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The selfhood of social professionals in children’s services is under-researched, and where the primary focus is on practice ‘outcomes’. Informed by a critical social policy frame this thesis focuses on the selfhood of social professionals in children’s services to ask how it might, or might not, be possible to think, and do, self differently. I bring into play a critical posthumanist (non-sovereign) becoming self alongside, and in relation to, the other ‘allowed’ or ‘prescribed’ selves of neo-liberalism, professional practice and (critical) social policy itself. Utilising theoretical resources, in particular from Arendt, Deleuze and Guattari, and Foucault, I characterise this as thinking with both ‘surveillance’ and ‘appearance’, and self as an explicitly political project. In a post-structural frame I pursue a post-methodological rhizomatic and cartographic methodology that aims to open up proliferations in thinking and knowledge rather than foreclose it to one clear answer, and where I also draw on a small number of interviews with experienced professionals and managers in children’s services. A rhizomatic figure of thought involves irreducible and multiple relations that are imbricated on the surface; it is a flattened picture where theory, data, researcher, participants and analysis are not separate, where all connections are part of an overall picture, and in movement. I argue that social professionals occupy a deeply striated landscape for being/knowing/practising, a particular ontological grid that tethers their selfhood to the pre-existing, and to intensifications in a neo-liberal project. Here, ‘rearranging the chairs’ becomes more of the same, where the sovereign humanist subject is “a normative frame and an institutionalised practice” (Braidotti, 2013, p.30). In thinking otherwise, beyond traditional critical theory, a posthuman lens draws attention to the ways in which we might be/live both inside and outside of the already existing and where we become with others, human and non-human in shifting assemblages. However, the self prescribed and prefigured in dominant discourses constitute the historical preconditions from which experiments in self, and other possibilities may emerge. Practices of de-familiarisation, a radical, non-linear relationality, and a hermeneutics of situation are suggested as strategies for thinking forward, for appearance, and a self beyond self.

This essay mirrors the structure found in my thesis film—a series of small vignettes—but does not emulate one for the other and vice versa. The essay is an experiment that seeks to allow rather than define and imagines a world already in place rather than built by the accumulation of reading and writing this text; the vignettes serve as a witness to this world rather than symbols building up a system of signs. I’m interested in expanding the conversation around political personhood towards a receptive stance; a politics of receptivity. This doesn’t serve as a counter to any narratives around a politics of action, activism and social justice, especially one that is needed now more than ever with the current political climate. Instead the text pays close attention to the daily, the individual, and the banal, not as an apathetic or reactionary stance, but as one charged with potential. In casting off an overarching relationship to narrative and resolve in the text, which does not deny narrativity found in the moments and individual vignettes, I posit a self of inconclusive gestures, pregnant moments and the feeling of something meaningful happening in a world of interviews, speculative text messages, portraits of binge watching tv, video essays, and case studies. The potential pitfalls and failures of a piece of this nature is to read each vignette as a simple projection of a stable self, that a stable I is seeing himself in all that is around. And while this writing encourages one to hold up a mirror and see oneself in a vignette it is also a piece that explores these affective limitations and symbolic acts of violence. There is the critique that non-narrative potential filled space creates a problematically uncomplicated relationship to the subject matter and viewer. This is a notion further developed in Maggie Nelson’s book, The Art of Cruelty that thinks through arts capability to enact change through often violent or problematic means. In discussing the work of artist Alfredo Jaar in which he rebukes Newsweek’s headlines with his own headlines about the Rwandan genocide, she writes, “since the artist has predetermined what it is, exactly, that we should have been looking at… what is the use of our looking at all?” (Nelson 26). By avoiding the possibility of critique or question to the piece by supplying the question and answer, Jaar’s work, she argues, becomes problematically tame. The receptive stance taken aims to keeps questions at the forefront rather than answer them. It is a writing that tries to keep the question, “What is left? What is still there after?” churning, full of potential and charged. It’s a piece that presumes a self always in the wake of, as Bergson writes with beautiful images of cones in his book Matter and Memory. It is a piece that also assumes a self that is always becoming, as Spinoza suggests with his famous line, “No one has determined what the body can do”. (Spinoza 87). Despite the contradiction of a self pulled to and from, past and future, this piece presumes that selfhood is formed on the basis of both simultaneously. Similar to how CA Conrad articulates his rituals creating space for himself, the text permits associations and cross readings in order to find some kind of residue to reside in. While this residual space from the accretion of texts rubbing up against each other is one in which I’m identifying a receptive selfhood, this space is one that also radically permits another. Kathleen Stewart articulates a similar position in her fantastic ethnographic study of coal mining communities in West Virginia, A Space on the Side of the Road. In it she writes, “In the effort to track something of the texture, density, and force of a local cultural real through its mediating forms and their social uses, it tears itself between evocation and representation, mimesis and interpretation.” It here could be both the text and an understanding of selfhood. This polemic of constructing a self through an affective refuge of experiences is one that is not a transaction. The vignettes, unless themselves an exchange, are complete onto themselves. They are curated and designed, but through their excess, unresolved nature and individuality they stand alone, while their impact secretes. I cannot say how the wake of the piece will be felt or what action comes from political passivity. But, as the Vipassana teacher Michele McDonald teaches, I know that in order to act first one has to understand where we are acting from. In this way the piece performs a similar purpose to Raymond William’s, Structures of Feelings that maps out affective terrains. This piece attempts to map, but never seeks to pin point or locate. There is no single source to find for one’s internal landscape, but there might be a way to witness where and how impact occurs in the radically passive personhood, the same way focusing on the breath allows one to witness when and how awareness shifts to thought, sensation or emotion; it’s about a continuous how, rarely about fixing a why. In lieu of the film one can think of the text as a bin system for video editing software. The folder in which this text is archived would be titled, potential. The text moves similarly to scrubbing through material. Then there is | |. I’m hesitant to pin down and strictly label the significance of | | but maybe thinking of it as a direction; | | is a whispered, “now,” or a pinched now, or a hand on the back with a warm now, but most importantly it is a continued now that respects critical/emotional distance. This sign is riddled throughout the text- in some moments performing an experience of time, time passing, or time severed, or performing the self addressing self through the correction of speech and grammar. At times it reveals an emotional temporal sense where the subjective experience extends or shrinks the actual.

