A journey around myself: an archaeological exploration of identity

A Journey Around Myself: an Archaeological Exploration of Identity is a study of self. It examines how a person with a fractured geography, dislocated and re-located in a foreign landscape, can structure a personal narrative and maintain an authentic voice. The thesis investigates the role of memory and narrative in unraveling a sense of identity and in doing so reveals how individuals bring a sense of linearity to the fragments of their existence by authoring a unifying narrative. In turn, this narrative (life-story) embodies a sense of identity that is actualised through narrative discourse (articulation of life-story). Commencing with a model for Constructing Personal Narratives (Flood 2003), A Journey Around Myself explores the complex and stratified fragments of memoried experience to extend the Flood model. Using the metaphor of archaeology, the thesis introduces a new approach to narrative inquiry. The model of ‘archaeological narrative inquiry’© uses the concepts, tools, and modes of archaeology to explore the building blocks in the authoring of self. This method embraces the creative potential of an individual and shows how creativity can be used as an essential element to investigate and interrogate the multifarious elements of personal narrative. The use of archaeological narrative inquiry reveals a unique way by which interrogation and reflection are used to tap into the creative self to generate data in the form of creative artefacts for examination and consideration. Through this process, data was generated and a number of artefacts were created. These include: (1) A Book of Photographic Collages: The Hall of Mirrors; (2) A Digital Story: Argumentum e Silencio; (3) A Digital Story: A Journey Through Lost Time… (4) A Digital Story: Lost in Translation (5) An Archive of Family Photographs: Happy Memories; (6) A Fable: Satatantra: The Elephant and the Mirror and (7) A Narrative Account of the Research Journey: Charting the Journey. These artefacts are an integral part of the thesis and can be read or viewed in any order. This method of archaeological narrative inquiry demonstrates the significance of, and the possibilities created by drawing on an individual’s creativity as part of an exploration of self. This distinctive data mechanism manifests in a PhD thesis that falls outside the traditional ‘research’ PhD or a ‘PhD by artefact and exegesis’. The thesis also demonstrates how various components interact to articulate a sense of self and preserve the authentic voice in a forum where the researcher and the researched are one and the same.