Research on self-harm and children tends to focus on adolescent children (12 years of age and above). There is limited available information about self-harm in children ages 11 years and younger. This study utilized autoethnography as the methodology to provide a rich description of the professional experiences and practices of an elementary school principal who worked with self-harming primary-aged students. Based on an autoethnographical analysis, this study proposes future research and makes recommendations for school leaders implementing trauma-informed practices, educators working with self-harming students, and districts committed to proactive support.

This study explores teacher retention and teacher resilience in the United States through the stories of five teachers. The researcher presents the research in two manuscripts. Finding My Way through Teaching: A Critical Autoethnographic Play combines critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970) with autoethnography (Ellis, 2004) to examine the author's personal journey as a teacher in a private school, a public school, and a public school in Central America. The research is presented as a one-act play with scenes focusing on conversations with parents, principals, and students, along with scenes examining each situation that take the audience through the internal monologue of the researcher's decision making process to move schools, stay in a school, leave a school, and question their ability or willingness to return to K-12 schooling. Building Relationships: The Stories of Four Small Urban School Teachers shares the stories of four veteran elementary school teachers, teachers who have taught for more than five years, from Parker City Public Schools. This study uses a case study approach with recorded dialogic interviews as data (e.g., Kvale, 1996; Marshall and Rossman, 2011). The stories the teachers tell point to the importance of building and maintaining relationships with students, other teachers, and administration, as one of the key factors for overcoming the challenges of working in a small urban school division and one of the key factors for changing schools or remaining in a school throughout their careers. / Ph. D. / This study explores teacher retention and teacher resilience in the United States through the stories of five teachers. The researcher presents the research in two manuscripts: Finding My Way through Teaching: A Critical Autoethnographic Play and Building Relationships: The Stories of Four Small Urban School Teachers. In Finding My Way, the author uses critical autoethnography to examine their own journey as a teacher in a private school, a public school, and a public school in Central America. The findings are presented as a one-act play with scenes focusing on conversations with parents, principals, and students, along with scenes examining each situation , taking the audience through the internal monologue of the author’s decision making process to move schools, stay in a school, leave a school, and question their ability or willingness to return to K-12 schooling. In Building Relationships, the researcher shares the stories of four veteran elementary school teachers, teachers who have taught for more than five years, from Parker City Public Schools. This study uses a case study approach with recorded dialogic interviews as data. The stories the teachers tell point to the importance of building and maintaining relationships with students, other teachers, and administration, as one of the key factors for overcoming the challenges of working in a small urban school division and one of the key factors for changing schools or remaining in a school throughout their careers.

Despite legal advancements recognizing the rights of individuals with disabilities, societal barriers are still arising from the medical model of disability. These obstacles have resulted in marginalizing and isolating practices, in turn leading to the underrepresentation of individuals with disabilities in the workforce and, by extension, in leadership positions. Grounded in the frameworks of critical pedagogy and critical disability studies, this autoethnographic study examines, using my personal experiences as contextual evidence, the determining factors underlying the struggle for equity and leadership, within the hegemonic society that people with disabilities must navigate. The study further explores the issue of empowerment and raised consciousness among people with disabilities, as afforded by blending the tenets of critical pedagogy with a critical social model of disability. Based on the autoethnographic analysis, the study proposes future research and makes recommendations for inclusion of individuals with disabilities, educators working with people with disabilities, and institutions committed to inclusiveness of leaders with disabilities.

Master of Arts / Department of Communications Studies / Sarah E. Riforgiate / At 47 years old, Lori is a high-functioning businesswoman, matriarch, and contributing member of society. Lori is also diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). From age 3, Lori was violently raped and assaulted by several perpetrators, yet views her multiple personalities as strength, as survival mechanisms, and wants to share her story to help prevent child sexual abuse. Utilizing methods drawn from communication studies, ethnodrama, and autoethnography, this study aims to tell a person’s story in her own words and in a format that can easily be shared with both academic and non-academic audiences. Lori’s story is woven together as an ethnodramatic play that includes original interview transcripts along with an autoethnographic monologue describing the experience of writing someone’s truth when it challenges the hegemonic views of society, and instead embraces the feminist ideals of equality and deconstruction of power. Academic research needs to reach further than academic journals to make a true impact. Through the non-conventional venues of autoethnography and ethnodrama, we can breathe life into our research and provide accessibility to innovative information for those who may need it most.