The goal of this thesis is to bring Rogers and Kierkegaard into productive conversation with each other, across disciplines, around the themes of self, authenticity, and relationality. The purpose is to show that people can still learn a great deal from these thinkers, particularly by reading each of them in light of the other. Rogers and Kierkegaard wrote in different historical periods and cultural settings. However, by identifying some cognate concepts (in English) we can appreciate how, for both of them, the central task of life is to promote human well-being, in community with each other, and in humble relation to a higher good or ideal. This thesis shows more specifically that Rogers' theory of person-centeredness and Kierkegaard's theory of Christian neighbor-love both reflect the conviction that being an authentic self if necessary for sustaining good relationships with others. Both authors argue that being in right relationship with others is, in turn, essential to self-actualization and authenticity.

Moral habilitation is the intentional and directed shaping of a new subjectivity in accordance with a culturally sanctioned, pro-social standard of daily ethical conduct. Treatment programs for sexual offenders are enterprises in moral habilitation that involve instilling participants with new values, beliefs, and practices. This research represents a person-centred ethnography that combined concepts of morality, stigma, selfhood, and agency with the treatment and community (re)integration of sexual offenders to learn how some of these men narrated their transformations from dysfunction to a state of self-regulation and greater wellbeing. To this end, 18 men of Euro-Canadian or Aboriginal ancestry living in western Canada were interviewed about their experiences in sexual offender treatment programs, their transitions from prison to community life, and their changing self-concepts. In this transition, participants described their motivations to change as derived from their experiences of (a) a stigmatized, unfulfilling life, (b) the desire for a better or “normal” life, (c) social supports, and (d) a determined and willful mindset. They adopted multiple narrative strategies to protect their self-concepts while the progression of time and ethical self-reformation facilitated a transition from shame and self-doubt to self-acceptance. Through this research, I propose a model of Ethical Self-Reformation (ESR) that combines the institutional morality of treatment programs with stigmatizing public moral discourses to individuals’ enactments of agency, will, and motivation to sustain what is in effect amoral enterprise. Moral habilitation is conceptualized as the internalized, automatic responses of an embodied morality as practiced through the ESR model. This research concludes that sexual offender treatment programs can effectively lead to moral habilitation if the offender is willing to submit to the process; but it also advises that programs need to be more individualized if treatment responsivity is to be enhanced.

