Inspiriting the academy : weaving stories and practices of living women's spirituality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This doctoral dissertation represents a qualitative inquiry into the lived experiences and practices of seven faculty and student alumni, the author included, within an accredited Women’s Spirituality Master of Arts (WSMA) degree program, located in the San Francisco Bay area. This graduate course of study originates from the grassroots North American women’s movement, and prepares women for leadership in the pluralistic global culture of the 21st Century. The woman-centred curriculum re-claims women’s history, pre-history, spiritual experience, social contributions and creative expressions by integrating scholarly research, feminist perspectives and analysis, goddesses, activism, ritual, spiritual practices, and the arts. Through individual and collective processes of self-inquiry, healing and transformation, faculty and students contribute to new knowledge and social practices that can holistically address local and global challenges of gender, social and ecological justice. This dissertation artfully illuminates intersections of spirituality and feminism in education that remain little known or understood. The study responds to calls made by North American scholars for inspiriting the academy by attending to the spiritual dimensions of human experience. The author posits the WSMA as being an exemplar of innovations of spirituality in higher education. Stories and practices woven into this dissertation document, communicate, and commune-with, faculty and students’ experiences of self- formation and authorization, search for meaning and understanding, gender, social, and ecological justice work, and the relational embodiment of spirit- and heart- centred learning and renewal. Throughout this text, the author navigates the complexity of her ongoing path as a scholar who claims Women’s Spirituality as a site of learning and research. Stories and practices are woven through the life-based, artistic material metaphor and gesture of “red thread” into themes of “Beginnings,” “Gifts,” and “New Philosophies.” The author engages narrative, auto/biographic, and arts-based research methodologies through life writing and oral history stories, her mixed-media textiles and performance art practice, and the research persona of the philosopher-midwife, drawn from her working background in lay midwifery of being with-woman. She weaves, performs, translates and transmits co-participants’ stories and practices of living Women’s Spirituality, and that of herself, as being the central bodies/body of this research text.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".