Othering the ‘leaky body’. An autoethnographic story about expressing breast milk in the workplace

In this paper, I present an autoethnographic story about my experiences of expressing breast milk at a Dutch university department. My story illustrates how interrelated and conflicting discourses about gender, motherhood, breastfeeding, embodiment and professionalism raised issues about (in)visibility, embodied control, spatiality and discipline of my body and shaped my experience as a newly maternal employee. This paper thus aims to include bodies and embodied experiences in organization studies and highlights the need to consider spatiality as an important topic of research. I address these issues in my writing and use insights from feminist poststructuralism to show how the experiences I describe are part of a larger cultural framework of power structures that produce the ‘leaky’ maternal body as the Other, subject to (self-)discipline and marginalization. I hope my story inspires reflexivity and empathic understanding of the complex reality of experiences related to expressing breast milk in the workplace.     

Breaking Out of Academic Isolation: The Media Odyssey of a Sociologist

The professional development of sociologists involves specialized training through which we acquire and apply numerous skills. However, it is unlikely that our professional socialization includes training in how to inform the public about sociological knowledge and research through media involvement. As a sociologist who did not receive such training and was not prepared for the enormous unanticipated media and public interest given to my research topic, I provide a personal account of my unexpected metamorphosis into a media self and my experiences working with the media. I describe the nature of my professional and media obscurity, provide an overview of my initiation into media culture, and explore a self-transformation process that became necessary to manage the responsibilities associated with the media-assigned role of expert. I identify and examine the lessons I learned through extensive media involvement and the emergent realities of this involvement. Based on my experiences and resulting awareness of media culture, I offer to the discipline some suggestions and guidelines for media involvement and advocate for media training.     

That time I punched a boy in the forehead: sibling stories ahead of research

In the past month, I have been building relationships with community members at a prairie-based research site in Canada by telling a story about my own sibling advocacy. Namely, the story about that time I punched a boy in the forehead when I was a kid. I observe that this story helps build trust between me and the families invested in a new research project. This is a current issue because recent research on the utility of sibling stories suggests that these narrative accounts, diverse as they may be, are foundational to knowledge creation about disability. Yet these stories are under threat of pathologization when they are understood through a clinical lens, rather than a critical disability studies lens. I conclude by suggesting that sibling stories ought to be claimed as pivotal to critical understandings of disability experiences.     

Digital Sociology: Emergent Technologies in the Field and the Classroom

In this essay, I use my own research experiences to address a critical intersection between technology and sociology. I suggest that thinking reflexively about technology might enhance both how sociologists do research and how they teach about it.     

Mindful Ethics: Comments on Informant-Centered Practices in Sociological Research

In this article, I introduce the concept of “mindful ethics” to describe my experiences as a feminist qualitative researcher who has confronted ethical dilemmas in my sexuality research. Mindful ethics is informed theoretically by mindful inquiry, grounded theory, ethics in practice, and ethically important moments. Mindful ethics has been useful in dealing with ethical considerations throughout all stages of my sexuality research. Shifting my attention to the takenfor-granted social contexts and circumstances surrounding informants’ life experiences has helped me deal with ethical concerns that otherwise may have resulted in harm to informants.     

The effects of cross-cultural competence on my teaching and studying in the UK context

In this paper, I reflect on my experiences as a Chinese educator, attempting to take my previous experiences into a new situation: teaching in the UK. These reflections take me down a path that shows how my Chinese cultural background and experiences created both challenges and opportunities for my teaching. I attempt to show how important it is to gain cross-cultural competence if one is to take one’s teaching into new cultural environments.     

Negotiating identities: the lives of Pakistani and Bangladeshi young disabled people

Research has generally amalgamated minority ethnic (all called 'Asian' or 'black') disabled young people's experiences and failed to acknowledge the multiple aspects of Asian and black disabled identities, for example how the combined attributes of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, culture, class and disability shape their perspectives and experiences. In an attempt to address this issue my doctoral research explored the experiences and perspectives of 13 young Pakistani and Bangladeshi disabled people. By drawing on the substantive and theoretical findings which emerged from my analysis in this paper I shall consider how multiple aspects of identity, such as ethnicity, disability and gender, affect this population's identity and self-image and how this makes their experiences different from white disabled young people and other minority groups' experiences.     

Experiencing Stigma and Exclusion: The Influence of Neoliberal Perspectives,Practices, and Policies on Living with Chronic Illness and Disability

Neoliberal perspectives, policies, and practices increasingly affect chronically ill and disabled people's embodied experiences of stigma and exclusion. Neoliberalism emphasizes individual responsibility and self-sufficiency, a limited social safety net, and narrow governmental accountability. Examining pivotal experiences of chronically ill people shows how neoliberalism can frame their alternatives, interactions, and actions. This examination prompts reconsidering Goffman's concept of stigma to include how larger social policies and practices affect experiencing stigma and exclusion and, also, illuminates temporal features of receiving a diagnosis, disclosing illness, and dealing with disabilities and unpredictable bodies. The analysis derives from an ethnographic story and published and unpublished personal accounts from first-hand and library research over the course of my career.     

