Page Text: | bek tenCH | (Brit. also bec)
she/her/hers
follow me on twitter see @10ch
LOCALE
Pacific Northwest, United States of America
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| bek tenCH | (Brit. also bec)
she/her/hers
follow me on twitter see @10ch
LOCALE
Pacific Northwest, United States of America
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Researcher
My research questions center around how contemplative experiences help us live meaningful lives. By "contemplative experiences," I mean spaces, practices, and technologies that help us to realize how amazing it is that we are alive — still, and in the first place. I believe that these experiences are critical for human and planetary flourishing and that our present culture too often convinces us otherwise, particularly through messages like busy is normal, happiness can be bought, and we aren't good enough (yet).
While I am just beginning my journey as a researcher, I have a few opinions regarding what I can know and how I can know it. First, I'm naturally qualitative in my approach to understanding. Second, I believe that humans' subjective, immaterial, messy lives are real and worthy of study. And third, I value (and acknowledge) my own experiences as an interpretive lens.
INFLUENCES
David Levy , Marion Milner , Thomas Merton
I'm drawn to methods like phenomenology and autoethnography, which I feel honor and allow for the complexity of influences and assumptions researchers make. I used both methods in my first research project, "An Exploration of Major Life Change Through Daily Freewriting," presented here at ACHME's 2017 conference.
My dissertation, “ The Restorative Potential of Participatory Design in the Attention Economy ,” explores how we are affected when we design restorative environments for ourselves and others. In particular, it asks how doing so might help us protect and restore our attention from technologies incentivized to exploit it.
I was trained as a designer in my undergraduate program, and my career before going back to school was as a designer. It’s no surprise that as a researcher, I’ve grown to value design as a way of knowing the world. In particular, I use participatory design to engage those I research and research with.