| Summary: | The ultimate aim of this inquiry is to expand understandings of what it can mean to engage meaningfully with children, youth, and families and the systems designed to support them, in context. By widening our gaze to include the discursive, political, and other dimensions of lived experiences, practitioners and policy makers may be able to engage in practices that prioritize the wellbeing of all community members, recognizing social justice as central to this development.
Methodologically, the challenge has been to work emergently, in line with social constructionist and postmodern understandings of social reality in which conditions are always in flux. Since there has been a call from qualitative researchers to make visible more ‘messy texts’ through which decision making processes can be made transparent, this document tracks the course of the study from beginning to end. By making explicit the methodological decisions as they are made, and contextualizing these decisions within not only the academic literature and data but also within personal and political realities, the author aims to demonstrate an ontological approach to learning and change. By experiencing research not only as product (findings), but also process (ways of engaging), the researcher highlights the transformative potential of relating differently with(in) one’s inquiry.
The five-part exploration itself begins by unpacking dominant discourses of both struggles and support, which are becoming increasingly individualized due to a number of contextual realities. It then explores relational theories of subjectivity as well as theories of multiplicity, in an effort to look at other – albeit often concealed – dimensions of experience. By taking these theories and the multitude of practices they inform into consideration, possibilities for other ways of engaging in human service practices and policy development become intelligible.
However, even when relational processes are acknowledged, avenues for action are significantly constrained through power relations. Deliberately incorporating notions of nomadism, non-unitary subjectivity, situatedness, and diversity into our discourses and practices can function politically in that they can provide opportunities for us to embrace and enact new narratives and ways of being. These in turn open space in which different kinds of meaningful social engagement can occur.
In the pursuit of more just ways of being, deliberately attending to multiple stories can thus contribute to shifts in practice and policy that are responsive to what was, what is, and what may be possible. Drawing from existing empirical research as well as personal narratives shared by community members and policy makers, this dissertation argues that by blurring lines between self and other, contextualizing practices, understanding change as ontological, reconceptualising power, and recognizing justice as an ongoing and shared responsibility, we might collectively access and mobilize fruitful possibilities that are often obscured. === Graduate
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