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http://hdl.handle.net/11375/30251
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DC Field | Value | Language |
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dc.contributor.advisor | Badone, Ellen | - |
dc.contributor.author | Gordon, Loa | - |
dc.date.accessioned | 2024-09-30T13:41:44Z | - |
dc.date.available | 2024-09-30T13:41:44Z | - |
dc.date.issued | 2024 | - |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/11375/30251 | - |
dc.description.abstract | Amid growing rates of poor mental health in Canadian higher education, many university students turn to self-care. This ethnographic study explores how self-care is mobilized by university students as they face inadequate mental health resources that do not attend to their lived realities of distress. Using ethnographic fieldwork, in depth interviewing, and artistic mapmaking, I discuss students’ self-care practices in three standalone papers. The first paper explores how students engage the imagination to create speculative spaces of healing through fantasy and play. Their imaginings reveal new social dimensions of self-care as embodied and communal, where make-believe alternatives that heal social ills for others also heal the self. The second paper overviews how histories of self-care in activist, medical, and popular spaces have resulted in a new genre of self-care that is focused on restfulness. Yet, in the context of the neoliberal university, rest and relaxation are made impossible in ways that inculcate bodily, emotional, and social harm and exhaustion. The final paper considers how students navigate many different formal and informal therapeutic spaces as they journey through treatment and care. Institutional and self-administered configurations of psychological care create unexpected openings and closures for emotional healing. Taken together, the dissertation elucidates how young adults absorb their social worlds to generate possibilities and constraints in caring for the self and others. A focus on self-care helps to expose the systemic influences on distress and redress that can be overlooked in professional treatment modalities. Self-care is a social practice, and it is precisely this solidarity through caring that can lead to improved mental health. This dissertation makes contributions to incipient anthropological discussions on care, cure, imaginings, and the entangled nature of our wellbeing. | en_US |
dc.language.iso | en | en_US |
dc.subject | care | en_US |
dc.subject | higher education | en_US |
dc.subject | mental health | en_US |
dc.subject | self-care | en_US |
dc.subject | entanglement | en_US |
dc.title | Beyond The Self: The Entangled Nature of Mental Health Self-Care in Higher Education | en_US |
dc.type | Thesis | en_US |
dc.contributor.department | Anthropology | en_US |
dc.description.degreetype | Dissertation | en_US |
dc.description.degree | Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) | en_US |
dc.description.layabstract | Amid growing rates of poor mental health in Canadian higher education, many university students turn to self-care. This dissertation explores how self-care is mobilized by university students in Canada as they face inadequate mental health resources that do not attend to their lived realities of distress. Using ethnographic fieldwork, interviewing, and mapmaking, I explore three themes related to student self-care practices. First, students engage their imagination to create spaces of social healing through fantasy and play. Second, as neoliberal institutions work to suppress students’ restful self-care, they push through exhaustion and seek resistance against pressures that stifle their wellbeing. Third, students navigate many different therapeutic pathways and boundaries for emotional healing. Taken together, the dissertation elucidates how young adults absorb their surrounding social worlds to generate possibilities and constraints in caring for the self and others. It is solidarity through caring that offers possibilities for collective wellbeing. | en_US |
Appears in Collections: | Open Access Dissertations and Theses |
Files in This Item:
File | Description | Size | Format | |
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Gordon_Loa_202409_phd.pdf | 2.84 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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