School of Education

'I-Us-Systems': Autoethnography as a key to unlocking personal power

Location
LT1; Exchange Building; Jubilee Campus
Date(s)
Wednesday 14th December 2022 (18:00-19:30)
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Description

A Centre for Research in Human Flourishing seminar

Speaker: Urszula Plust, Assistant Professor in Education, University of Nottingham

Urzula is the module convenor of Children and Young People pathway on the MA Experiential Person-Centred Counselling and Psychotherapy. Her research interests are at the intersection of person-centred counselling and education with particular interest in authenticity, organismic living systems and creative expression.

Abstract

When met with oppression, indifference, or violence it is not surprising to feel powerless, unsafe, or hated. And yet, it is also likely that it is the 'I' that will integrate these experiences as deserved even if they oppose the experience of self. When this happens in our formative years it is likely that before we had a chance to learn where our personal power comes from, it has been swiftly locked away. It can happen so silently that we never realise that it was there in the first place. This is when the flow of our life force, our actualising tendency or individual capacity and motivation for growth has been efficiently inhibited.

In this seminar we are going to consider autoethnography as a research method that has a unique potential of unlocking the flow of personal power. Autoethnography can be understood as a pathway of researching-self with the focus on the function and impact of the social systems that we are born into and pre-existing values that we are fed with, on the formation of our self-concept. In this case I am going to use some examples from my own autoethnography to examine the processes of both locking and releasing personal power in connection to authenticity, experiential safety, freedom of expressiveness, and openness to experience.

School of Education

University of Nottingham
Jubilee Campus
Wollaton Road
Nottingham, NG8 1BB

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