| Summary: | In this dissertation, I articulate what I call a personal-is-political ethics, suggesting that the realm of human affairs long called ethics is inseparable from that which is today normatively called psychology. Further, I suggest that these names for this shared realm are situated in different discursive traditions which, therefore, provide different parameters for possible action and understanding. In my exploration of what it is to be human, I strategically centre ethical transgressions, particularly those that are mappable onto systemic forms of oppression. I explore personal-is-political enactments of sexism, ableism, racism, colonization, classism, ageism, and geopolitics, including situations in which several of these intersect with one another and those in which therapeutic, pedagogical, or parenting hierarchies also intersect with them. Without suggesting this is ‘the whole story,’ I closely read people’s narrations of ethical transgressions that they – that we – commit. I claim that such narrations shape our possibilities for harming others, for taking responsibility, and for intervening in others’ lives in an attempt to have them take responsibility (e.g., therapy with abuse perpetrators and critical pedagogy).
I work to demonstrate the ethical and political importance of: the impossibility of exhaustive knowledge, the illimitable and contingent power relations that are ever-present and give shape to what we can know, and the ways our possibilities in life are constituted through particular contact with others. I explore ethical transgressions I have committed, interrogating these events in conversation with explorations of resonant situations in published texts, as well as with research conversations with friends about their ethical transgressions and how they make sense of them. I tentatively advocate for, and attempt to demonstrate, ways of governing ourselves when we are positioned ‘on top’ of social hierarchies – in order to align our responses and relationships more closely with radical political commitments.
|
|---|
