Browsing by Author "Kean, Matthew Joseph"

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    Men's work : narratives of engaging with change and becoming non-violent : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2024-07-26) Kean, Matthew Joseph
    Family violence continues to be a harsh reality for many families, whānau and communities around New Zealand. The primary aim of this project is to produce new possibilities for the violence prevention sector by linking theory and community practices supporting men, and their families, with pathways of change in relation to their cultural, gendered, socio-economic, and religious experiences of the world. In partnership with Gandhi Nivas, a community-based organisation providing early intervention support services to families in the Auckland region, I collaborate with men accessing Gandhi Nivas for support to bring to the fore an ethics of care empowering non-normative processes of change towards non-violence. Informed with the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, I provide an autoethnographic analysis of fieldwork experiences, 1:1 interviews, and a weekly men’s social support group, expanding on Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic theory to privilege narratives of events, felt experiences, and embodied memories of different institutional, legal, political, and socio-cultural forces conditioning men’s every day social worlds. With narratives as a form of re-remembering men’s sticky networks of affective memories, I experiment with nomadic subjectivity as a cartographic methodology capable of tracing sensorial data with enlivening moments of bodily sensation. This is not a straightforward task. A complex project, I craft a mosaic of affective connections with selections of notes, transcripts and events reverberating flows of materiality that produce changes to specific social, political, gendered, and cultural locations, enabling me to reflexively analyse what experiences follow me, what social processes I have articulated, and what processes are left off the page. I elaborate an understanding of nomadic subjectivity as a tactic enabling me to bear witness to both men’s capacities for violence and non-violence within men’s social world, by unfolding affective memories with a series of textually connected hesitations, pauses, and irruptions of social forces conditioning how we experience the world. Informed with Deleuzian political thought, nomadic narratives help me materialise different, unpredictable arrangements of fluxes, flows, and forces with indefinite processes of individuation, providing different potentials, capacities, and limits past the limits of normative knowability. Retrospectively evoking the complexities of following the affective movement of men, which we bring out into the community and to others, this research positions non-violence not just as the absence of violence, but as an iterative process of embodying variations in arrangements and connections of thought processes, propelling alternative modes of relations empowering an ethics of care and concern for others through which violence becomes less possible, reduced, and mitigated. Engaging with an organisation that celebrates difference within ethical frameworks of care informing a diversity of professional practices and experiences, this collaborative, community-oriented research project embraces embodied understandings of change processes men experience whilst in the care of Gandhi Nivas, and puts to work DeleuzoGuattarian non-normative subjectivities of affectivity and intensity as entry points to resonate embodied materiality I cannot know—but feel. With men invoking becomings of non-violence unable to be represented with normative masculinities and hegemonic notions of violence and non-violence, writing a nomadic subject enables me to attend to how different experiences of forces act on and through us, affirming empowering productions of a self with the material and discursive possibilities of men’s daily life.
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    Nomadic becomings : narrative accounts of predictive genetic testing for Huntington's disease : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Psychology at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2019) Kean, Matthew Joseph
    This thesis constructs three narratives of my experiences of Predictive Genetic Testing (PGT) for Huntington’s Disease. Not content with ideals of normative thought, illustrating the unitary subject of representation navigating the challenges of a testing process, I write how one might undertake the PGT process, if only to provide further possibilities unimaginable to me outside the limits of this thesis. Informed with Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic theory, the narratives are written with a multiplicity of dispersed selves forming with the molecular possibilities of human, non-human, and more-than-human forces and flows, tracing non-normative subjectivities of becoming-other. Privileging intensive differences of affective change and motion, nomadic narrative creates rhizomatic figurations able to traverse the limits of normative thought with non-linear thinking. Written with affective memories of my experiences of difference, narratives of the PGT process form multiplicities of nomadic subjects inhabiting the time of Aion, embodied with the mindless, generative and affirmative vitality of Braidotti’s Life as Zoe. Addressing issues of sustainability and endurance with nomadic ethics, nomadic narratives escape binary dialectics and excluded-other of representational thought, affirming a multiplicity of empowering witness-able accounts of the PGT process. I engage political philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, amongst other theoretical ontologies, providing understandings of processes I experience writing with nomadic subjects. I explore the limits of nomadic narrative, in the creation of smooth space that challenges normative social, cultural, and academic practices exceeding past the confines of this thesis.