Thinking of age: Personal reflections on critical gerontology

This essay is a reflection on how personal experience has inspired and shaped my ideas about critical gerontology. It is a writing from the inside about the outside world of intellectual discovery, apart from the typical narratives about career and research. I take this opportunity to explore the life of thought through my own life, and conclude that our ideas about aging are bred in those places where humor, tragedy, conflict, passion and sympathy make it imperative that we ask the questions we do as critical thinkers.     

Danger,Pleasure, Vulnerability,Shame: Reply to Commentaries

Hartman's and Blechner's responses to my essay highlight some illuminating differences with my own theoretical and clinical inclinations. In particular, Hartman's postmodernism and Blechner's empiricism allow me to clarify my own thinking, in particular the centrality of my concern with vulnerability. Sedgwick's challenge to my clinical case says much of interest about shame. It also permits me to address misunderstandings that can take place between analysts and patients, as well as between psychoanalysts and academics.     

Personal Reflections of A Family Therapist*

In this informal paper I discuss my personal evolution as a family therapist, developments in the field, the politics of a systems approach in conventional settings, resistances to family and marital therapy by other professionals, some still puzzling aspects of family therapy, whether family or marital therapy works and what do we mean by working, directions my own work has taken, some comments about the nature of family life, the satisfactions and frustrations and stresses of being a family therapist, some hidden agendas of family therapy practices, how one's own personal family relationships affect and are affected by this kind of work, the casualties among family and marital therapists, and, finally, whether family therapists should have family therapy for themselves and their own families.     

COMMENTARY (12 YEARS ON) ON ‘THE CONTRIBUTION OF OBSERVATION TRAINING TO PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN SOCIAL WORK’ BY JUDITH TROWELL AND GILLIAN MILES

This article aims to stimulate discussion about relationships between the lives of professionals and of service users. The idea is that when parallels are explored and developed, power dynamics between professionals and social workers are reduced, the quality of interaction and work with service users can be improved, and professionals can also be helped in overcoming difficulties in their own lives. I start with an outline of my own personal background and highlight my development throughout, including my emerging identity as a Buddhist. I discuss a case study involving ‘Sally’ and her family and our work together while I was a social work assistant in a Children and Family's team. I try to show the interconnections between the different difficulties that we faced and how that informed my work. I look at some of the benefits, pitfalls and boundaries of working from the point of view that service user and professional are both working to overcome their problems. I also interweave interactions I had at the time with Carlos, a drug user friend in a crisis and the impact he had on me. Because I include my own situation I have called this article a ‘case experience’.

Throughout I refer to Buddhist and psychoanalytic thinking and particularly to agreement between the two around ideas that inner‐resistance is the main barrier to personal evolution. I argue that faith is the key to unlocking resistance, and that faith should be understood as the development of a belief within people that they are able to progress rather than be destroyed in the face of inevitable problems.     

The Unlived Life Is Worth Examining: Nothings and Nobodies behind the Scenes

This paper explores how people talk about the things that have not happened in their lives. I argue that we can perform reverse biographical identity work upon our unmade selves by exploring the meanings of unlived, non-experience. Challenging one's own rehearsed life story is an act of narrative self-transgression, involving negative responsibility assumption. Drawing on my symbolic interactionist theory of “nothing,” I consider how negative social phenomena (no-things, no-bodies, and non-events) are interactively accomplished and retrospectively made sense of in personal accounts. Themes of lost opportunities, silence, invisibility, and emptiness emerge from an analysis of twenty-seven stories. These tales reveal a mixture of emotions: not only sadness, stigma, shame, and regret, but also relief, pride, acceptance, and gratitude. Narratives of nothing are often ambivalent in tone, reflecting the complexity of storied life behind the scenes.     

Feminism and casework

Abstract

In my casework with women I have been impressed by the striking similarities in their experiences, particularly as wives and mothers, and in their feelings about themselves. Even more surprising has been the fact that most of the women I have worked with have considered themselves 'unique' in these feelings and deficient because of them. Feelings of low self-esteem, of failure in their socially ascribed roles and confusion about these feelings are common. In trying to understand the difficulties and conflicts confronted by these women (and the similarities I find they bear to my own feelings) I have found the feminist analysis of women's psychology and a feminist approach to therapy most informative. I present here my early attempts to integrate a feminist theory into my psychodynamically oriented casework.     

