Changing Lives in Unanticipated Ways?

2020 ◽  
pp. 57-74
Author(s):  
Ann Phoenix
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Research Team ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Narrative Construction ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Small Stories

This chapter analyzes two interviews that come from a study concerned with the ways in which adults from three different family backgrounds re-evaluate their earlier experiences of growing up in visibly ethnically different households. Both examples are from adults who are of mixed black-white parentage. The chapter considers the ways in which the two accounts are inextricably linked with the participants’ racialized, gendered positioning and commitments, which are ethically entangled in their narratives. The “small stories” that both participants produced in their narrative construction of their identities as well as their “bigger” life stories produced tensions amongst the research team that were irreconcilable because the researchers were positioned differently and orienting to different aspects of the narratives. The narratives were powerful and produced different possibilities for social change in the researchers, sometimes in ways that posed difficult challenges to their worldviews.

scholarly journals Revisiting Photovoice: Perceptions of Dementia Among Researchers With Intellectual Disability

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (7) ◽  
pp. 1019-1032 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Watchman ◽  
Kate Mattheys ◽  
Andrew Doyle ◽  
Louise Boustead ◽  
Orlando Rincones
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Intellectual Disability ◽  
Intellectual Disabilities ◽  
Research Team ◽  
Critical Dialogue ◽  
Marginalized Groups ◽  
Improved Outcomes ◽  
People With Intellectual Disabilities ◽  
Photovoice Methodology ◽  
Global Evidence

There is limited global evidence exploring perceptions of dementia among people with intellectual disabilities. This article presents findings from the first known study where an inclusive research team, including members with intellectual disability, used photovoice methodology to visually represent views of people with intellectual disabilities and dementia. Drawing on Freire’s empowerment pedagogy, the study aims were consistent with global photovoice aims: enabling people to visually record critical dialogue about dementia through photography and social change. We investigated the benefits and challenges of photovoice methodology with this population and sought to identify perspectives of dementia from people with intellectual disabilities. Data collected identified issues such as peers “disappearing” and the importance of maintaining friendship as dementia progressed. Although reaching policymakers is a key aim of photovoice, this may not always be achievable, suggesting that revisiting Freire’s original methodological aims may lead to improved outcomes in co-produced research with marginalized groups.

scholarly journals Everyday life when growing up with a mother with an intellectual or developmental disability: Four retrospective life-stories

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (6) ◽  
pp. 418-430
Author(s):  
Ingrid Weiber ◽  
Per-Anders Tengland ◽  
Johan Sanmartin Berglund ◽  
Mona Eklund
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Developmental Disability ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Growing Up

Southern Strivings

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik S. Gellman ◽  
Jarod Roll
Keyword(s):  
Meaning In Life ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Agricultural Labor ◽  
Rural South ◽  
Family Survival ◽  
Jim Crow South

This chapter details the respective backgrounds of the two preachers under discussion, highlighting the similarities in their life stories—particularly their shared frustrations growing up as ambitious, talented young men in the rural South. Their youths were defined by the tensions between family survival and an individual sense of calling, between agricultural labor and adventure, and between physical hunger and the thirst for deeper meaning in life. Moreover, the laws and culture of the Jim Crow South also held sway over both their lives, and made Claude Williams's youth at once very similar to, yet completely separate from, Owen Whitfield's experience. Both men would, however, come to the same religious calling as they came of age.

scholarly journals Shape-shifting: Stories of Teaching for Social Change in Nursing

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Rosemary Anne McEldowney
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Nurse Educators ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Change Agents ◽  
Cultural Safety ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Health Community ◽  
Rich Material ◽  
Individual Voice ◽  
Feminist Educators

<p><b>Because little is known about why and how nurse educators teach for social change, this research breaks new ground. A review of the general literature on teaching for social change revealed that few educators have attempted to analyse and understand it in relation to personal narrative inquiry. However, critical feminist educators provide a useful framework for theorising about teaching for change that addresses issues of hegemony, agency, praxis, individual voice, difference, justice and equity.</b></p> <p>Six women Pakeha/Tauiwi nurse educators from throughout New Zealand volunteered to participate in this research and share their lived experiences of teaching for social change. In-depth conversations over two years unfolded new and rich material about how and why these six women continue to teach the evaded subjects, like mental health, women’s health, community development and cultural safety. All teach in counter-hegemonic ways, opening students’ eyes to the unseen and unspoken.</p> <p>Among the significant things to emerge during the research was the metaphorical construct of shape-shifting as an active process in teaching for social change. It revealed the connectedness and integrity between life as lived and the moral imperative that motivates the participants to teach for difference. Shape-shifting was also reflected in other key findings of the study. As change agents, the participants have had significant shape-shifting experiences in their lives; they live and work as shape-shifters within complex social and political structures and processes to achieve social justice; and, they deal with areas of health practice where clients are socially and politically displaced.</p> <p>The research also generated new methods for gathering life-stories and new processes for analysis and interpretation of life-stories. It is hoped that this research will open pathways for other nurse educators to become shape-shifters teaching for social change.</p>

scholarly journals Who else Needs Protection? Reflecting on Researcher Vulnerability in Sensitive Research

Societies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynette Sikic Micanovic ◽  
Stephanie Stelko ◽  
Suzana Sakic
Keyword(s):  
Research Team ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Research Data ◽  
Vulnerable Population ◽  
Emotion Management ◽  
Emotional Impact ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Research Experiences ◽  
Wide Range

Ethnographic research characterised by immersion, reflexivity, and rapport can be unpredictable and uncontrollable, producing a wide range of emotional responses. Much of the literature on sensitive research focuses on ethical requirements and strategies for protecting participants while less attention has been given to the need for researcher protection. In this paper, we share some of the concealed and/or overlooked aspects of researcher vulnerability that are commonly disregarded or under-explored. Based on our fieldwork experiences with a vulnerable population, it considers some of the different ways doing sensitive research with people experiencing homelessness has had an impact on our research team and wider. Specifically, we analyze the emotional impact of distressing and painful research experiences on those directly and not directly involved with the collection of research data (i.e., transcribers and coders). The themes that are discussed include: i) blurring of roles in the field; ii) dealing with heart-rending life stories; and iii) handling emotionally charged experiences. By reflecting on our fieldwork experiences and emotions, we also explore the ways in which emotional impacts can be managed in practice. Strategies for emotion management that have helped us deal with the unique challenges of this research are outlined.

Social Change and the Transition from Adolescence to Adulthood: A Study of Three Generations of Australians

1982 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Ann O'loughlin ◽  
Kenneth E. Sinclair
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Transition To Adulthood ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Three Generations ◽  
Australian Family ◽  
Younger Age

The study focuses attention on the different patterns of transition to adulthood experienced by the members of a hypothetical three-generation Australian family consisting of grandparents, parents and their adolescent children. For each of these three generations data from the Bureau of Census and Statistics were examined to determine the age at which they left school and entered a job, married, and began a family. The data indicate that when the transition to adulthood is measured in terms of these variables the process of growing up was accomplished by the most recent adolescent generation in a shorter space of time, at a younger age, and by a greater proportion of the cohort than for either the parent or grandparent generations.

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