This post-qualitative inquiry project investigated subjectivity (sense of self) among graduates of creative writing Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs. The project asked how subjectivity is involved in the creative writing process and how that process fuels further writing after a creative piece (such as the MFA thesis) is completed. A post-qualitative, thinking-with-theory approach was used to explore the role of subjectivity among four anonymous graduates of creative writing MFA programs who provided writing samples describing their creative writing processes. Following the thinking-with-theory approach, the data were analyzed using Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of productive desire. Study findings are presented in two formats. First, a traditional, qualitative presentation of findings describes how unconscious desires develop a beneficial weakening of subjectivity that may encourage creative writers to continue writing after completion of the MFA degree. Next, further findings are presented via a nonlinear, rhizomatic data assemblage. The project concludes with recommendations for the use of Deleuzian productive desire as a pedagogical framework in graduate-level creative writing courses, as well as a call for the consideration of post-qualitative research methods in the field of education.

According to the 2022 IPCC report on mitigation of climate change, a transformational change is necessary in every aspect of society, industry and commerce by 2030 in order to keep global temperatures within safe limits. What would this transformation look like and how do we begin? I argue that applying Bruno Latour’s concept of the Terrestrial can help lead us towards the path of transformation. More specifically how the multispecies management of ecological farming in Puerto Rico can help us understand how to reorient management practices in what he calls The New Climatic Regime. I explore what it means to land in the critical zone and situate ourselves within what Haraway calls the Plantationocene. I situate Puerto Rico as a microcosm of the living wholeness of the Earth. I approached uncovering stories of the earthbound as a way to discover a world where colonialism, neoliberalism and racism have led to environmental degradation, food insecurity, and poverty. By placing Bruno Latour’s arguments for a new political landscape in dialogue with post-qualitative inquiry, I hope to gain insight into the world in a different way, one that acknowledges the intricate nature of the connections between the social and the ecological. Connections that cannot be unravelled into neat and easy to follow strands of cause and effect but are tangled and knotted, allowing for multiple entry points into ideas of becoming Terrestrial. I approach stories as a way of being in continuous dialogue with the self and the surrounding world. What stories do ecological farms tell us about collaborative engagement in a multi-species organisation? Not as an attempt to provide solutions or definitive answers for how organisations should orient themselves but rather as an uncovering of the possibility of exploring new ways of thinking and doing.

As a life-limiting illness mediated by rapid advancements in biomedical technologies, metastatic breast cancer (MBC) now presents in increasingly unexpected ways where women are living longer. These women’s lives may not fit well with established healthcare and societal understandings of an advanced breast cancer, including disease progression and prognosis. This qualitative inquiry aims to think differently about women’s daily lives with an ongoing MBC. While also considering the underexplored context of these women living in smaller communities. I explored communities on Central Vancouver Island, which is on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. The research question directing my inquiry was: how are women, who are living with MBC as a life-limiting illness over an extended period, produced as both living and dying subjects? Informing this research was a feminist relational materialist approach with a healthcare practitioner orientation, primarily informed by Braidotti. I used multiple data collection methods centred around sequential interviews with 14 women who had been living relatively well with MBC for at least two years. Working with relational materialist and post qualitative principles, analysis disclosed the importance of temporal pulses and bodily transpositions in women’s lives. Temporal pulses speak to how time was laden with tensions such that a distinctive part of living with ongoing MBC was an embodied sense of fluctuating time. There was also the idea as to how, at any given moment, women could bodily know their illness and mortality through varying frequencies of the presence and/or absence of markers of living and dying, often at the same time. Bodily transpositions speak to how life-limiting illness was not so much about women moving from one set of circumstances to another as part of a clean-edged transition. Rather, the women navigated daily life with few set waymarkers. Within this context, ‘hope’ took on new forms and living with their advanced breast cancer became a kind of endurance demarcated by what I refer to as generative living. These findings call into question the ways in which MBC gets talked about in categorical terms as palliative or end of life, and/or as chronic. Findings are an opportunity for healthcare practitioners, policymakers, and interdisciplinary leaders to further understand MBC specific to our contemporary context. Project findings renew discussions of how best to support women’s needs, including the ways MBC is talked about. There is also the opportunity to direct further research into MBC as an example of today’s shifting boundaries of living and dying (which I am framing as living<=>dying). / Graduate

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This master thesis is inspired by St. Pierre’s post qualitative inquiry and the philosophy of immanence, which support the creation of concepts through immersion in theory, philosophy, and practice. This serves as a guide of thought for the inquirer´s journey of exploration and creativity. This research departures in Latour´s concept of the Terrestrial, enriched by Haraway´s addition to the concept; and in Haraway´s theory of string figures, which is the foundation for exploring how to enact the change that is needed to survive in a world of climate destruction and business as usual. Haraway says that not all humans observe the Terrestrial from above (as Latour suggests) and invites us to go out there and find the people that never took off. For this purpose, I went to Costa Rica and had non-structured conversations with six Costa Rican leaders, who have been working for and with social and environmental causes for years. This inquiry aims to get a deeper understanding of how these stories, combined with the concept of the Terrestrial and SF theory, may help us create new concepts and develop a philosophy of Terrestrial Leadership. From a magic island to banana women, these stories tell us about how these leaders have gone through constant metamorphic processes of inner development, the discovery of their response-ability, the enactment of collaborations, and the politics of staying with the trouble in a chaotic world; in the Chthulucene. Finally, with the help of storytelling, I attempt to offer a first ontological and epistemological perspective on the concept of Terrestrial leadership and how we might benefit from it.

This thesis is a post qualitative inquiry that explores a different research approach concerning climate change and what Bruno Latour calls the Terrestrial. We are now living in a New Climatic Regime or locked-down age, according to Latour, where life continues – yet is ever more suspended and disorienting. This frozen image of modern life is drawn in our new landscape – that is political, organizational and it concerns terrestrial sustainability – along with an emerging worldview (of Gaia) that is challenging to understand and manage for. It also reorients how we are managing sustainability and what we connect to it. This new landscape – that is also a mapping of dominant trajectories for organizing and Terrestrial reorientation with the world – is traversed, extended, and explored with two blockchain projects for sustainability. The projects are organizing their own currency for putting-on-chain, tokenizing, or attaching to nature, carbon and other actors. The key coordinates and blockages of this new landscape for sustainability are also drawn from these two cases – mapping their organizing trajectories and Terrestrial reorientation. The research and writing of this inquiry gathers with Terrestrial earth-bound movement for managing, living and organizing in connection with the common world for habitability.