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Abstract
Within the broad, interdisciplinary field of adult education, affective aspects of experience and the roles they play in learning have, thus far, not been properly theorized or researched. This dissertation first explores how John Heron’s whole person theory (WPT) conceptualizes feeling as an expansive affective capacity at the root of all human ways of knowing and the wide implications this has for understanding and facilitating transformative learning. Considering how to inquire into feelingful experience, a chapter examines methodological choices experiential learning scholars have made to study Eugene Gendlin’s concept of felt sense, a specific affective phenomenon resonant with WPT. A second methodological chapter documents an analysis process researchers co-created during a pilot collaborative inquiry testing ways of inquiring into feeling and felt sense that acknowledge their further resonances with philosophical perspectives on affect. Finally, this research culminates in a collaborative inquiry into creative sound practice and how long-term musical partners followed their felt senses in seeking more complex and feelingful ways to evolve their long-standing collaboration. Interludes throughout perform an artful and poetical thinking with theory, braiding the theories of whole person feeling, felt sense, and posthuman affect into knots revealing subtle patterns and connections, including more than human relationalities. These multimodal sections also offer links out to an online portal containing videos and sounds from the aforementioned sonic collaborative inquiry, extending the aesthetic presentation of this research into more participatory realms.