Botswana Expansive School Transformation Project (BeST): A Response to Serpell’s Commentary

Those who are acquainted with Vygotsky's theory probably know that his publications were blacklisted in the Soviet Union from 1936 until 1956. Regrettably though, only a few adherents of Vygotsky in the West are informed about the great pains taken by the Russian Vygotskians to get hold of a firm position in the local psychological landscape between 1956 and the origin of the perestroika at the end of the 1990s. With this in mind, we here present Vasilii Davydov's vivid account of an endeavor to organize an open conference on Vygotsky's theory at the Moscow Institute of Psychology in 1981. Ultimately, the Communist Party officials prohibited this conference. The story involved is actually an excerpt from an unedited audiotaped interview I had with Davydov in my residence on June 13, 1994. Davydov spoke in a flawless, sparkling Russian. Therefore, it was a great challenge to translate his narrative adequately. Elina Lampert-Shepel and I have done our best to render the subtleties that reverberate in Davydov's account of the event concerned.     

More Powerful Forces? Women,Nonviolence, and Mobilization

In this survey of studies of women's nonviolent mobilization, I scrutinize “more powerful forces,” the mobilizing forces of marginalized social actors that add to and make possible the development of broad‐based people power. The study of people power has yet to extensively consider the contribution of marginalized social actors. Specifically, I ask: (i) What do women contribute to the development of nonviolent protest power and (ii) What can we learn about mobilizing power, the power of people to protest nonviolently and gain the franchise they seek, when we expand our analytical lens to incorporate women's roles? How do we account for the gendered but often unseen actions taken by marginalized social actors? My focus on women in nonviolent mobilization stems directly from my research on gendered invisibility with an empirical focus on women's gendered socialization. Here, I review how gendered social structures shape women's power of participation and success in nonviolent mobilization.     

“Life at Lake Home”: An ethnographic performance in six voices; an essay on method,in two

Debates about representational forms in qualitative research have tended either to celebrate or to condemn particular forms. Such an approach reifies the differences between various means of expression and diverts attention from the interpretive, political and pedagogic issues which, in my view, lend importance to representational choices. Here, I offer an experiential account of performing ethnography, based on my own field work. I discuss performance both as process and product, and find points of convergence between my goals as an ethnographer and the resources of performance. As process, performance encourages participants — performers and audience members alike — to articulate and reflect critically on cultural contexts and meanings; as product, performance models (in ways more difficult through writing) episodes of social life which, often, are the object of naturalistic inquiry.     

Completing the Story: connecting relational and psychological processes of exclusion

This paper explores how my understanding of and approach to investigating youth transitions and social exclusion, shifted when conducting a case study about Ray, a mature student in transition from a further education college. Having relayed the findings of a study about Ray's experiences of social exclusion, I will discuss the events and reconsiderations that prompted a change in my relationship with Ray. I will reveal how I began to know Ray is his own right, and grasp his feelings and views about his life, and show how this caused Ray to become a participator in and not merely the subject of the study about his life. This (methodological) reconsideration prompted me to perceive my original relationship with Ray in exactly the same way as I had understood his relationships with his mother, his lecturers and with officials--a relationship between the barer of 'expertise' and the subject of this knowledge. The paper will conclude that the new, closer relationship Ray and I developed enhanced the validity and the richness of my understanding of his social exclusion.     

Coming Out as “We 3”

Abstract

Using an academic letter format, I use a blended-method-ological approach of personal ethnography and qualitative case study to assess the three-partner, gay male relationship and the role of parental support. In working to understand better the relational “We 3,” I first provide an account of my relational experience with two other men. I discuss the process of our coming together and then make a methodological turn to provide insights from both e-mail and face-to-face interviews with one set of parents who have supported their gay son in his three-partner relationship. As I, personally, have not had an in-depth conversation with my own parents regarding this issue, I use the parental case study to bridge an academic conversation regarding the negotiation of what might be termed a second or relational coming out process with parents. Finally, I discuss how insights from the first, personal coming out process provided the parents with tools to keep the conversation going and to support their son's relational coming out as a “We 3.”     

Challenging stereotypes of British-Asian women's experiences of work and family life

Kalminder Kaur describes herself as ‘married, I've got 2 girls; 10 and 7 years old now, and we're Sikhs. I went to university and did my first degree in Biology and my PhD in Biology and Engineering. The job I've got at the moment is with a water company. I am a Water Treatment Specialist.’

Kalminder was talking to researcher Baljit Kaur Rana about British-Asian women's experiences of the work-family interface. What Kalminder has to say raises many questions about stereotypical images of British-Asian women, their working lives and related community issues. This article seeks to highlight the significance of changes that have recently started to become more commonplace in the organisation of Asian family life in Britain. It is evident that increased awareness about these changes is of considerable significance to employers, as well as in relation to other families and the wider community. Debate continues about how women juggle work and family commitments, and Kalminder's account draws attention to the ways in which cultural background can blur the boundaries further. In practice however, many families respond effectively to very complex demands.     

What is this moment we are caught in?

