Women Decision-Making and Responsibility-Taking of Criminal Lifestyle: The Israeli Case

This study aims to investigate patterns of decision-making and responsibility-taking as opposed to the compulsion process selection of a criminal lifestyle among women in prison. A life story approach and semi-structured interviews sampling 30 Israeli women in prison during their first imprisonment were used. Using a mixed-method, results revealed that most of the participants claimed full or partial self-responsibility for having engaged in a criminal lifestyle or for the offense of which they had been convicted. This figure was consistent when the participants were divided by age of first offense or a history of abuse. The results support the need for an integrated approach explaining women’s criminal paths, including gender-specific as well as gender-neutral factors. The conclusion is that responsibility-taking for a criminal act should be one of the factors in intervention programs for women with delinquent behavior, regardless of whether there is a history of victimization or not.

What Do You Want Us to Know?: Learning From Life Stories to Improve Veterans’ Healthcare Experiences

My Life My Story (MLMS) is a national Veterans Health Administration (VA) life story interview program that aims to provide more humanistic care for veterans by focusing on the patient as a person. Our project took place at the Pittsburgh VA Healthcare System and had 3 main goals: (1) describe themes that emerge in MLMS interviews from the prompting question, what do you want your healthcare provider to know about you?; (2) identify topics of importance to veterans and suggest ways for healthcare providers to explore them; and (3) foster a culture at the Pittsburgh VA that places not only the health but also the personal triumphs, hardships, and aspirations of veterans at the center. Veterans provided verbal consent to have their previously recorded stories used in this study. Stories were coded and then analyzed for patterns and themes. A total of 17 veterans participated in our study. Themes that emerged from the stories include (1) Early Hardships; (2) Economic Disadvantage; (3) Polaroid Snapshots; (4) Around the World; (5) Haunted by Combat; (6) Life-altering Moments; (7) Homecoming; (8) Romantic Beginnings & Obstacles; (9) Inequity across Gender & Race; and (10) Facing Mortality. This study's findings underscore the need to address the traumas associated with military service, as well as the challenges faced with re-integration into civilian life, when working with veterans. The MLMS interviews explored in this study can help clinicians identify topics of importance to veterans, strengthen their relationships with their patients, and improve the care that veterans receive.

Why Watch?

The process of surveillance allows the watcher to assess the worth of the life story of the watched. In certain cases, this has significant value. In the case of I2I, one of the outcomes is better understanding of the competition; in some cases, such as I2P, there is a better understanding of the “worth” of a person. For the P watcher, there is an assessment of another person just as the person can now assess institutions.

The Essentials of Surveillance

The process of surveillance has been around for a long period. Different theories of surveillance such as the notion of the panopticon were suggested to explain the ways in which surveillance can create a more controlled society. This led to the notion of the docility and surveillance where the knowledge of surveillance can create a docile society. With the availability of newer tools, surveillance becomes more widespread, which leads to a networked surveillance. All of this eventually builds up to a process of surveillance of the life story of institutions and people.

Mark's Story

The personal story of Mark Kent is not an easy one to read or to ignore. This chapter shares the difficult life story of Mark's journey from an individual who was sexually and emotionally abused as a child to one where he is currently in a healthy and happy marriage with four children. Mark attributes this success to his Asperger's Syndrome and the support of his family, but he also realizes he is an exceptional case study. He advocates for much better awareness, sexual education, and overall acceptance on the part of society to ensure others can overcome the same challenges he has faced.

EXPERIENCES MADE OF WOOL: VISUAL AND VERBAL METAPHORICAL RECONCEPTUALIZATION IN ADOPTION AND FOSTER CARE NARRATIVES

This paper aims at exploring adoption and foster care discourse (AFD) so as to uncover the role of multimodal novel metaphor, and the resulting ad hoc concepts, in (re)addressing (AF) narratives. It specifically focuses on the picture book Speranza’s Sweater (Pusey and Mello, 2018), and the extended conceptual metaphor a life story (of a child [in adoption or foster care]) is a sweater, as well as the net of minor related metaphors. These are analysed following Romero and Soria’s (1997, 2005a, 2007, 2014 and 2016) as well as Forceville (1994, 2008)’s frameworks on, respectively, novel and multimodal metaphors. Dictionaries, thesauri, corpus-assisted tools, as well as close reading/viewing will inform the delineation of source and target domains. The paper illustrates and concludes the cognitive power of multimodal creative choices in relation to (AFD) to integrate children’s past, present, and future experiences, while strengthening their sense of identity and belonging.