Shadows and silences: a creative-relational self-inquiry into the liminal space between what is seen and not seen, what is said and not said

Abstract

This thesis is a journey that took off from Laurel Richardson’s (2000b) assertion that writing is a method of inquiry. Inspired by her work, I wrote and wrote and wrote, hoping to produce knowledge along the way. Eventually, however, No showed up to protest. What followed was a series of refusals, experiences of embodied no-ing that resulted in my repeated rejection of research methods. I lost my way and my grounding, grappling with stuckness and failure, not knowing what to do and how to proceed. Left with no choice, I decided to file a “fictional” ethics complaint against myself, troubling the conceptualisation of lostness, harm, consent, and vulnerability, a process that thankfully ended with a truce, a compromise that has given me permission to write about my shadows and silences, to explore the liminal space between what is seen and not seen, what is said and not said.

This exploration is an enactment of what I have come to call creative-relational self-inquiry, following the footsteps of those who believe in “the ‘creative-relational’ as a dynamic conceptual frame for vibrant, incisive research” (Centre for Creative- Relational Inquiry 2023). Using performative accounts (Jackson and Mazzei 2023) which are a curation of texts, images, and audio recordings gathered from my almost four years of self re-search, I engage with my shadows and silences not simply as concepts, but as embodied realities, using an approach that is experience-near (Bondi and Fewell 2016). These performative accounts seek to bring to life British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s (2016, 439) claim that in life’s “sophisticated game of hide-and-seek…it is joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found.” In this thesis, I show and hide myself through my shadows and silences, allowing you to take a peek into the spaces between and within them.