abstract: Traditional healthcare narratives have set the stage for the care of the population with Severe Mental Illness (P-SMI). Thus far, two prevailing health strategies anchor services for mental illnesses, acute psychiatric care, and mental health, psychosocial rehabilitation. Between these, care transitions mediate PSMI’s needs and their movements from the hospital to the community and home. However, as individuals with Severe Mental Illness (i-SMI’s) leave the hospital, time is short with little opportunity to make known authentic narratives born out of self-evidence. After transitional care, maintenance treatment re-centers these individuals back into a playbook with operatives of pathology and disability and inconsistencies with the narratives on recovery and rehabilitation. This project sought to hear i-SMI’s stories and propose how their experience can be used to create a new “counter” story of transition that empowers these individuals through a better understanding of their “space”: conceptualized here, as all that surrounds them and is dynamic and responsive to their interactions and needs. Underpinning this inquiry is a post-modernist conversation that converges on the critical perspectives in the theory of architecture, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and the aesthetic practice of psychiatric nursing in the context of transitional care. A qualitative paradigm of narrative repair guides an ethical appraisal, “deprivation of opportunity,” and “infiltrated consciousness,” regarding relational power dynamics that are at work in healthcare master narratives. Narrative findings of this study reveal that identity and agency come together in a personal space of safety born out of a core sense of self, belonging, and control. Space emerges within the self-narrative as physical sensibilities in the constructs of agency and safety, and as with emotional responses, metaphor and meaning can repair personal transitions. The counterstory derived from the narrative findings reveals: Equitable relational dynamics attune social space, the physical environment, and meaning, as a response to the dismissiveness and overcontrolling health professional power. Thus, the journey toward narrative repair from the perspective of i-SMI’s uncovers a deeper counternarrative, Ecosystem of Space: the manifestation of a personal architecture for healing, making a systematic organic-space-experience for the core sense of self to transition and flourish. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Nursing and Healthcare Innovation 2020

This dissertation examines selected literary works by Anita Rau Badami, Denise Chong, Hiromi Goto, Larissa Lai, and Kerri Sakamoto, exploring how their stories respond both to the absence of representations of Asian Canadian women in literary discourses of the early twentieth century and to homogenizing assumptions in official histories. My formulation of (re)presentation in the title recognizes the multiplicity and constructedness of these denoted identities and experiences and the self-representations of these writers as a response to this elision and misrepresentation. The term repair borrows from philosopher Hilde Lindemann Nelson’s theorizing of “narrative repair,” which involves telling counterstories, but also is used in psychological contexts as a healing mechanism. An elaboration of both models, as applied in this study, is optimally useful in diasporic contexts as resistance to the elision and/or racist and gendered discursive constructions of Asian Canadian women and as restoration of damaged identities. The texts under study—Tamarind Mem, The Concubine’s Children, Chorus of Mushrooms, When Fox Is a Thousand, and The Electrical Field—were all published in the mid-1990s, after the initial forays into the writing of novels by Asian Canadian authors such as Joy Kogawa (1981) and SKY Lee (1990). My choice of these sister narratives recognizes the family as central to identity construction and intergenerational (mis)understanding and emphasizes the importance of this period’s second-generation explosion of writings by Japanese, Chinese, and Indo Canadian women that paved the way for the current plethora of writings by authors from these cultural groups that contribute significantly to Canadian representations of diasporic identity. This study explores the nuances and pluralisms of the representations of Asian Canadian women. The texts under consideration are cultural autobiographies and matrilineal or sexually transgressive narratives that reinvent the cultural memory of Canadian women of Asian ancestry; produce cultural fusions through the transcreation of oral traditions and simulations of the oral, transcoding of ancestral tongues, and discursive strategies of silence; and address connections between self and place in examinations of Canada, the adopted country, as (un)homely territory. Presenting unhyphenated diasporic female subjects who exceed socially scripted boundaries of gender, sexuality, race, and nationality, in terms of both Canada and the writers’ and protagonists’ ancestral Asian nations, these “acts of narrative insubordination” (Nelson 8) exemplify emancipatory politics and recuperative and revisionary projects. Interrogating questions of (re)presentation and repair from positions of liminality and across gendered, racial, linguistic, and geographical divides, this research contributes to current urgent discussions of identity, transculturation, multiculturalism, and globalization in literary and cultural studies.