Thesis Chapters by Luke Kernan
This doctoral project, Re-worlding the Self in Graphic Narratives—A Case Study of Sense, Affect, ... more This doctoral project, Re-worlding the Self in Graphic Narratives—A Case Study of Sense, Affect, and Mad-Centered Knowledges of Psychosis, collaboratively explores and addresses experiences of psychosis (sensory breaks from reality) with Mad-identifying participants who describe their earliest memories of these interior events from a sensorial and visual perspective. Co-creating an arts-based ethnography of psychosis through the ongoing production of artworks and media, I survey the ways that participants’ narratives of psychosis materialize through visual and poetic representations of their lived experiences of madness. I examine how individuals distressed by psychosis move beyond their symptomatic illnesses and narrowly prescribed identities and find new ground to (re)make themselves through expressive processes. Within a synergetic inter-arts research setting, I led a series of five online workshops with two unique groups of participants, each of whom had prior past episodes of psychosis and were immersed in outpatient mental health services. Participants drew from and upon their interior, emotionally charged experiences during the workshops to develop multisensory and narrative drawings that became both prompt and foundation for subsequent individual interviews. We then collaborated on participant-led comics that became the foundational impetus for re-imagining the ethnographic text. Through this novel approach to arts-based research, I aimed to understand psychosis from empathic, sensorial, and visual perspectives. This project documents, engages, and theorizes the role of “psychosic” imagination and creativity in the lives of ten participants who have experienced psychosis as a life event and were involved in comics-making activities. Here, I track how participants, as cherished Mad interlocutors and co-collaborators, sought to resolve communication and subject-positioning issues that arose from the equally ineffable and challenging dynamics of psychosis and madness. These conflicts were internally registered and spurred a vital set of self-fashioning, polyphonic dialogics that primed my interlocutors for self-transformation and psychosic re-worldings. These collective efforts not only de-center ethnographic practice through research-creation strategies, but they succinctly clarify aspects of how madness and pressured, non-normative consciousness are experienced, generating a set of symbolic, poetic, and visual languages to capture expressions of psychosis. Moreover, as a collaborative research-creation practice, our extensive, year-long work aided in destigmatizing and reframing mental duress. Participants simultaneously developed ways to navigate emotional tensions, challenge points, and affective accruals wrought by psychosis through graphic narrative modalities, offering this practice as one that sees Mad-inclusive systems of living myth intertwined with post-traumatic growth.
Cultural resource management is an effort to revitalize culture in the present, and the aim of su... more Cultural resource management is an effort to revitalize culture in the present, and the aim of such endeavours is to provide stability for future generations in navigating culture. This theme runs throughout my preliminary fieldwork in Wadeye, as I sought to collect traditional narratives of the mythic “Dreaming” song cycles. One of the goals of my volunteering and fieldwork in this region was to help make history relevant to future generations of Aboriginal Australians by providing them with resources from the local Kanamkek-Yile Ngala museum. In this thesis, I explore how culture as presented in traditional myths and narratives becomes intertwined in the daily lives of Aboriginal Australians. The thesis delves heavily into the process of fieldwork as a way of engendering empathy for the social analysis of myths. The experience of the field, entering into another way of life, is central in forming an understanding for how myth and narrative play vital roles in Aboriginal Australian culture. The fieldwork here is largely from the vein of applied anthropology in seeking answers relating to the loss of narratives in the region. The drive here is to find a framework for the successful revitalization of lost stories by visiting cultural sites and reconnecting to experiences of the land. I also explore notions of ethno-poetry as a possible way of tapping into the creative potential of the Aboriginal Australian “Dreamtime.” The aim is thus to engender a larger discussion in cultural resource management by centering the community in deciding its own responses and adaptation strategies in dealing with story revitalization efforts.
Papers by Luke Kernan
Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, 2020
Ever since Christina and Stanislav Grof coined the idea of a “spiritual emergency” (1989), in opp... more Ever since Christina and Stanislav Grof coined the idea of a “spiritual emergency” (1989), in opposition to or substitution of an episode of psychosis (a break from reality), there has been mounting interest in debating and outlining the role of exactly how alternative states of consciousness (trance states and otherworldly encounters) have come to define life-worlds and spiritual breakthroughs. Clarke (2010) in Psychosis and Spirituality: Consolidating the New Paradigm provides context for these mounting and theoretical concerns; her multidisciplinary and co-authored text examines how psychosis offers a gift of ‘trans-liminality’ in re-orienting the human mind towards experiences of alternate phenomena, enhanced creativity, and what often translates as mysticism. In working along these lines, I want to explore the sensory worlds of the psychotically inclined, the inspired—carving out intellectual space and capacity to understand and empathize how they as embodied selves process reality, stepped in mythic, symbolic, and, above all else, subversive (sub)texts of being that map out the present moment as a ‘lived’ psycho-scape. Using theories from the interdisciplinary canon of cultural, social, and political thought, I plan to analyse localized accounts of psychosis, literatures of madness, and the cultural neurophenomenology of belief in documenting both resistance and transformation. To do so, I explore the sensory experiences and poetic texts of three bipolar suicidal poets—namely, Paul Celan, Alejandra Pizarnik, and myself.
PlatForum, 2018
Aboriginal Australian stories captivate listeners and express a unique worldview-each narrative m... more Aboriginal Australian stories captivate listeners and express a unique worldview-each narrative manifests the applied wisdom of traditional understandings of illness embedded within local land and biology in confronting ailment Dreamings. These experiences warn adherents about how cultural illnesses infect the living land as they translate and signify through currencies of human suffering. This paper will explore how these ailment Dreamings can be further situated within cross-cultural dialogues, to responsibly temper understandings between anthropological theory and community-lead observances by implementing a combination of preliminary fieldwork data, auto-ethnographic reflection, and sources from the Wadeye region (NT, Australia).
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Thesis Chapters by Luke Kernan
Papers by Luke Kernan