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| author |
Laura McCullough-Thoms
| | title |
The Coordinates of Being: Compassionate Curiosity, Apophatic Storytelling, Relationality, & the Healing Imagination
| | abstract |
The Coordinates of Being: Compassionate Curiosity, Apophatic Storytelling, Relationality, and the Healing Imagination is a hybrid dissertation that foregrounds scholarship while integrating and modeling creative practices as a praxis. It consists of two interrelated components: a meta-hybrid essay and a novel. The essay anchors the project in over a decade of research in attachment theory, epigenetics, trauma studies, narrative theory, care ethics, and philosophies of knowledge, while drawing on poetic inquiry and the arts. This scholarly framework examines how artful inquiry fosters healing, wellbeing, and well-becoming across individual and collective experience. The novel, in dialogue with this scholarship, is a multi-voiced, intergenerational narrative centered on transracial adoption, kinship, inherited trauma, and correlates between colonial histories and cultures while asking questions about appropriation and alterity and writing though a decolonizing lens. Through the researched, imagined, and remembered voices of biological, adoptive, and ancestral maternal figures, the narrative interrogates how attachment and trauma cross generations and how threads of connection, especially among female and maternal kin, bind us beyond biological determinism. This creative work enacts a Humanities-based epistemological inquiry into belonging and relationality, moving from abstraction to embodiment. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that imagining the lives of others, past, present, and future, human and more-than-human, enables us to become more sapient, compassionate, and relational participants in a shared world. It offers a model for integrating rigorous scholarship and imaginative, apophatic storification and storytelling to advance the medical humanities as a field committed to care, imagination, wellbeing, and ethical relationality.
| | school |
The Caspersen School of Graduate Studies, Drew University
| | degree |
D.M.H. (2026)
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| advisor |
Merel Visse
Liana Pieheler
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| full text | LMcCullough-Thoms.pdf - requires Drew uLogin |
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