Jane Speedy

Two Women Walking Along the Emergent Edge is not a methods book in the traditional sense, but methodology as lived praxis, and as artistic, poetic worlding. It weaves thoughts and emotions together, through words and paint, through art, literature, poetry, ecology, history and auto-ethnography. It moves back and forth in-between the two authors, Jane and Bronwyn, as they explore their different scholarly approaches to life itself, as they have lived it, imagined it, thought about it, and occasionally argued about it. It is partly historical, wondering how we humans arrived at this point, partly speculative, considering our (im)possible futures, and it is highly personal and intra-personal. It explores the acts of living and dying, not an individualistic living and dying, but the living and dying of the more-than-human, who are of the world, entangled in the matter and mattering of the world. The analysis draws on new materialism, post-humanism, post-qualitative inquiry, ecology, autoethnography, art, literature, and the authors’ own everyday relationality. It seeks to find|forge a new and sometimes hopeful sense of the world, and of thought and action. It does so mindful of the broader context of the new populism being deployed by autocrats, a populism that limits and controls human thought, and with it, creativity and freedom.

Two Women Walking Along the Emergent Edge is not a methods book in the traditional sense, but methodology as lived praxis, and as artistic, poetic worlding. It weaves thoughts and emotions together, through words and paint, through art, literature, poetry, ecology, history and auto-ethnography. It moves back and forth in-between the two authors, Jane and Bronwyn, as they explore their different scholarly approaches to life itself, as they have lived it, imagined it, thought about it, and occasionally argued about it. It is partly historical, wondering how we humans arrived at this point, partly speculative, considering our (im)possible futures, and it is highly personal and intra-personal. It explores the acts of living and dying, not an individualistic living and dying, but the living and dying of the more-than-human, who are of the world, entangled in the matter and mattering of the world. The analysis draws on new materialism, post-humanism, post-qualitative inquiry, ecology, autoethnography, art, literature, and the authors’ own everyday relationality. It seeks to find|forge a new and sometimes hopeful sense of the world, and of thought and action. It does so mindful of the broader context of the new populism being deployed by autocrats, a populism that limits and controls human thought, and with it, creativity and freedom.

The Arts if Living in a More-than-human World is about affect, about stopping, listening, and feeling the vibrant matter of this world, and of our selves embedded in it. The title refers both to the arts, (specifically to painting, photography, fiction and poetry), and to daily life as an art form that might be lived differently-a difference that emerges in relation to more-than-human life-the life of the world that we collectively depend on and are symbiotically attached to. This astonishing and lively work brings new materialist concepts to play, as it explores the poetics of embodied living in everyday life. It brings arts-based methodologies together with current research in the natural and biological sciences, moving well beyond many old, familiar, well-established disciplinary boundaries. The poetics of living-as- and of writing-as-inquiry draws inspiration from "the fleeting, viscous, lively, embodied, material, more-than-human, precognitive, non-discursive dimensions of spatially and temporally complex lifeworlds" (Vannini, 2015: 318). It is informed by an ethics that dismantles the centuries-old assumption of human dominance and ascendance over the material world. It engages in an exploration of our human selves in motion, as emergent, and as embedded in the complex, interwoven materiality of the world--a world that is always in motion. This book pushes at the edges of our understanding, and of our capacity to communicate, offering a bridge between the thinking and the doing of new materialist inquiry. With a wild grace, Bronwyn and Jane move us through the entanglements of life with more-than-human beings. Their work embodies the intra-action of art, philosophy, and a creative relational methodology for living response-ably with water and sky and stone and soil. Theirs is a book we want to live in as our body is pulled into the ink, the paper, the ipad, the rock pool, the flower, and their fields of existence, creating a more-than-human empathy. Merge with the pages of The Arts of Living in a More-than-Human World. You'll be glad you did. Tami Spry, author of Body, Paper, Stage: Writing and Performing Autoethnography.

Winner of the 2016 ICQI Outstanding Qualitative Book AwardAcclaimed qualitative scholar Jane Speedy’s world was upended completely after suffering a severe stroke when only in her late 50s. After returning home from the hospital, Speedy took to her iPad to write and draw as a way of making sense of her experience and to aid her recovery. The stunning, fragmented, poetic text and images comprising Staring at the Park depict the events of this difficult journey. It provides an alternative model of engaging the self in a research project in an evocative and artistic way. This highly original book: -uses the seemingly ordinary motif of the park opposite the author’s house as the catalyst for a wildly creative autoethnography;-includes three narratives of the author’s experience of staring at the park—an imagined murder mystery in the park, a realist ethnography of the park, and the life story (both imagined and real) of her facing her illness and recovery; -offers readers a poetic and performative inquiry into the author’s new reality.

Winner of the 2016 ICQI Outstanding Qualitative Book AwardAcclaimed qualitative scholar Jane Speedy’s world was upended completely after suffering a severe stroke when only in her late 50s. After returning home from the hospital, Speedy took to her iPad to write and draw as a way of making sense of her experience and to aid her recovery. The stunning, fragmented, poetic text and images comprising Staring at the Park depict the events of this difficult journey. It provides an alternative model of engaging the self in a research project in an evocative and artistic way. This highly original book: -uses the seemingly ordinary motif of the park opposite the author’s house as the catalyst for a wildly creative autoethnography;-includes three narratives of the author’s experience of staring at the park—an imagined murder mystery in the park, a realist ethnography of the park, and the life story (both imagined and real) of her facing her illness and recovery; -offers readers a poetic and performative inquiry into the author’s new reality.

Speedy provides a necessary introduction to the purposes, possibilities and processes of narrative research methods in therapy practices. Merging social science and arts-based research methods, makes this book ideal for therapy students and practitioners, as well as those providing counselling in other related professional areas.

Speedy provides a necessary introduction to the purposes, possibilities and processes of narrative research methods in therapy practices. Merging social science and arts-based research methods, makes this book ideal for therapy students and practitioners, as well as those providing counselling in other related professional areas.