A TD-MD: Transdisciplinary Double-Doctor, a journey to post-traumatic growth

The context in which my public works were created has been and continues to be complex environments that include diversity, conflict, trauma, deprivation, colonialism and, more recently, while writing this thesis—a global pandemic and the war in Ukraine. I have chosen an autoethnographic lens to this critique. I open with a critical reflection of the shaping of my agency in the world through the formative years of childhood in Canada that account for some of the ways that I have, in turn, shaped my environments and how they have shaped me to have the positionality I have today. This leads onto my professional accomplishments and personal growth as I engage myself and the reader in narrative discourse. I chose autoethnography as a lens for its capacity to embrace both the evocative nature of personal and professional practice and analytic autoethnography which guides the evocative and the experiential towards contributions beyond self and one’s profession that have something to say about the human condition and how humans have interacted with the world both constructively and destructively. Both these dimensions are intrinsic to understanding the dichotomous skills and understanding that I possess and the diverse works I have both created and conducted, which are manifestations of my agency in and on the world. At this transition point in my life, I felt the need to subject them to a critical gaze. Three themes had arisen in my own works which I wanted to look at more closely through this opportunity to engage more critically in my own outputs. First: Global Health; my work as executive Director and founder of Global Familymed Foundation as well as an article written with colleagues from Nepal and Myanmar and a podcast series I have run with global partners. I question whether the work conducted was through a colonial paradigm. Second: Social Innovation, where I use the Adaptive Cycle metaphor to analyse different facets of my career representing each phase. Artefacts in this chapter include the two non-profits, the Cooperative, and the corporation I founded as well as programming I conducted in other organizations. Third: Trauma, both the intense study I conducted to become an integrated traumatologist as well as the demonstration of my critical questioning through TikTok-style self-psychoanalysis around my motivations to create my social media channel and write my book The Modern Trauma Toolkit. The insights which have emerged for me are profound; offering future directions related to social justice, education, innovation, and post-traumatic growth.