The wrong shoe and other misfits: Fiction writing as reflexive inquiry within a private girls school (With Original writing)

Writing fiction is a relentless reflexive process that demands an immediate saturated experience of language and context. My thesis focuses on fiction writing as a form of research practice. I emphasize the significance of fiction writing as an act of inquiry and not merely a form of representation. I examine possible philosophical frameworks for recommending fiction as an ethically sound, embodied form of inquiry. The thesis is comprised of three distinct parts. The first recounts the research journey and lists possible criteria for evaluating the work. I outline the process of character development and appraise various strategies for embedding both thematic and personal narratives in a plot-structured fiction. Revisioned concepts such as rigor, authenticity, and empathy are analyzed through the lens of arts-informed inquiry. The second part of the thesis is a novel entitled The gravy chronicles. The story features a researcher in pursuit of a critical methodology in her encounter with a private girls' school. She witnesses the silencing of dissenting teacher voices within the conservative school culture, and pursues forms of artful resistance towards the regulative regimes of truth and tradition. The novel examines research delusions of self-enclosure and community coherence and the traps of reciprocal (mis)recognition in educational inquiry. Issues around sameness and asymmetry in the intersubjective construction of self, other, and community are shown to be operating on multiple levels within the narrative. Questions of outsider privilege and ethical alterity are addressed through plot and narrative technique. The third part of the thesis offers a detailed reflection on narrative technique and the nature of aesthetic judgement, relating these to hermeneutic issues of language and interpretation. The role of authorship and personal signature is juxtaposed against the politics of anonymity and supposed neutrality. Writing and performative language are seen to mediate the construction of community and the experience of alienation within the school context.