Grieving in doorways: a critical autoethnographic exploration of embodied knowledge amid shifting reality and radical possibility

Author

Holly RaeFollow

Graduation Date

Spring 2025

Document Type

Thesis

Program

Master of Arts degree with a major in English, emphasis in Applied English Studies

Committee Chair Name

Janelle Adsit

Committee Chair Affiliation

Cal Poly Humboldt Faculty or Staff

Second Committee Member Name

Renée Byrd

Second Committee Member Affiliation

Cal Poly Humboldt Faculty or Staff

Third Committee Member Name

Laura Johnson

Third Committee Member Affiliation

Cal Poly Humboldt Faculty or Staff

Keywords

Embodied, Grief, Change, Transformation, Epistemology, Queer, Disability, Ontology, Walking methodology, Critical studies, Ethnic studies, Feminist, Gender

Subject Categories

English

Abstract

This thesis is a critical autoethnographic exploration of embodied knowledge amid shifting reality and radical possibility. Beginning and ending with my own body, I explore how grief, as an embodied companion, offers wisdom and power in moments of profound change. Rooted in a methodology of slowness, rest, walking, and active listening, this work resists the extractive pace of modernity and instead invites building a relationship with grief and discomfort. This research is an experiment in co-creating knowledge with bodies and their intersectionality within systems that would keep us separate from knowing our embodied knowledge. As a location of research for this project, I look to my body which is a body that is queer, disabled, white, formerly Mormon, a parent, and a traitor to hegemonic normativity. I offer grief as one site of knowledge, a location from which paradigms shift, identities reorient, and ontologies unravel. Through the use of embodied invitations, walking methodology, and lived experience, I investigate how systems of power benefit from our inability to engage with grief, and how grief itself becomes a threshold through which we access the not-yet-known. This project engages with the political, emotional, and spiritual weight of change—personal and collective—in a time marked by mass grief, genocide, climate collapse, and systemic violence.

Walking-with grief, listening to its dialects in sensation, emotion, and memory, I follow the thread of what becomes possible when we move with grief rather than resist it. This research is shaped by slowness, rupture, rest, dreaming, tenderness, mutiny, and hope. Readers are invited to bring their bodies along, to feel-with this text, to pause, to notice, and to become researchers of their own embodied knowing. Together, we linger in doorways—thresholds of loss, undoing, and emergence—seeking futures built through kinship with grief and deep attention to what our bodies know.

Citation Style

MLA

Recommended Citation

Rae, Holly, "Grieving in doorways: a critical autoethnographic exploration of embodied knowledge amid shifting reality and radical possibility" (2025). Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects. 2283.
https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/etd/2283