Impact of organisational practices on the relationships between young people with disabilities and paid social support workers

Summary This article uses Ikäheimo’s concept of institutionally mediated recognition to explore how organisational norms and rules facilitate and constrain interpersonal recognition between a young person with disabilities and their paid support worker. The experience of recognition is important because it reflects the quality of this relationship and shapes the identity of both people in the paid support relationship. To understand the relationships between the pairs, Honneth’s interpersonal modes of recognition were applied as the theoretical lens. The data were generated from photovoice, social mapping, interviews and workshops with 42 pairs of young people and their support workers in six organisations. These data were then analysed for the ways institutional practices mediated the interpersonal relationships. Findings The findings revealed four practices in which the organisational context mediated interpersonal recognition: the support sites, application of organisation policies, practices to manage staff and practices to organise young people’s support. Some organisational practices facilitated recognition within the relationships, whereas others were viewed by the pair or managers as constraints on conditions for recognition. Some young people and support workers also exercised initiative or resisted the organisational constraints in the way they conducted their relationship. Applications The findings imply that to promote quality relationships, organisations must create the practice conditions for recognition, respond to misrecognition, and encourage practices that make room for initiative and change within the paid relationship. This requires supervision and training for and by support workers and people with disability.

Ten forms of recognition and misrecognition in long-term care for older people

During recent decades, theories of mutual recognition have been intensively debated in social philosophy. According to one of the main theorists in the field, Axel Honneth, the entire social world may be based on interpersonal recognition (such as mutual respect, esteem and care). Our aim is to study what it would take that residents in long-term care would become adequately interpersonally recognized. We also examine who could be seen as bearing the responsibility for providing such recognition. In this paper, we distinguish ten aspects of recognition. We suggest that in order to support residents’ dignity, long-term care should be arranged in a way that preserves residents’ full personhood regardless of their cognitive or other abilities: the mere fact that they are human persons is a ground for recognition as a person. But further, in good care residents’ personal characteristics and residents’ ties to significant others are also recognized to enable them to feel loved, esteemed and respected.

Reciprocity

Both care workers and patients are concerned about the reciprocities of the relationship between them. From the patients’ side, the reciprocities are framed as issues of money: are they getting sufficient work and respect from their employees, in exchange for the life savings they are spending? Are they subject to theft by the strangers they are allowing into their homes? Patients expect to buy care and respect as consumers. Care workers, on the other hand, attend to respect and appreciation—whether in the form of redistribution or in the form of interpersonal recognition. Furthermore, some see themselves as doing God’s work, spreading love and encouragement by caring for someone, rather than giving their labor in exchange for money. As such, they do not expect reciprocity to come immediately and from their patients, but on God’s time, in their hour of need.

Recognizing freedom

Domination as opposed to what? Michel Foucault’s works on power and subject formation uncover the subtle ways in which disciplinary power structures create opportunities for domination. Yet Foucault says little about the forms of freedom that we should prefer. I argue that the proper opposite of Foucauldian domination is a version of the concept of social freedom found in contemporary recognition theory. I establish that Foucault implicitly commits himself to an ontological concept of recognition in which the subject is constituted by acts that affirm particular qualities. On the basis of this ontological commitment, there is room for Foucault to endorse an ethical concept of recognition as well, in which the subject’s freedom is bound to a variety of forms of institutional and interpersonal recognition. Finally, Foucauldian insights regarding the potentially dominating tendencies of genuine acts of recognition lead to helpful modifications of the concept of social freedom.

Experiences of (Mis)recognition of Same-Sex Partnerships in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland

The article discusses the recognition of same-sex partnerships in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland (ELCF). The main focus is on the experiences of recognition and misrecognition of same-sex couples when the couples have asked for a prayer on behalf of their registered partnership. The findings of this study confirm that the researched experiences of recognition have two dimensions, vertical and horizontal. Vertical recognition deals with institutional recognition and experiences with the sacred. Horizontal recognition entails experiences of interpersonal recognition. Narrated experiences often contained both horizontal and vertical dimensions of (mis)recognition. Recognition is a social phenomenon. Participants of the study had two distinct social contexts for recognition. One is the more loosely defined “rainbow community”, the other the formally authoritative, institutional ELCF. Most of the interviewees had positive experiences of recognition from the informal community but mainly negative experiences of misrecognition from the institutional ELCF. The difficult balancing between the conviction of the equal human dignity of each individual and the understanding of marriage as a social category for heterosexuals only led to same-sex couples’ experience of not being treated as equal members of the church. The study affirmed the importance of experiences and feelings as indicators in identifying a valid struggle for recognition.

