Elizabeth McKibben

This paper develops a conceptualization of biographical diffraction via a creative autoethnography of climate disaster grief. In January 2025, the Eaton Fire devastated Altadena, California killing 19 people and destroying over 9,000 structures. Among them was my family home. Having lived abroad in Aotearoa New Zealand for 5 years, I return to Altadena after the fire, navigating loss from sites of distance and proximity. Drawing upon Barad’s concept of diffraction and the void, I grapple with the asymmetries of grief, privilege, belonging, and self that emerge with the loss of “home.” To do so, I craft a narrative with audio recordings of my footsteps walking around the debris of the Eaton Fire burn scar. By weaving together sensory vignettes, evocative writing, images, and reflections I consider how climate disaster grief is an embodied and emplaced phenomenon both historically entangled and unequally distributed. I then draw upon cross-cultural learnings to explore how Indigenous knowledge can, and cannot, inform healing of place and self from positions of settler-colonialism. Biographical diffraction is thus presented as a tool for attending to the layered emotional, material, and political dimensions of climate disaster, particularly when “home” becomes an unrecognizable site of trauma, memory, and transformation.

This thesis develops an understanding of the Pratyahara Paradox. Pratyahara (withdrawal of the senses) is a core tenet of yoga philosophy. Through pratyahara, a yoga practitioner can transcend the material world and unite with spiritual consciousness. While a withdrawal from the sensory-material world is embedded in the aims of yoga, it isn’t clear how, and if, pratyahara is part of contemporary yoga. Today, yoga is connected to a multi-billion-dollar industry that sells health and wellbeing through sensory-material experiences. Branded clothing, lean bodies, and curated spaces are all part of a modern re-interpretation of yoga shaped by Western health ideals. As a yoga teacher, and autoethnographic subject of this research, I am troubled by how the people, places, and things of yoga create an aesthetic that reproduces neoliberal health imperatives and neglect yoga’s spiritual purpose. The aim of this thesis is thus to understand the apparent contradiction between the withdrawal of the senses and sensory-material engagements in yoga practice today.To address this paradox, I integrate Karen Barad’s ethico-onto-epistemology with pratyahara’s onto-epistemology to craft a “spiritual posthumanist” auto/ethno/graphy. This methodology navigates inward and outward awareness, using site visits to yoga spaces, object interviews, and crafting practices to examine how sensory encounters with yoga’s material “things” shape experiences and identities in yoga practice today. In my approach, observations, reflections, interview excerpts, and yoga pants are re-configured into three narratives and a make-shift yoga mat. These creative processes bring both author and audience into the sensory, affective, and intellectual experience of the research process. Further, through this process, latent power structures such as whiteness, body-centricity, and neoliberal feminism are made more visible, audible, and tangible in everyday yoga settings. By engaging with the more-than-human world, I reveal how sensory-material engagements reinforce Western health ideals. I also offer pathways to reimagine pratyahara’s role in withdrawing from hegemonic norms. Ultimately, this thesis positions pratyahara and self-study as tools for critical praxis within yoga spaces, encouraging scholar-practitioners to reflect upon, and potentially withdraw from, dominant power structures in contemporary yoga.

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Yoga has become a popular health and wellbeing practice that draws on ancient philosophy. Pratyahara is a core tenet of yoga practice and is often translated to mean withdrawal of the senses. Withdrawing from the senses plays a key role in aiding yoga practitioners to find spiritual enlightenment by transcending the worldly. Withdrawing from the material world, however, does not neatly fit within the parameters of the contemporary postural yoga industry. This paper looks at the conceptual origins of pratyahara through stances relevant to health research. The author weaves biomedical, esthetic, and neoliberal onto-epistemological stances through health discourse to discuss how postural yoga both resists and replicates power imbalances. In so doing the author emphasizes the paradoxical nature of pratyahara as it is reflected in socio-political tensions of the yoga industry. To conclude, the author suggests that pratyahara itself can be useful in resolving this tension as yoga fulfills a philosophical prerogative for social change.

The contemporary yoga industry is entangled in many contradictions. While yoga is intended to be an inclusive, liberatory practice, its contemporary iterations enact exclusion through an industry that often privileges able-bodied, affluent, white women. As a yoga scholar-practitioner who embodies these identities, I am troubled by how my teaching and studies of yoga further replicate power imbalances. In this article, I interrogate privilege and power as they emerge with yoga pants. I draw upon Barad’s cutting together-apart in a diffractive auto/ethnography. I make literal cuts through the fabric of my yoga pants, as reflections, reactions, and interview transcripts make figurative cuts through self-image, body-image, and feminine norms. I consider how this methodology materializes an entanglement of affective forces, power, and critical feminist academia that is useful in exploring possibilities for change. This inquiry does not conclude, but rather acknowledges an imperfect and ever-evolving interrogation of embodied power as it shapes intellectual inquiry, and spaces of yoga practice.

Narratives, like the people who tell them, are fluid, changing through time and in response to context. Longitudinal narrative interviewing enables researchers to explore the meaning of stability and change in narratives over time. Despite much attention to and application of longitudinal narrative interviews in recent years, the ways that time is conceptualized and the ways it is applied are markedly different. In this paper the authors present a scoping review to examine the methodological and empirical literature on longitudinal narrative interviewing in health-related research. This research is used to highlight a methodological tension between narrative theorizing of time and analytic practice in research involving longitudinal narrative interviews. Longitudinal narrative research struggles to acknowledge time as both chronological and interpretative, and in doing so misses an opportunity to examine interviews as both multiple data collections and as multiple instances of narrative re-configuration. The authors suggest that future theorizing and empirical work can strive to bridge an onto-epistemological gap by intentionally foregrounding theoretical orientations to time within narrative analytic approaches using repeated interviews.

The evidence regarding the benefits of yoga for treating psychological trauma is well-established; however, there is a paucity of qualitative reviews exploring this topic. The purpose of this rapid review is to gain a deeper understanding of the impact that yoga can have on people with a history of psychological trauma and to reveal barriers and facilitators to the uptake of yoga in this cohort, from a qualitative perspective. The Ovid(EMBASE), Ovid(MEDLINE), PsycINFO, PubMed, and SPORTDiscus databases were searched using key terms. The systematic search generated 148 records, and 11 peer-reviewed articles met the inclusion criteria. The following main impacts of yoga on participants were identified: feeling an increased sense of self-compassion; feeling more centred; developing their coping skills; having a better mind–body relationship; and improving their relationships with others. The main barriers were also identified: concerns initiating yoga; time and motivational issues; and the costs and location of classes. The main facilitator was the feeling of safety generated in the trauma-informed yoga classes. This review suggests that yoga offers great potential in the field of trauma recovery. Despite this, more high-quality research with rigorous methodologies is called for to allow this field to advance.