LGBTQ Persons’ Use of Online Spaces to Navigate Conception, Pregnancy, and Pregnancy Loss: An Intersectional Approach

Navigating conception, pregnancy, and loss is challenging for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people, who experience stigma due to LGBTQ identity, other identities (e.g., loss), and intersections thereof. We conducted interviews with 17 LGBTQ people with recent pregnancy loss experiences. Taking LGBTQ identity and loss as a starting point, we used an intracategorical intersectional lens to uncover the benefits and challenges of LGBTQ-specific and non-LGBTQ-specific pregnancy and loss-related online spaces. Participants used LGBTQ-specific online spaces to enact individual, interpersonal, and collective resilience. However, those with multiple marginalized identities (e.g., people of color and non-partnered individuals), faced barriers in finding support within LGBTQ-specific spaces compared to those holding privileged identities (e.g., White and married). Non-LGBTQ spaces were beneficial for some informational needs, but not community and emotional needs due to pervasive heteronormativity, cisnormativity, and a perceived need to educate. We conceptualize experiences of exclusion as symbolic annihilation and intersectional invisibility, and discuss clinical implications and design directions.

Identity and memory as resilience: Applications of liberation psychology in a rural Maya Achi community

This study sought to understand interpretations of interconnections between historical trauma, contemporary violence, and resilience in a Maya Achi community currently engaged in promoting peace and social change through popular education. In particular, the ways in which participants drew upon identity and memory in articulating characteristics of community distress and resilience are discussed. The research is informed by liberation psychology and critical perspectives of mental health, particularly considering the challenges inherent in the promotion of collective memory of trauma and resistance in contexts of violence and humanitarian settings. Participant reflections on historical and contemporary violence highlight elements of collective distress, connecting identity and memory with acts of both oppression and resistance. Education and development are signaled as possible sites of resilience but also experienced as sites of power upholding the status quo. Diverse experiences and applications of identity and memory provide insight into the ways in which community organizations working in contexts of political violence might navigate polarizing and paradoxical discourses in order to subvert, co-opt, or adapt to hegemonic cultural, political, and economic power relations in the process of transformation for collective resilience.

“What do you think people feel?” Emotional climate during a pandemic: Adaptation and validation of a scale

Our study examined the psychometric properties and factor structure of an instrument to assess emotional climate during the COVID-19 pandemic using a sample of 601 Portuguese individuals. Two sub-samples were created, one to perform an exploratory factor analysis (EFA), composed of 300 participants, and the other to conduct a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), composed of 301 individuals. Two factors were found: positive and negative emotional climate. In the EFA, both factors established a negative and significant correlation. However, the CFA presented a better fit with two independent factors. Reliability analysis indicated acceptable values for both dimensions. There was also evidence of discriminant, convergent, and criterion validity. More negative emotions were perceived regarding the social climate. Results were discussed in the frame of different positive and negative psychosocial variables related to positive and negative emotional climates, as well as positive emotional climate as a resource for collective resilience.

Solidarities Across: Borders, Belongings, Movements

What is the role of affinity, friendship, and care, as well as of conflict and dissonance, in creating possibilities of and hindrances to transnational solidarities? Building on an emergent literature on everyday and affective practices of solidarity, this chapter offers a set of diverse ethnographic accounts of activist work oriented to recognizing and challenging inequalities and relations of oppression based on race, ethnicity, religion, and class, alongside gender and sexuality. Engaging a variety of material from feminist and LGBTI+ activisms, the chapter highlights ambivalences inscribed in the making of collective resilience, resistance, and repair by: First, problematizing activist efforts to build solidarity across geographic and contextual divides; second, highlighting the importance of solidarity as shared labor in challenging state actors and institutions and reversing colonial processes; and third, unpacking the implications of transnational solidarity campaigns in different locales. The chapter ends with reflections on how feminist scholarship can advance conceptualizations of solidarity across difference.

“If worse comes to worst, my neighbors come first”: social identity as a collective resilience factor in areas threatened by sea floods

Research on collective resilience processes still lacks a detailed understanding of psychological mechanisms at work when groups cope with adverse conditions, i.e., long-term processes, and how such mechanisms affect physical and mental well-being. As collective resilience will play a crucial part in facing looming climate change-related events such as floods, it is important to investigate these processes further. To this end, this study takes a novel holistic approach by combining resilience research, social psychology, and an archeological perspective to investigate the role of social identity as a collective resilience factor in the past and present. We hypothesize that social identification buffers against the negative effects of environmental threats in participants, which increases somatic symptoms related to stress, in a North Sea region historically prone to floods. A cross-sectional study (N = 182) was conducted to analyze the moderating effects of social identification on the relations between perceived threat of North Sea floods and both well-being and life satisfaction. The results support our hypothesis that social identification attenuates the relationship between threat perception and well-being, such that the relation is weaker for more strongly identified individuals. Contrary to our expectations, we did not find this buffering effect to be present for life satisfaction. Future resilience studies should further explore social identity as a resilience factor and how it operates in reducing environmental stress put on individuals and groups. Further, to help communities living in flood-prone areas better cope with future environmental stress, we recommend implementing interventions strengthening their social identities and hence collective resilience.

NEOJIBA: art as a bridge to human development

An amazing story told through the details of the creation and implementation process of Program NEOJIBA – State Centers for Children and Youth Orchestras of Bahia. It takes the reader on a journey of individual and collective resilience with the purpose of fulfilling a dream: opening opportunities for social development and the common good through the teaching of classical music to less privileged communities.