Marginalized to double marginalized: My mutational intersectionality between the East and the West

Intersectionality allows better understanding of the differences between individuals' experiences. In this article, I use intersectionality to explore how my lived experience of marginalization is different from one context to another. I reflect on how the nature of intersectionality and the intensity of oppression are altered by context. Grounded in a brief reflection of my fragmented experience in two different contexts, I explore how my identities and their intersection “mutate” from the Egyptian context to the UK context. Then, I reflect on how the intensity of oppression changed with this alteration in my intersectionality. In contextualizing my intersectional experience, first I problematize viewing intersectionality as a fixed acontextual ontology. Second, as a student immigrant and racialized minority in the United Kingdom, I seek to extend intersectionality and move beyond the traditional categories of race, class, gender, religion, and sexuality to include precarity as a pivotal social category that amplifies the intensity of oppression and marginalization, especially when intersected with race and gender. Finally, in sharing my reflection as a Middle Eastern woman, I contribute my unique experiences into the conversation, and a voice that has been muted, invisibled, marginalized, and excluded from the literature.     

Autoethnography: The story of applying a conceptual framework for intentional positioning to public relations practice

This autoethnography is an exercise in reporting, recording and reflecting on the process of attempting to apply a public relations theoretical construct to a practice environment. I take a social constructionist approach where the practice of autoethnography presumes that reality is socially constructed and where I, as the autoethnographer, can contribute to the social construction of what is known as public relations practice. I applied an analytical autoethnographic approach and used my own experiences, reflections and memories to construct myself in my writing as an academic and practitioner working within the context of a pro bono public relations consultancy project. The aim of this research was to ascertain whether the Framework for Intentional Positioning in Public Relations could assist practitioners to develop positioning strategies for future programs and campaigns. I applied the positioning framework to the design of a positioning strategy for a small university-affiliated environmental organization. My work indicated that the framework could aid in designing a positioning strategy, however, applying the framework to organizational circumstances could be challenging. The framework was found to have two distinct sections to it when applied to practice and this was not evident in previous analytical work. The project also indicated that further research is needed on how to adapt the framework to the concept of emergent strategy. My hope is that this autoethnography shows that even seasoned practitioners/academics can be challenged in practice situations.     

Who needs Cantonese,who speaks? Whispers across mountains,delta, and waterfronts

This essay digs into the ‘dirtiness’ of cultural studies to prioritize praxis, or as the way my mountain folks collect summer lotus: putting our feet in the muddy water, and finding ways to get the stems underneath the smooth leaves. Using Cantoneseness as a case to locate such ‘dirtiness’, I draw on personal/familial histories as well as research projects to tell how conjunctures of Cantoneseness are politically and unevenly lived. This complex journey travels roughly from my childhood in the Yuebei mountains of northern Guangdong through my teenage and early adult years in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) to my current location as a temporary resident in the East Pacific port of Vancouver. I selectively emphasize and speak on three different locations: first, the rural inland Cantonese location of Yuebei mountains – the borderland and hinterland experiences of my family and myself living what the mountains would offer and how these have changed; second, the industrial superior Cantonese location of PRD in Shenzhen and Guangzhou – my personal experiences and identities as a migrant youth, combined with a case study including interviews with migrant peasant-workers and their children; and third, the western transnational Cantonese location of East Pacific waterfronts in Vancouver and Richmond – my personal engagement with social activism as an ethnicized, international student, combined with a narrative study including interviews with social activists with different Cantoneseness and migration routes. While this mix of whispers speaks in its own way towards using cultural studies with more seriously (global) space-sensitive and (social justice) praxis-sensitive approaches, the primary focus is more modestly on my autobiographical accounts and research efforts as a specific case: to show some strategic locations of ‘Cantonescape’ on the one hand, and to invite wider conversations around cultural-spatial politics on the other.     

Into the Dark Heart of Ethnography: The Lived Ethics and Inequality of Intimate Field Relationships

In response to critiques from feminist, existential, and postmodern qualitative researchers, the idea of maintaining objective and distant relationships with research subjects gave way to the belief that researchers could and, in some cases, should become intimately connected to research participants. These traditions opened the door for contemporary field workers to unapologetically forge close relationships to setting members. Several ethical evaluations have emerged from this intimate literature warning researchers of the harm that can come when we “go to far” in the quest for intimate familiarity. In this paper, I reflect on some of the debates regarding intimacy and exploitation by examining my experiences of dating, marrying, and eventually divorcing my key informant. I trace the way that, despite my attempts to follow the existing ethical guides, I reinforced several larger inequalities in my intimate stance. Using my failure to avoid or mitigate harm, I argue that our discussions of intimate methods and immersion in the field have failed to accurately note how we reinforce or resist structure in our research endeavors. Viewing ourselves as “doing structure” in the field would lead us to stop debating whether intimacy is better than objectivity, celibacy is better than sex, disclosure is better than silence, or conventional behavior is better than deviance in the field. Instead, we should locate how our behaviors, research roles, or discursive choices enact structures and the effect this enactment has on the people who we research.

