The World at Heart
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Presented on this platform is a compilation of papers presented by the author, summarising her life’s work. Based on autoethnographic research, the author argues, that meaning and recovery can be found by embracing reality – through recovering not child’s play but the freedom of the mode of playing, waking up to a sense of freedom – i.e. not by turning to Buddhism but by turning to Reality in a playful way, as she has experienced it herself in and through Psychodrama. Much of the author’s life is about the joy and challenges this inner freedom can bring: As a philosophical mind she came to understand why religion had not appealed to her even as a child; as a social worker she walked the tight rope of creativity between caring for individuals in contexts where social justice is in short supply, as a tutor in HE she experienced how the teacher - inadvertently or otherwise - teaches orientation, as social justice campaigner she experienced her resilience and clarity of mind. Throughout her career her biggest challenge: Dealing with her inner paradox. To illustrate, her conceptual philosophical work will be sprinkled with personal narrative, all based on the author’s original personal research: A Life lived unconditionally, on Resilience and Hope may indeed become a work of art.
The third submission, originally presented at an international conference at the University of Utrecht in June 2020, on the conference theme of poetic justice - citizenship and narratives of personhood, is title 'Barbed Wire in Between'. It is an auto-ethnographic study of motivation and conscience - a process not without its own inner paradox.
This piece of work was in fact peer-reviewed by the then Head of the Theology Dept at Newman University (then still Newman College) in 2004 - who commented, the work already showed the criterion for PhD-level work - being an 'original contribution to the body of knowledge'. It is closely linked with another submission 'Insight at Rockbottom', presented after peer-review at Loyola Marymount University (Lonergan symposium) in 2003.