Title: Beyond the body: A poetic and pluralist approach to more-than-human embodiment, assistive technology, and movement after lower limb amputation
Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Erica Bennett
Committee Members: Dr. Andrea Bundon, Dr. Katherine Tamminen, Dr. Melissa Day
Chair: Dr. Shannon Bredin
Abstract: Lower limb amputation (LLA) creates a profound disruption in a person’s life, reshaping their relationship with their body, identities, and social and material worlds. Given these significant changes coupled with the rising incidence of LLA in Canada, there is a need to better understand people’s complex lived experiences after amputation. With the goal of restoring ambulation and a return to the able-bodied norm, existing research has examined the barriers and facilitators to physical activity, as well as experiences of rehabilitation and adaptation to prosthetic use. However, the bulk of this existing research has conceptualized LLA, movement, and mobility in narrow biomedical or functional terms, and has overlooked the relational, emotional, and embodied dimensions that impact how individuals make sense of movement after and with LLA. To address this gap, in my research I will integrate posthumanist theory with narrative and poetic inquiry to explore the entangled relationships between embodiment, movement, and assistive technologies among adults with LLA. The following research questions will guide my inquiry: i) how do individuals with LLA utilize storytelling to navigate and negotiate their embodied identities after amputation? ii) how does movement impact the integration of assistive technologies into the embodiment of people with LLA, and iii) how can poetry be used as a method of emotional and embodied understanding within narrative storytelling, particularly in exploring complex entanglements between the self and material? Constructing data through a series of life story interviews with adults aged 18-64, and a reflective arts-based research activity involving poetic co-construction, I will examine movement as a key contextual site of entanglement. Informed by facet methodology and through dialogical narrative analysis and a rhizomatic assemblage analysis grounded in posthumanism, I will investigate how stories, bodies, and assistive technologies shape movement and lived experience after LLA. This proposed research will make novel theoretical and methodological contributions by interweaving posthumanist and narrative theorizing with poetic inquiry to illuminate the embodied, affective, and material dimensions of movement and the self after LLA. Additionally, findings from this research will develop our understanding of the potential of poetry as a heuristic bridge between stories and materiality, opening up new possibilities for understanding of the dynamic and shifting relations between bodies in motion and technologies. My dissertation will challenge the idea that recovery after amputation should be judged through binaries of success/failure, whole/broken, or human/nonhuman; it will illuminate more nuanced conceptions of movement that recognize and celebrate diverse ways of being in the world.