«Å bli til i det å bli sett». Om sammenvevingen av det etiske og det estetiske i Trondheims minnepark for 22. juli-ofrene

Artikkelen er en fenomenologisk og hermeneutisk betraktning av Trondheims minnepark for 22. juli-ofrene. Bakgrunnen ligger i et etisk moment av hermeneutisk selvkritikk, som utspilte seg i storsamfunnets reaksjoner på terroren, og som parken må sees i lys av. Artikkelen tar utgangspunkt i at flere av diktene som er slipt inn i minneparkens hvite betong, tematiserer behovet for mellommenneskelig anerkjennelse. Ved hjelp av kunstteoretikeren Bourriaud og filosofene Fichte og Hegel synliggjøres det hvordan dette temaet – mellommenneskelig anerkjennelse – kan sies å være integrert i parkens helhetlige estetikk. Siste del drøfter ved hjelp av Gadamer hvordan anerkjennelse også er relevant for aktiviteten med å gå omkring og lese diktene i parken. Til sammen belyser artikkelen hvordan minneparken utgjør en sammenveving av det etiske og det estetiske, og hvordan ordet minne her har to betydninger. Med parken minnes vi ofrene for terroren i betydningen kollektiv hukommelse, eller in memoriam. Samtidig blir vi påminnet vår evne til å være i relasjon med andre mennesker, og til å vokse i relasjonelt samspill. Den siste betydningen er filosofisk, og spiller på betydningen gjenerindring (gresk: anamnesis). Nøkkelord: hermeneutisk selvkritikk, anerkjennelse, deltakelse, hverdagslighet, lesning English summary: "Becoming fully oneself by being seen." On the connection between ethics and aesthetics in Trondheim's Memorial Park for the July 22 victims This article presents a phenomenological and hermeneutical consideration of Trondheim's Memorial Park for the July 22 victims. The background evolves in an ethical and hermeneutical form of self-criticism, which emerged in Norway in the public reactions to the terror. The article observes the fact that several of the poems embedded in the white concrete of the Memorial Park promote the need for interpersonal recognition. Through considering ideas of Bourriaud, Fichte, and Hegel, the author demonstrates how this very theme of interpersonal recognition is integrated into the park's overall aesthetics. The author considers how recognition is also relevant to the activity of reading the poems in the park through evoking Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. In sum, the article demonstrates how the Memorial Park constitutes a joining of the ethical and aesthetic dimensions and how the word memorial [Norwegian: minne] here gains two meanings. In the park we remember the victims of the terror in the sense of collective memory, or in memoriam. At the same time, we are reminded of our ability to be in relationship with other people and to grow in relational interaction. The latter sense is philosophical and draws on the meaning of recollection (Greek: anamnesis). Keywords: hermeneutical self-criticism, recognition, participation, everyday life, reading

Optical Allusions: Textual Visuality in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom

This chapter reads William Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860) as an emblematic text that depends upon a series of complex interactions between the Crafts’ cultivation of their image and their use of dialogue and narration in different contexts. Examining how the visual image Ellen cultivates is juxtaposed with the couple’s use of double entendre, the chapter argues that William Craft places the ambivalence of language and the ambivalent language of skin color side by side to unsettle popular notions of racial identity and identification. The narrative illustrates that phenotypical characteristics such as complexion are not facts with fixed meanings, but, rather, are discursively defined social symbols that can be manipulated to various ends. I argue that Craft turns this revelation back on the authenticating requirements of the slave narrative, offering interpersonal recognition as a mode of visuality which counters the objectifying gaze of slavery.