Selling your soul to the devil: an autoethnography of pain, pleasure and the quest for a child

In this article I present an autoethnography in the form of a quest narrative linked as a self‐reflexive text to my continuing research of children and adults with spina bifida. My story centers on the themes of chronic illness, pain and sexuality, highlighting gaps in the literature related to these topics. I narrate my story as a manifesto for women with physical impairments to break their silence and talk about their sexuality. I recommend autoethnography as a method of understanding disability as embodied.

Faustus:?Now tell me, what says Lucifer thy lord?     

Rock Creek History1

This is an experimental, mixed‐genre narrative, combining autoethnography with other evocative writing forms, including narratives of the self. Using the techniques of fiction, I tell a story about myself and my experiences with nature, the sacred, and a small Montana river named Rock Creek. Kittridge asks for narratives that embed the self in storied histories of sacred spaces. These stories chart the outlines of an epistemology that stresses the sacredness of human life and its relationship to nature. Accordingly, this performance‐based project attempts to enact a sacred epistemology and a form of writing that honors our relationship to nature and the natural world.     

A (not so) simple dialogue activity

ABSTRACT

This article explores the research on peer-to-peer dialogue in higher education, including the innovative practice of intergroup dialogue and other practices such as nonviolent communication and contemplative listening. I then describe an activity I do with my community college students, in a context where lack of time and other resources do not allow a more resource-intensive dialogue practice. I ask them to experience dialogue with several free, easily available resources, including nonviolent communication, contemplative practice, and public radio podcasts from On Being, then have a conversation outside of class in which they mostly practice deeply listening to someone with different political beliefs than they have. They may make a brief attempt at dialogue or nonviolent communication. I discuss how my activity may accomplish some of the goals of intergroup dialogue and be useful where students are learning about diversity and inequality across social divides, including in social work education and sustainability education. I nest this activity in a course that involves some contemplative practice, to explore how both sustainability education and the social justice component of social work may benefit from contemplative practice. Finally, I detail some other resources about hope and despair that support this activity.     

Reconnecting with policy: requirements for survival as a mental health nurse

This article discusses the disconnection between mental health nurses and policy, and the importance of reconnecting such relationships not only to benefit the consumers with whom we work but also to influence health care policies and, ultimately, contribute to strategies to improve the health of our nation. In this article, I draw on my own experiences and apply these to a discussion of how we, as mental health nurses, can influence and strengthen our relationships with nursing policy.     

Incorporating intersectionality into research design: an example using qualitative interviews

As intersectionality gains more prominence, scholars still face difficulties of incorporating principles of intersectionality into empirical research. Key concepts of intersectionality theory include moving away from additive thinking, relationality, and social constructionism. An important challenge is how to incorporate these concepts into research design. While existing scholarship examines intersectional methodology, most of the focus has been on issues of analysis not data collection. I argue that some of the difficulties in intersectionality scholarship are not just issues of analysis but issues of data collection. In particular, I discuss how scholars can incorporate intersectionality concepts into research design by offering examples from my own research that used qualitative interviews to examine how race and gender influenced neighborhood experiences. I also present the obstacles I encountered in conveying the key concepts of intersectionality into language that is relatable to study participants.     

‘To talk or not to talk?’: Foster youth's experiences of sharing stories about their past and being in foster care

Sharing stories about the past and about being in care, can help adolescents placed in foster families to make meaning of their experiences and connect with their conversation partner. However, what obstacles and opportunities for sharing stories are experienced by foster youth has not been researched, while this holds important implications for research and practice. In an episodic interview, thirteen adolescents and young adults (16–23 years) talked about their experiences with sharing their memories about their past and being in foster care. Using a thematic analysis, two themes were constructed, each containing three sub-themes. The theme ‘When’ included references to the prerequisites for talking and considerations made by participants, and contained the sub-themes ‘How often do I talk’, ‘Conditions’ and ‘Ownership of my story’. The theme ‘Why’ included references to the rationales for sharing or not sharing memories, which contained the sub-themes ‘Protection’, ‘Understanding’ and ‘Processing the past’. The stories of the participants highlight both the opportunities and obstacles for talking. Foster parents and foster care workers should be aware of the needs foster youth have with regard to conversations about their experiences and should try to facilitate the meaning-making processes, although some foster youth prefer managing their memories in a more private way.