Crafting Themselves as Community-Based Research Facilitators: A Foucauldian Analysis of Subject Formation Through the Care of the Self

Grounded in Foucault’s concept of the care of the self, this article examines how community-based practitioners participate in their own formation as community-based research (CBR) facilitators. It draws on the stories of three facilitators working outside of university settings, generated through narrative inquiry and subsequently unsettled through post-structural and post-qualitative perspectives. Through diffractive analysis, participants’ narratives were read through the care of the self to explore how they relate to and act upon themselves within power/knowledge relations. The analysis traces embodied, temporal, and relational practices, including disclosure, retreat, reflective writing, doodling, collective reflection, feedback, and recursive questioning, through which facilitators cultivate particular dispositions and modes of action. The article argues that care of the self extends the notion of pedagogy of the subject by illuminating how facilitators participate in their own subjectification. It also broadens understandings of facilitators’ relations to themselves beyond treating reflection and reflexivity as their primary or exhaustive forms. This perspective matters because facilitators’ practices of self-relation shape how they engage others, organise participation, and contribute to the possibilities and limits of community-led inquiry.