Becoming Unsettled Again and Again: Thinking With/in and Against Autobiographical Writing

Abstract

This theoretical paper takes up pieces of the process of thinking about, and proposing, my PhD research in the context of (my own) treaty personhood identities. Demonstrating tension through autobiographical writing, it aims to disrupt humanist notions of (my) self as stable, rational, and understandable. With some attention to certain post-structural philosophies, especially by engaging in Deleuzian lines of flight, it seeks to continually unsettle the assumption that (my) self can be known fully; that (my) subjectivity can easily be named. Instead, it views identities as plural and shifting, and subjectivity as a process of identity formation that is socially constructed. As well, the process of writing these self-stories further constitutes (my) self, in a relational process with other texts, towards becoming-otherwise again and again.