Our response to the question ‘What is this moment we are caught in?' is articulated through our collaborative reading of Berlant's (2011) Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Cruel optimism, Berlant suggests, is a desire for something that undermines its own potentiality. As queer academics we expose the cruelty of our desires to live a good academic life, and we do so from our different positions as postdoctoral fellow, tenured academic and PhD candidate. In labouring to consolidate relationships and practices that hold the promise of our own sustainability, we give accounts of the material and affective work we perform to constitute what Berlant calls an intimate public, a collective space of mediation that functions as a key tactic to manage our academic life. These accounts take the form of three vignettes, each inflected by the specificities of our different positions and histories of becoming academics. We use Berlant as a point of departure to both interrogate practices of self‐management and find possibilities for a collective response to the moments in which we find ourselves caught.     

Metaphors we experiment with in multimodal ethnography

In this paper, we argue for a view of analysis as an embodied practice and review others’ testimonies of carrying out multimodal ethnography. This review suggests that metaphors are key for communicating what happens to us in the course of the research and our subsequent sense-making practices. We identify four metaphors for communicating data collection and analytic practices: composing, meandering, plundering and time travel. We then turn to our own multimodal fieldwork with children in middle childhood, to think about the experiences and emergent metaphors that shaped our practice on an international study looking at the relationship between childhood and public life. Children’s play was instructive in our own formation as multimodal ethnographers. We provide examples of the ways in which children recruited us into their play, the ways in which play taught us about what matters to children, and finally, how we took play into our own analytical practices.     

Response to Commentaries by Mitchell and by Butler

This paper is a response to a discussion of my work by Stephen Mitchell and Judith Butler. I treat number of issues raised by those writers. Chief among the issues raised by Mitchell are the status of drive theory and the interrelation of the intersubjective and the intrapsychic. I clarify that, although I do value the paradoxical tension between opposites in relation to many binaries, I do not aim to preserve Freud's instinct theory alongside current views of Object relations. However, I do believe that intersubjectivity theory should posit an inherent conflict in the mind that is not simply a reflection of Object relations, that is, experiences with outside others. Rather, the inherent difficulty in recognizing the other, and the attendant problems of splitting and destructiveness, are crucial aspects of intersubjective theory. Precisely for this reason I reject Butler's claim that my theory does not see destruction and breakdown as essential to the movement of recognition. I see my own intentions as closer to those expressed by Butler's own statements about the relation of destruction and recognition. However, the faith that the clinical endeavor can overcome destructiveness may be the real point of contention. Another important difference relates to the question of the triad and the third. I accept Butler's view that I emphasize the dyad over the triad and attempt to take up some of her questions about triadic relations and the nature of thirdness.     

Situating Children's Voices: Considering the Context When Conducting Research with Young Children

I problematise my own concept of children's voices in research by reflecting on certain practices in a study that I conducted in a kindergarten classroom in a city in Saudi Arabia. I examine the cultural and social contexts of my research by drawing on my experience of obtaining children's assent or dissent, my assumptions regarding the possibility of reducing power differentials, and finally, my understanding of the ways children voice their feelings and views. I conclude that voices manifest themselves in multiple ways that extend beyond visual or verbal media. Voices are constructed socially and are shaped culturally to reflect norms regarding how individuals should express their views and feelings within a particular setting and time.     

Reclaiming Our Agency in Academia: Engaging in the Scholarship of Teaching in Social Work

In this paper, I argue that as academics we need to engage in self reflection on our own practice as educators. Among many things, this means looking at ourselves and challenging our own unhelpful arguments that work to rob us of our agency in terms of our scholarship. While beginning with an acknowledgement of broader realities, such as neoliberal agendas, that impact on our experiences of tenure and promotion, I wish to push the discussion further by arguing that one form of resistance to these unjust conditions is to reclaim our agency by revaluing our practice as educators.

Hence, this paper begins with a challenge to some of our unhelpful arguments and proceeds to a discussion of several ideas that could be helpful in furthering our scholarship within a climate where quantity supersedes quality and where ‘productivity’ is the defining feature of success. My hope in writing this article is to offer my reflections and experiences as a way for other young academics to enhance their own scholarship. As such, this paper discusses the importance of writing for publication from an untenured academic's point of view and provides ideas that could assist specifically in engaging in the scholarship of teaching.     

The “Replacement Child”: On Adoption,Haunting, and the Unlived Life

What does it mean to live in the shadow of an older sibling’s unlived life? This study draws on notions of haunting, guilt, fantasy, and envy to explore the experience of the “replacement child.” Art Spiegelman’s (1986) Maus tells the story of what it was like to occupy the place of his older brother, who died during the Holocaust. This is intertwined with my own account of adoption and replacement. The dead sibling is perceived as a ghostly presence, shaping the possibilities of who and what the “replacement child” will become.