy
path. This thesis then, attempts to present an 'honesty trail' that maps
the confusion, challenges and different directions of a complex inquiry.
In this sense I show you the development of my ideas and my method of
inquiry of embodied writing, in action as such.
I also seek to draw on literature on action research, autoethnography,
narrative therapy, trauma and violence against women and explore
issues of knowledge generation, of sensemaking, confidence and of
course, form. In the end this work considers how writing can be used as
a way of negotiating life, of keeping. us connected to ourselves and the
innate wisdom of our bodies, and also a way of keeping us connected to
others. The thesis concludes with a consideration of story as an inquiry
method and also a way of 'writing to live', a way of encapsulating all of
the joy, horror and ordinariness of life and as a tool to negotiate the
incoherence of life events.
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