Rethinking "foster child" and the culture of care: a rhizomatic inquiry into the multiple becomings of foster care alumni.

• Main Author: Corcoran, Rebecca H.
• Other Authors: De Finney, Sandrine
• Language: English; en
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: foster child; foster care; Youth in care; Rhizomatic inquiry; Deleuze; Guattari; Foucault; Tuck; Culture of care; Desire-based framework; resistance
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1828/3958

This thesis inquires into the lived experience of five foster care alumni as they re-member and explore negotiations of time, space, and being made/becoming as young people formerly in government care. Informed by arts-based living inquiry (Irwin & de Cosson, 2004) and a collaborative research ethic, I undertook an emergent, rhizomatic exploration of new ways of viewing/thinking about the culture of care and about problematic representations of youth in care as irrevocably “broken,” “damaged,” and “deficient”. This process of inquiry allowed for movement between tangled lines of power, resistance, becoming, and desire informed by concepts central to the works of Foucault (1982), Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Tuck (2010), and Skott-Myhre (2008). Five foster care alumni explored their inquiry into “being in care” through arts-based methods that included collage, painting and drawing, and individual and group interviews. Important themes identified by participants included being seen/being heard, “foster child,” time, space, labels, disrupting “normal,” becoming complex, becoming political, and the importance of spirituality, belonging, Indigenous ways of knowing, and community. Such layered, complex representations foreground creativity and dignity while troubling the problematic representations of youth in care that permeate dominant discourses, practices, and policies shaping foster care systems and interventions. === Graduate