Confessional identity and models of aristocratic conversion in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Hungary

This article explores the intricate relationship between representations and social practices in the context of aristocratic conversion, non-conversion and marriage. The autobiography of a Calvinist magnate woman, who lived in a mixed marriage and resisted conversion, is discussed and interpreted as a non-conversion narrative. It is compared to other extant documentation (both ego-documents and third-person narratives) regarding the conversion to Catholicism of four aristocratic men, whose political and social positions were enhanced as a result of conversion. The construction of Habsburg rule and its concomitant pressure for Catholicism provides the common political context of both eighteenth-century Transylvania and seventeenth-century Habsburg Hungary, where these stories take place. Offering a further comparative perspective, the study aims to highlight the similarities and differences between Hungarian and European accounts. It also pinpoints the underlying similarities within the conversion models of rival confessions (Catholic and Protestant) and brings to the fore the social practices that entailed the crossing of confessional boundaries. Its most surprising finding is that in the propagandistic climate of the confessional age even the autobiographical narrative was turned into a tool of propaganda against mixed marriages. Amid this confessional rivalry, not only were the appeal of female agency and the story of conversion for love and marriage lost but, in Habsburg Hungary, politics was also excluded from conversion models due to the ambivalent relationship of the elite to the foreign king. Similarly to patterns identified in other regions of Europe, martyrdom played a significant role in both Protestant and Catholic conversion models.     

Relating mothers' social framing to their children's entry competence with peers

The purpose of this study was to examine how mothers view and construct meaning their children's social interactions, and to understand the interpretive frames they bring to filtering the social world and conveying meaning to their children. Maternal narrations to their children' videotaped entry behavior revealed narration patterns related to their children' entry behavior and the group's response. Generally, when their children were behaving competently, mothers appeared to have a broad based, context embedded view of the interaction, but focused more specifially when difficulties arose, These narration patterns were influenced ny the mothers' own remembered childhood social competence and recollections of positive and anxious peer experiences. Implications of these results for the socialization process were discussed.     

Tensions and paradoxes of humanitarianism. Dialogue with Lilie Chouliaraki

Lilie Chouliaraki is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has a background in Languages and Linguistics and her research has a strong interdisciplinary orientation, drawing on social and cultural theory, moral philosophy and sociology, visual communication and discourse theory. Her main interest lies in understanding how the media shape our ethical and political relationship to distant others; how they inform the ways we witness the vulnerability of these others and the ways we are invited to feel, think and act towards them. In 2006, she published The spectatorship of suffering, which is a seminal piece of work within the field of Media Studies, opening up the domain of mediated suffering studies. In 2013, Lilie published The ironic spectator: solidarity in the age of post-humanitarianism, which was awarded the Outstanding Book of the Year Prize by ICA 2015, and has been widely reviewed and acclaimed. In this recent work, Chouliaraki explores how digital media are today changing the traditional relationship between humanitarian practice and politics, focusing on the ways humanitarian agencies try to - and fail to - combine a dominant market logic with a political vision of justice and social change.     

“I’m Just a Woman. But I’ve Never Been a Victim”: Re-conceptualizing Prostitution Policy through Individual Narratives

Drawing on narrative theory in political science and policy studies, this article argues that narratives serve definitional purposes in the prostitution policy process, but not all narratives are equally influential here. To illustrate, it shares Gloria Lockett’s narrative. Lockett is a 65-year-old African American former sex worker, prostitutes’ rights activist, and the cofounder and the current executive director of the California Prostitutes Education Project, an HIV/AIDS prevention and education nonprofit in the San Francisco Bay Area. Although Lockett’s narrative does not represent all women in prostitution, it complicates dominant understandings of prostitution in the United States, contests the current criminalization regime, and alerts health authorities to sex workers’ occupational health and safety concerns. Yet even as others share and support her narrative, various legal and ideological factors limit its impact in the policy process.     

