Forgiving the Unforgivable

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 270-294
Author(s):  
Kristen Lee Hourigan
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Symbolic Interactionist ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Semistructured Interviews ◽  
Self Help Group ◽  
Feeling Rules

Utilizing a symbolic interactionist framework, this article analyzes data from 30 semistructured interviews of individuals who have lost loved ones to homicide and 32 months of concurrent participant observation of relevant social networks and local events, including self-help group meetings, in order to explore the factors that foster or impede forgiveness after homicide as well as the association between forgiveness-related feeling rules and lived experience of forgiveness. Key findings include the discovery of a forgiveness-fostering factor that had been previously overlooked (evidence of pro-social change) and evidence that the internal emotional transformation of forgiveness remains possible through understanding and empathy, despite several factors that may make forgiveness of extreme harm more challenging and/or less likely than forgiveness of more minor harm. Findings demonstrate that discrepancies between one’s forgiveness-related feeling rules and actual lived experiences of forgiveness are overcome through a redefinition of the situation, including with regard to remorse, severity, and intentionality.

Treading the tightrope of femininity: Transforming gendered subjectivity in a therapeutic community

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 390-404
Author(s):  
Inna Perheentupa ◽  
Suvi Salmenniemi
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Therapeutic Intervention ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Transformation Process ◽  
The Self ◽  
Escape Route ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Feminist Discourse ◽  
Femininity And Masculinity ◽  
Self Help Group

This article examines the therapeutic self-transformation process in a self-help group in Russia. Drawing on participant observation and interviews, and engaging with debates on therapeutic technologies and the transformation of gender relations, it explores how the self-help group shapes how participants come to understand and act upon themselves. It shows that the process of self-transformation is profoundly gendered, problematising femininity and identifying it as an object of therapeutic intervention. Rather than collectively contesting gendered power and disadvantage, participants are invited to cultivate traditional notions of femininity and masculinity and learn to draw pleasure from them. We argue that this message may be appealing to women because it speaks to their lived experience of exhaustion and precarity, and offers them the prospect of overcoming it through a mythologised heteronormative order. It offers solace and a potential escape route where room for political agency is limited and feminist discourse heavily vilified. Yet the article also shows that participants do not merely internalise the ideological messages of the group, but engage with them in contradictory and ambivalent ways.

Bereaved Parents and the Compassionate Friends: Affiliation and Healing

1985 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 353-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Klass
Keyword(s):  
Research Method ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Bereaved Parents ◽  
Helping Others ◽  
Self Help Groups ◽  
Supportive Community ◽  
Professional Interventions ◽  
Self Help Group ◽  
Do So

This article is an attempt to describe the Compassionate Friends (TCF), and self-help group, as an effective intervention in the severe bereavement after the death of a child. The research method is participant observation. Three decisions form the framework of the description: the decision to attend the group, the decision to affiliate, and the decision to transform oneself into a helper within the group. The decision to attend seems to be rooted in a variety of expectations, supported by a variety of experiences with professional interventions or with other self-help groups. Affiliation has, first, a cathectic dimension that entails a unity with those whose lives have also been shattered, an appropriate object on which to attach the energy formerly given to the child, and a sense of family in a supportive community. Second, affiliation has an experiential dimension that is an attempt to develop an existential stance in a problematic world based on solutions to concrete problems that are shared among the members. The decision to become a helper is key to the TCF process, for it is the concept that helping others is the best way to help the self that allows the cathectic dimension to become complete in reinvestment and allows the experiential dimension to change from using the experience of others to sharing one's own experience. As time progresses, some members move to formal organizational leadership while others tend to become less regular in attendance, though they do so with some ambivalence. The article ends with the claim that analysis of other interventions using schemas similar to those used in this study could be done.

scholarly journals The market as lived experience: on the knowledge of markets in antitrust analysis

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-190
Author(s):  
Gustavo Onto
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Competitive Market ◽  
Analytical Work ◽  
Sociological Literature ◽  
Market Practice ◽  
Lateral Modes ◽  
Antitrust Analysis

