This doctoral portfolio is a collection of papers and pieces of creative writing arising out of therapeutic, supervisory and training conversations and in relation to a wide range of texts. I have wanted to find ways of writing ethically so as to avoid objectifying people and appropriating their words, their life stories. I find ways of writing in which the values and practices of a collaborative, dialogical and reflexive ways of being with people are echoed in the texts. I show how writing and reading are relational practices in that I speak with the participants in the texts as well as with the reader and also with other writers. To do this, I experiment with a variety of written forms and employ literary devices so as to speak from within a range of practice relationships, from within inner dialogue, with real and fictitious characters. Technically and ethically, I try to write in a way which not only captures the sound of talk but which also speaks with the reader who would be reading, and perhaps hearing these accounts of conversation. By sharing a rich level of detail from my polyvocal inner dialogue, I invite the reader into a unique and privileged alongside position as a participant-observer in my work. Inspirational research methodologies include: writing as a method of inquiry, reflexivity, autoethnography, performance ethnography and transgression interpreted by many areas of systemic theory and practice. To support this innovative work, I offer several theoretical and practical papers offering novel developments on systemic practice theory. I situate systemic practice as a research method and demonstrate many family resemblances between systemic inquiry and qualitative inquiry. I offer a reflexive model for systemic practice and practice research which I call Praction Research which regards therapy and research as political acts requiring an activist agenda. Linked to this I politicise ideas of reflexivity by introducing local and global reflexivity and create a political connection with a concept of theorethical choices in theory and ethics in practice research. I propose a new form of ethnography suited to systemic practice, Relational Ethnography in which I draw attention to reflexive relationships between writer and readers, between the voices of inner and outer dialogue in research texts.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:570936 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Simon, Gail |
| Publisher | University of Bedfordshire |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/10547/223012 |
Page generated in 0.0019 seconds