Trust,uncertainty and identity in health-related decision-making: the role of key professionals

There is a growing literature examining the way service users make choices in the context of complex and frequently changing forms of welfare provision and increasingly personalised services in England. Despite criticisms of the individualistic, consumerist assumptions underpinning these policies, little is known about the relational contexts of individuals’ lives and the role of professional support in choice-making. Drawing on interviews with ‘key professionals’, identified by service users as having played a crucial role in recent important choices, this paper explores how these choices are made with the support of those who are trusted to provide assistance. Placing ‘key professionals’ at the centre of the analysis, the distinct experiences of people with fluctuating and sudden-onset health conditions are examined. The analysis highlights the particular value of relationships that pay close attention to transitional health identities and the co-production of health-related decisions.     

Maltreatment and Internal Representations of Relationships: Core Relationship Themes in the Narratives of Abused and Neglected Preschoolers

This study examined whether the predominance of particular themes in maltreated pre-schoolers' stories about relationships is related to type of maltreatment they experienced. The MacArthur Story Stem Battery was administered to 49 maltreated and 22 non-maltreated children. Children's representations of self and other were extracted from the resulting stories using the Core Conflictual Relationship Theme Method. Significant differences were found among the physically abused, sexually abused, neglected, and comparison subgroups with respect to the predominance of specific relationship themes in their stories. Both physically abused and neglected children represented the self as angry and opposing others more frequently than non-maltreated children. Neglected children represented others as hurt, sad, or anxious more frequently than both abused and non-maltreated children. Compared with all other children, sexually abused children represented others more frequently as liking them, and compared with physically abused children, expressed more frequent wishes to be close to others. This study supports the hypothesis that maltreated children's internal representations of relationships are related to their experiences of specific types of maltreatment.     

Development of outstanding leadership: A life narrative approach

Developmental events of a sample of outstanding leaders experienced in early life were examined. Relevant sections of 120 biographies of outstanding leaders in the 20th Century were content coded using a life narrative framework. The results indicated that individuals evidencing a particular leadership type (charismatic, ideological, or pragmatic) and orientation (socialized or personalized) were linked to certain types of developmental events. Similarly, event content was found to vary between the leader styles. Specific kinds of experiences were also related to various indices of leader performance. Practical and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Over the Colombian Rainbow

This poststructural narrative research intends to contribute a better understanding of some lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) people's meanings, interactions, and reflections through the analysis of Colombian government's master narratives and LGBT advocates’ counter-narratives. A better understanding between the Colombian government and LGBT activists is needed in order to build bridges that allow the parties to construct pathways to new stories that legitimize them and will support solutions to their conflicts. The author argues that LGBT counter-narratives are repairing the damaged identities of LGBT in Colombia, even though they have not become master narratives.     

Resistance to dominant narratives and the construction of identity legitimacy: counterstories of Chinese migrant workers with pneumoconiosis

This study is focused on the pneumoconiosis workers’ illness narratives in Bashan Town in Chongqing. In-depth interviews were used to gather their illness narratives, and a “counterstory” framework was adopted for the critical analysis of the resistance of these texts to the dominant discourse. The results showed that these pneumoconiosis counterstories to be legitimacy narratives that sought four types of legitimacy: medical, suffering, moral, and public. Three opposing identity relations were explored in these narratives: qualified vs unrecognized pneumoconiosis patients, bearers of great suffering vs complainers without cause and neglected within the pneumoconiosis group vs Invisible pneumoconiosis. These identity relations strengthened the pneumoconiosis workers’ confrontation with the illegitimacy of the main social narrative, and they were used in the attempt to construct a legitimized self-identity. The study also identified three narrative strategies used to resist the oppressive dominant narrative, they are revelation, refusal and contestation. Finally, the author proposed that these counterstories consisted a weapon for the weak to voice their legitimacy concerns and offered recommendations for the prevention and treatment of pneumoconiosis.