Coming home to self: a first person action research inquiry

After 25 years of professional practice in leadership and change management, I came to doctoral inquiry in 2017. I realised early on that I had been living in a taken-for-granted positivist world with neoliberal expectations of utilisation and normative compliance. It became clear that challenges of being a female in professional life were far greater than I had imagined.

My drive-into-inquiry came from discovering factors distancing me from myself and others. I’ve found intersectional influences of gender, neoliberalism and neurodiversity, leading to disappearance and suppression of private sphere embodied, emotional and relational aspects of myself. I aspire to counter these dynamics, to reconnect, care and enable personally, relationally and professionally, as ethical care of the self resistance, as a form of learning and development practice. To come home to self personally, as political action.

However, inquiring in personally protected and camouflaged spaces, with undiagnosed neurodiversity, has triggered distress, over many inquiry years, impacting voice, sensemaking and progress.

Therefore, my emergent inquiry approach has expanded to enable self-care as well as action research self knowing and enablement. My first person inquiry, with others, is grounded in a phenomenological based extended epistemology approach, with experiential, embodied, relational and presentational forms as walking, photography and poetry sometimes shared online, journalling, yoga and narrative. Retrospectively I consider I have built on neurodiverse sensory, pattern and sensemaking orientations.

Practice impacts have included shifting from top-down organisational change practice to educational leadership, research and teaching, drawing on relational and care ethics, with greater voice, agency and self-acceptance. Future opportunities include research and writing about enabling extended epistemology and care in learning and change practice, and inquiring further into lifeworlds of fellow neurodiverse practitioners.