Paper short abstract:

"Homing In: An Adopted Child's Story Mandala of Connecting Reunion and Belonging," uses autoethnography, a transformational process, recollecting relational connections and kinning. Questing for a Culture of Care, the storyline moves from kinship to living in/on Earthship, storying Alpine activism.

Paper long abstract:

Kinship is analysed through the lens of adoption using the autoethnographic method to tell an adoption and reunion story. The recounting process enfolds through the phase of rememberings, recounting reunion, and reflections on belonging in/on Earthship. Embodied epigenetics, planetary wellbeing, and relational transformation are concepts intertwined within the story mandala. Synchronicity and reunion and how the homing in mechanism works to inform and guide adopted children searching for their birth parents are analyzed. Using narrative inquiry to generate an emancipatory process the storyline addresses humanity's potential to home in to a hopeful future. Relational approaches reflect on the interconnections between self, family, and bioregions in the performance of a Culture of Care.Whilst facing Anthropocene, communities are challenged to co-construct viable relational matrices interweaving kinship and Earthship. Kinning generates new relations, stories, and flyways. As we are storied beings, Green New Deal art and storytelling can enkindle a movement as did New Deal Art, with the potential of eliciting a cultural shift and planetary transformation. Relational responsibility storied through intergenerational bonds and transgenerational connectivity, creates reflexive space about transmission, stewardship, and sustainability. Creating flexibility through storytelling gives form to life-o-grams, or aesthetic life history, that when beholden become transformagrams, transfigured life course trajectories. Berry, Thomas. 2015. The Dream of the Earth. Berkley: Counterpoint. Gergen, Kenneth J. 2009. Relational being: beyond self and community. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press. Riva, Susan Mossman. 2020. Homing in: an adopted child's story mandala of connecting, reunion, and belonging. 1st éd. Christiansburg: WriteLife Publishing.