This dissertation offers my personal exploration of the loss of my father through the eyes of multiple selves. Utilizing an arts-inspired autoethnographic narrative case study approach, I detail my journey of meaning making as I explore my personal transitions and self-discovery in the face of my bereavement, while also uncovering the potential for growth and development within my relationship with my dad. Throughout this dissertation, I incorporate a variety of mediums to capture the essence of the experience of my filial bereavement. Through this synthesis of form, it is my goal to invite witnesses to enter my experience, to have the opportunity to explore a different way of knowing by being able to look through the eyes of my multiple experiencing selves and their presentation of emotion, thought, and behaviour. Through blending of genre, this study provides a unique way of exploring a lived experience. It is meant to provide a specific view of a broad topic from multiple angles. Though it is situated within my personal bereavement, a daughter’s loss of her father, and inevitably my story will demonstrate the cultural influence of my Canadian background, it also aims to touch on aspects of the universality of loss, of bereavement, and what it means to be alive.

Thesis (MBA)--Stellenbosch University, 2014. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The author is an Afrikaans-speaking, white male person, who was previously an extreme, selfdeclared racist. The author was also a member of an elite unit in one of the right-wing political organisations, which resulted in being author arrested during the 1994 National South African elections. The author transformed from being an extreme self-declared racist to become a person who respects and appreciate racial diversity. The author conducted a reflective autoethnographic study from his personal life experiences, which is complemented with critical feedback from people whom the author holds in high esteem. Feedback was gathered in order to identify the transformation process, which the author experienced in the quest of becoming an authentic leader. The aspects identified in the transformation process enabled the author to understand what is required in the future to become a truly authentic, value-based leader. This research study could assist white Afrikaans-speaking people and the broader community of South African people to transform towards acceptance and appreciation of racial diversity.

The following autoethnographic study highlights the perceptions of a Southern, White male teacher, at times experiencing bouts of depression and anxiety, in the predominantly White rural high school community he both lives and works. The researcher- teacher utilizes critical reflection, self-imposed transportation theory, and arts-based research to unravel these perceptions and to enhance his autobiographical findings. The intent of this research was to uncover one predominantly White Southern High School community’s actions and thoughts through the eyes of someone not born and established in the community. Another intent was to give a White male further perspectives into his biography, his attitudes of racism, prejudice, and inequality, and further understanding into the underlying causes of depression that bound his experiences in one place. The findings exposed and confirmed hegemonic control of the predominantly White rural high school community and attitudes towards new residents without established ties to the community. It also revealed evidence of isolated acts of racism and inequities within the rural high school community. Furthermore, the study revealed that critical reflection and self-imposed transportation theory, while at times dangerous for the teacher-researcher experiencing depression or anxiety, none-the-less, is effective for unleashing possible ties that bind both depression and anxiety to original perceptions made within the community.

Canada has distinct contemporary faith communities that differ from western and European counterparts. Unfortunately statistics tracking denominational allegiances give little insight into the daily intricacies of collective religious practice. The purpose of this study is to contribute towards filling a gap within scholarly research on the lived culture and experiences of contemporary religious communities within Canada. This study examines the pattern of culture-sharing within a non-denominational faith community as lived and practiced in Ottawa. Through autoethnography, this study asks why members attend and how members view the use of popular culture video clips within church. Individual and collective religious identities are constructed through observations, interviews and material artifacts gleaned through participant observation from January 2011 to December 2011. The results show that within the church, a community of practice is built around shared parenthood and spiritual journey. Members place importance on children, on providing support of all kinds for one another, and on keeping religion relevant. Reasons for attending are echoes of the patterns of culture-sharing: members enjoy the feeling of community, the support, the friendships, the play dates. Participants view popular culture video clips played within church as one aspect of an overall importance placed upon relevance. Mutuality of engagement results in members experiencing their lives as meaningful, it validates their worth through belonging, and it creates personal histories of becoming within the context of a community of practice. Future research recommendations include further study of other contemporary faith communities within Canada, with investigation into the possibility that communities of practice may be what the churched and unchurched are seeking.

