不良研究所

I came to social work from theatre directing, so I鈥檝e long been fascinated by narrative and storytelling. But it was my climbing partner's life-altering injury and my own severe ice climbing incident that crystallized my research question: How does the climbing community navigate trauma? 

This summer, I immersed myself in first-person narratives by women climbers, coding and recoding memoirs, searching for patterns in how we perceive self, climbing and community in relation to resilience, social identity and trauma. The process became intensely reflexive, or 鈥渕e-search鈥�, as my supervisor called it. I'd read these stories of death and injury, then carry them into the Bugaboos, Squamish, the Bow Valley, feeling them inside me as I climbed. Some days I'd think, "climbing is stupid, I'm done." Other days, I'd feel the resilience of these women strengthening my own. 

One moment shook my assumptions entirely. I'd coded a passage as "resilient" where a climber continued to partner with someone she suspected might be trying to kill her. My supervisor gently challenged me: "Perhaps that's not resilience. That's a false sense of self." I had to confront something fundamental: applying social work theories to an elective, privileged activity requires reconciling frameworks designed for imposed trauma with experiences people choose.

This work is bigger than sixteen weeks. It's become part of my life's trajectory, connecting academic theory with lived community experience in ways I'm only beginning to understand.