This article describes some of the reported thoughts, anecdotal observations and analytic practices of advisors and commissioners working at the Brazilian antitrust body (CADE) regarding the markets, industries, sectors - i.e. the economic world - which they aim to understand and regulate. The activity of these professionals primarily requires an evaluation of certain market characteristics in order to establish strategies for the investigation of allegations of anti-competitive market practice and for passing judgment on administrative cases filed before the antitrust tribunal. Based on interviews with these professionals and participant observation of their analytical work, this article seeks to describe modes of knowing and conceiving markets which are parallel to the modes officially and more explicitly relied upon by antitrust bureaucrats. We present these lateral modes of knowing as a set of personal lived experiences and compare them to ethnographic practices of knowledge production, in order to reflect on the importance of lived experience in the anthropological and sociological literature on markets.

scholarly journals A Space for Suffering? Communicating Breast Cancer in an Online Self-Help Context

2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (12) ◽  
pp. 1631-1641 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne-Grete Sandaunet
Keyword(s):  
Breast Cancer ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Online Communication ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Alternative Discourses ◽  
Self Help Group

In this article, I explore the communication in an online self-help group for Norwegian women with breast cancer, aiming to add further knowledge to the question of whether the online context functions as a “liberating realm” for alternative discourses about illness. My analysis is conducted within an action-oriented framework and is based on participant observation of the online communication and qualitative interviews of women who participated in the group. Based on the analysis, I argue that proposals of a replication of dominating offline discourses in online communication are affirmed. More precisely, I argue that a “socially desirable” story about the cancer “hero” was further circulated in this online context, and that experiences of resignation and meaninglessness were not woven into the communication. Offering some reflections on this process, I suggest that it has active and voluntary aspects that need attention in further research.

How are alternative stories created in a self-help group?

2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Atsushi Kitamura
Keyword(s):  
Participant Observation ◽  
Social Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
Self Help ◽  
The Social ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Narrative Practice ◽  
Self Help Group

The aim of this article is to reveal how alternative stories and identities are constructed through narrative practice in a self-help group. An analysis using the concept of positioning was conducted with a SHG for the parents facing their children’s delinquency. I use data that were collected in the framework of participant observation and interviews with group members. The results show that parents were describing themselves in two manners: in relation to social discourse and in relation to an emerging group narrative. The group narrative provides support for parents trying to break free from their negative position as imposed by the dominant social discourse. Another important piece of the construction of alternative stories is the positioning that differentiates the past self from the present self. Thereby, the parents acquire a position from which they can criticize the social discourse that was part of the foundation of the past self.

Marriage and Divorce among Bereaved Parents in a Self-Help Group

1987 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 237-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Klass
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Marital Relationships ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Bereaved Parents ◽  
Death Of A Child ◽  
Observation Method ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Self Help Group

The death of a child is one of the most difficult griefs in contemporary society. This study using the participant observation method examines the relationship between the bereaved father and mother in The Compassionate Friends (TCF), a self-help group of bereaved parents. The study examines the dynamics of couples already divorced, of parents who divorce within a few years after the death of the child, and of parents who remain married. Findings from this study suggest that marital relationships are not separate from the whole set of dynamics which come with the death of a child. Among these parents, two themes seem central. First, there is the paradox of a new tie established between those who have lost a child even as there is a great deal of estrangement in the separate griefs. Second, there is a strong sense of reordered priorities and a sense of the self as a center of strength within the decision to face directly the issues given in the new world of parental bereavement.

scholarly journals Trans* Vocality: lived experience, singing bodies, and joyful politics

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1-2018) ◽  
pp. 31-53
Author(s):  
Holly Patch ◽  
Tomke König
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Ground Theory ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Vocal Expression ◽  
Ongoing Research ◽  
Critical Feminist ◽  
The Voice

In this article, we argue that with critical feminist materialisms, it is possible to develop what we have already learned so far from poststructural gender deconstructivism while also asking what can yet be learned from bodies, experience, and materiality. We continue to reject essentialist understandings of gender but maintain that there is a need to emphasize the material dimension of lived experiences. ‘Voice’ is ‘material relationality’ that has not yet received enough attention despite its centrality to political pursuits. In tracing the voice and its relation to materialisms, phenomenology, and poststructuralism, we frame ‘vocality’ as an embodied and lived phenomenon, developing a theoretical lens for the purpose of investigating the enactment of agency of trans* vocality. This phenomenological, materialist approach turns to the lived experiences of transgender and non-binary singers to both ground theory on gender and understand what is political about trans*vocality in singing. Using material from an ongoing research project, we seek to show how the constitution of singing subjects is political and, additionally, how through singing – a kind of ‘sensuous knowledge’ – trans* vocal expression can be a joyful resource for politicism and social change.

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