This thesis develops a new way of engaging emotion in a large organisation and develops a new form of organisational practice entitled “Reflective Emotional Practitioning.” The thesis argues that the concept of emotional intelligence as accepted in organisations represses rather than embraces emotion. The conceptual framework centres the inquiry on the problem of organisational power as an obstacle to the creative harnessing of emotion at work. The thesis reverses the organisations’ centralised power by placing the individual at the centre so that the individual learns to reflect upon and embrace emotion in collective and self inquiry, and demonstrates how this may lead to creative and ethical work. The thesis is divided into two parts: in the first, the author carried out action research workshops on emotional intelligence and performance management, but it became clear that power was an issue, repressing emotions. But through reflection this became a turning point after the author engaged in deep self-reflection in meditative supervisions, writing and reflective practice. This enabled the author to process experience into a methodological shift towards a self-ethnography and research action applied to the work situation in what became called Reflective Emotional Practitioning (REP). The REP model was used as a tool to venture further on a visceral pathway, uncovering the author’s relationship with emotion. The author began to recognise that the self and the other could be held in reflexive practice and writing. In the second part evidence comes through further vignettes representing the author’s pathway and shone a light on a dialogical process between the self and others. Freedom and space were revealed and the research began to demonstrate the inner- and outer-selves working through emotion. Through this process emotion became conceptualised as “felt energy”. Felt energy was triggered by the outer world, but also a place of knowing from which further action could be taken, and then further reflected upon. The reflexive writing process used vignettes to illustrate how emotion was engaged, fed back and stored as a “return to the self” in a continual learning process. Through illuminating a new way of both conceptualising and working with emotions, the author shows how, over several years of reflective practice, the method underpinned some major innovative and sustainable work projects. The thesis concludes by defining the contribution of this research as a transferable approach that can engage emotion in self-empowered actions within an organisation’s power regime. The contribution is to both methodology and knowledge about the way emotion is experienced, used and conceptualised, although the author acknowledges and discusses the difficulty of producing knowledge through writing the self, particularly within the confines of a large public sector organisation. However, the struggle to write the self has produced a rich text that conveys the possibilities of transferring the approach for other organisational researchers and reflective practitioners engaging emotion in their different personal and organisational contexts.

By exploring how my/a tattooed body functions as becoming through the concept of bodies without organs (BwO), this work pushes the edges of qualitative inquiry. Following St. Pierre’s call to deconstruct the concepts on which qualitative research is built, this inquiry troubles the I/we of authorship and linear meaning making as it examines the tattooed body functioning as becoming a BwO. The nodal ethnography is a Deleuzo-Guattarian-based methodological inquiry in which interruptions and layers of narrative are used to create spaces for conversation between my multinodes. The tattoos on my semipermeable corporeal flesh tell multilayered stories that are constantly moving and shifting, and I (re)make meaning of these stories within, amongst, and between the nodes that constitute this disorganized body while approaching the limits of a BwO, always in progress, becoming. There is no beginning or end, only a middle, made up of lines that can be read in any order, as linearity does not live here. The Laminar Express iPhone/iPad photography application allowed for the layering of images, text, and color to rupture and even to distort the lines of ink on my body as a plane of representation adds yet another collaborative space to have dialogue(s); thus offering endless possibilities for the nodes of my ethnography to be (re)connected and (re)produced. My tattooed body evokes response from my multiselves as well as from others; ergo, I invite the reader to become a co-collaborator of this nodal ethnography, and to take lines of flight with/in this experimental space of what may appear when tattoos/images/multinodes/selves and storied lines of inked/textured text collide with Deleuzo-Guattarian theory in exploring my tattooed skin as becoming a BwO.