This is my eportfolio for Athabasca University’s Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies (MA-IS)! Over three years (2023-2025), I worked on these projects while holding a full-time job, volunteering in my community, nurturing friendships and partnerships, and navigating enormous personal transitions.
This eportfolio contains a series of artifacts that highlight my key learning outcomes from my coursework.
In my MA-IS work, I explored themes of ancestral discovery, family structures, elevating and honouring ordinary lives (through life history research), and restorying/reconstructing women’s lives.
My arc of inquiry moved from the general to the highly specific: I started with settler-colonial family paradigms and ended up immersed in a tiny book of poems written almost a century ago by my great-grandmother. It felt less like an arc and more like a zoom-in, as I started with the big picture of social context and ended focused on the details of one person’s life.
This person was my great-grandmother, Marjorie, who to my surprise made herself visible over the course of my research. I became enchanted by her story, and she left behind just enough information for me to learn about her and want to know more. Please browse through my artifacts to explore my research and read my reflection to discover what I learned about her and myself.
The bulk of this work happened over the final 12 months of the MA-IS program. As I put together this eportfolio and reviewed my outputs, I realized I may have written the same paper four times, with different interdisciplinary lenses. I explored the overlaying relationships between these archival materials and my great-grandmother through personal essay, autoethnography and sociocultural reflection, arts-based inquiry, and qualitative research. I felt like I was digging through layers to get to an essential core. Here is where I’ve ended up.
Roseanne Harvey 