Research
My research experience began during my master’s degree in psychotherapy and spirituality at the University of Alberta affiliated St. Stephen’s College. My master’s thesis, Sex, Shame, and Spirituality: A Study of Lived Experience, engaged with phenomenology to explore the lived experience of shame surrounding sexual behaviour among emerging adults belonging to a faith community.
As I began my PhD at the University of Alberta I was able to work with a range of scholars with various research interests including psychoanalysis, analytical psychology, existentialism, phenomenology, curriculum studies, and educational philosophy. As a research assistant I was granted the opportunity to assist in two federally funded research projects, outlined below.
With a personal interest in the relationship between death and life, my doctoral research was informed by analytical psychology, and employed heuristic inquiry to investigate the living experience of mortality among curriculum graduate students. Broadly speaking, I remain curious about the ways in which living with an awareness of our death influences our experience of life—most notably in our experiences of learning and becoming. My research further aims to draw educational implications of how the nature of morality influences the educational situation.
First Project
The first project was led by Dr. David Lewkowich and utilized psychoanalytic theory to investigate how the aesthetic experience of reading comics may be meaningful for adults becoming teachers. The study explored how the visual merger of visual arts and literature offered by comics allows for an engagement in a particular form of psychic work, most notably in the area of memory, the experience of time, and the influence of the unconscious on the reading experience.
Second Project
The second project engaged with the work of Ernest Becker and terror management theory under Dr. Cathryn van Kessel. This project involved pre-service teachers engaging with terror management theory and developing educational strategies to apply in their classrooms. Through this project we explored the importance of an engagement with the human experience of mortality and how it influences the educational situation, both as expressed within the classroom and through how curriculum is approached.