The main problem addressed in animal ethics is on what grounds and to what extent we owe animals moral consideration. I argue that many animals deserve direct moral consideration in virtue of their agency, selfhood and autonomy. I start by providing an account of agency and selfhood that admits of degrees, from minimal to complex, among animal species that is supported by current research on consciousness and the mental capacities of animals. I posit that agency and selfhood are morally valuable as they allow for subjective mental experiences that matter to conscious individuals. I then develop a view of autonomy that corresponds to my view of agency and selfhood, whereby the degree to which an individual is self-aware indicates the degree to which that being is autonomous. I argue that autonomy not only consists in the rational and reflective capacities of humans, but also at a more minimal level where autonomy is simply the ability to make choices. I support this view of autonomy as choice with an account of ???naturalized autonomy??? and explain some of the implications of this view for animals. After considering the views of Peter Singer, Tom Regan and Bernard Rollin on animal ethics, I analyze the flaws in their reasoning and argue that my own view provides a stronger account for the direct moral consideration of animals. This is due to my inclusion of agency, selfhood and autonomy, which these philosophers mainly neglect. I review some current reinterpretations of Kant???s moral arguments that claim animals ought to be considered ends-in-themselves. I present reasons why the inclusion of selfhood would strengthen this claim and further develop my argument for respecting the autonomy of animals. I conclude that a theory of animal ethics based on agency, selfhood and autonomy provides the strongest account for the direct moral consideration of animals, as it is empirically informed and provides a moral middle path between animal welfare and animal rights.

This dissertation explores Aristotle's concept of human flourishing, or eudaimonia, through the lens of the flourishing self. Connections will be made with Heidegger's concept of authenticity, as seen through the lens of authentic selfhood. It is argued that there is some type of authenticity or self-appropriation already present in Aristotle's ethical thought. For both thinkers, however, the particularized self is subsumed into a type of universality--the universality of excellence or care. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts / Philosophy / PhD / Dissertation

This thesis provides a history of the sense of touch in modern Britain. Seeking out fugitive intimacies and incidental brushes of lover and stranger alike, it argues that far from being a natural constant, what, how, and why people touched, and what they felt when they did, has a history. Through five case studies of different domains - the mind sciences, visual impairment, public transport, law, and commercialized leisure - it explores how these uses changed, and how they transformed Britons' understandings and experiences of their bodies. Both as a practice and a metaphor, from making space on the bus to keeping 'in touch', touch established the distinctions that Britons made between their bodies and the world and themselves and others. In doing so, touch crucially shaped histories of law, labour relations, scientific experiment, education, and love in the early twentieth century. But it also reformulated the very distinctions of selfhood - distinctions of inner self and outer body, person and thing - on which our accounts of modernity are based. By tracing a history of touch, then, this thesis turns touch into a means of critique. It challenges histories of modernity for which selfhood is a substance rather than produced only through particular social relationships. But it also proposes a new way of thinking about selfhood as an immanent relationship the self has with itself through use of the body. Through historically specific ways of touching, early twentieth-century Britons shaped not only their experience of themselves as bodies, but also the boundaries defining them as selves. Their selfhood was, in short, what they did with the body through touch. By exploring the history of touch between 1870 and 1960, this thesis therefore offers an alternative account of British modernity and a way of re-examining histories of selfhood within and beyond modern Britain.

After a mastectomy due to breast cancer, a woman faces a choice about whether to undergo cosmetic reconstruction of her breast(s). In choosing reconstruction, women restore not only their bodies but their socially acceptable selves. In spite of this, most choose not to have reconstructive surgery. Though they are in the majority, not much is known about these women, and about what they do to navigate through life with a body that does not meet expectations of femininity. In this project, I use the case of women who choose not to have reconstruction and not to simulate their missing breast(s) to explore the boundaries of the socially acceptable body. Drawing on interviews with women who did not have reconstruction, examination of depictions of bodies on breast cancer organization web sites, and content analysis of their discussion board postings, I analyze women’s choices not to reconstruct their breasts and place those choices in the context of modern breast cancer culture, which promotes an ideal ‘survivor’ body. I find that these women emphasize concerns about stigma and authenticity and that these concerns are expressed through appearance changes that vary across public and private settings. This research extends our understanding of deviant bodies to understanding the stigma of socially incomprehensible bodies. Further, it makes explicit the assumptions about selfhood that are implied by both current popular perception and sociological work on stigmatization.