Conference Agenda

In 2018 Reinekke lost her spouse Frans Meijers to cancer. In the year that followed she wrote a book about the loss that revealed many dimensions of her experience. In DST terms: there was an angry self, a sad self, a determined self, and even a sexual self. As she wrote her story, an academic I-position arose that helped her study the grief literature applying it to herself. There was also an I-as-poet position which expressed the meaningful ways in which she remained connected to Frans. Additional I-positions of loss were revealed in a theatrical like dialogue that allowed her to revisit their unfinished family business and feel heard.

This paper, inspired by her book “Writing the Self in Bereavement: a story of love, spousal loss, and resilience” (Routledge, 2021) discusses shifting identity positions in the face of loss. This invited paper explains the use of Dialogical Self Theory to explore the contradictions and taboos in bereavement using therapeutic writing. Poetry, story, dialogue, and autoethnographic research were part of her process.

French philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin developed in his ‘La méthode’ a comprehensive version of complexity theory, which might inform DST to a significant extent. He never published much in English, hence his work has remained largely unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world. This presentation aims to introduce a few interesting concepts of his thinking and suggests ways to make use of them in DST.

There’s a striking similarity between Morin and DST: it further corroborates DST’s conceptual framework. But more than that: both Morin and DST offer, emphatically, bridging theories.