How do we meaningfully speak of transformation? Transformative learning maybe a perspective on how a person transforms mental models through critical discourse and contemplation. And/or there are more relational, embodied, embedded, existential, emotional, aesthetic, and spiritual perspectives on transformation and resistance to it. We seek to link the personal and theoretical, micro, meso and macro levels of analysis, using auto/biography. This is a good, deeply satisfying way to consider all aspects of transformation.

We invite, in the process, participants to share images and experiences of transformation and resistance. We problematize dominant views of narration and voice as transparent. We get personal in the seminar by exploring the possibilities and anxieties of our encounters with otherness: of transitioning beyond binaried gender categories; or of struggles for truer, less false relationships; or by exploring the complex interplay of cultural and psychological identities in hyper complex late modernity; or the tension between the need to belong and individuation. We challenge in doing so a paradigm of disconnection permeating academic space; and of patriarchal hubris in the fiction of neutral, objective observers (or educators). We explore diverse, fluid, polyphonic positionings that might serve us better.

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