Motives for sharing illness experiences on Twitter: conversations of parents with children diagnosed with cancer

A patient- and family-centred approach in paediatric health care is important because parents are involved in making key decisions about their child’s health care and advocating for the best interest of the child. Parents and family members are increasingly turning to the internet to find and actively share information about their child’s health care. Twitter is one of many online platforms used by parents of children diagnosed with cancer to share information related to their child’s cancer experience. Existing research suggests that there is a need to better understand the motives for using Twitter for sharing content about a child’s cancer experience. Furthermore, there is a lack of theoretical frameworks for characterizing those motives. In this paper, we identify key themes of tweets posted by parents of children diagnosed with cancer and align those themes with motives inspired by the well-studied Everyday Life Information Seeking framework. We propose a new motive in addition to those associated with the framework and suggest that information can be shared for endogenous reasons as well as to meet the needs of others. This paper contributes an increased understanding of motives for sharing information about a child’s cancer journey and extends a theoretical framework for building further knowledge in this area.     

Cosmopolitan militaries and dialogic peacekeeping: Danish and Swedish women soldiers in Afghanistan

Feminist security studies (FSS) scholarship advocates the analysis of women’s war experiences and narratives to understand conflict and military intervention. Here we add a non-great power focus to FSS debates on the gendered discourses of military interventionism. We zoom in on Danish and Swedish women soldiers’ reflections on their involvement in the ISAF operation in Afghanistan. Their stories are deconstructed against the backdrop of their states’ adoption of a cosmopolitan-minded ethic on military obligation. Both states employed women soldiers in dialogic peacekeeping in Afghanistan to establish links with local women and to gather intelligence, tasks that were less frequently afforded to male soldiers. However, feminist FSS scholarship locates military intelligence gathering within racial, gendered and imperialist power relations that assign victimhood to local women. This feminist critique is pertinent, but the gendered and racial logics governing international operations vary across national contexts. While such gender binaries were present in Danish and Swedish military practice in Afghanistan, our article shows that dialogical peacekeeping offered an alternative to stereotypical constructions of women as victims and men as protectors. Dialogical peacekeeping helped to disrupt such gendering processes, giving women soldiers an opportunity to rethink their gender identities while instilling dialogical relations with local women.     

Narrating European integration: transnational actors and stories

ABSTRACT

This article introduces the special issue on narrating European integration. Narratives, or stories, are a key mechanism for constructing individual and collective identities, and other politically important elements of discourse. The articles in this special issue go beyond most existing work on narratives. First, they examine the actors and networks, ranging from EU institutions to political parties and social groups, which create, foster and disseminate narratives. Second, they address major narratives and sets of narrating actors of at least a partly transnational nature. Third, the authors transgress disciplinary boundaries, drawing on contemporary history, sociology, political science and cultural studies.     

My king’s good words: royal addresses,modern media and national narratives in Denmark, 1933–1945

Monarchy and nationalism are embedded in a complex relationship, and many of Europe’s ruling dynasties crumbled in the nationalist upsurge of the modern era. Yet, the Danish royal house managed to get through the upheavals and gradually turned into a national rallying point. The article explores this historical development, focusing on the interplay between monarchy and media from 1933 to 1945, when the process of mediatization prompted a merging of royalist and egalitarian narratives of the nation.     

Different narratives,one area without internal frontiers: why EU institutions cannot agree on the refugee crisis

ABSTRACT

This article contextualizes contemporary institutional responses of the European Union (EU) to the refugee crisis within the historical setting in which EU migration and asylum policies emerged – namely during the implementation of the border-free Schengen Area (1984–1995). Using the analytical framework of ‘policy narratives’, it argues that EU institutions have used the creation of the ‘area without internal frontiers’ to build coherent narratives about the nature and scope of EU action and of their own role in it. Such narratives became locked into the institutional discourse and influenced the subsequent evolution of EU politics on the topic.     

Balancing caring and paid work in the UK: narrating ‘choices’ as first-time parents

Paid work is generally accepted as an important dimension of hegemonic masculinities and men's identities, which can become heightened when they become fathers. Changes in global economies together with educational shifts and other demographic patterns mean that paid work has become a significant feature of many women's lives too. Increasingly across Europe women who are mothers combine caring, domestic chores, and paid work. Using data from a qualitative longitudinal study on women's experiences of transition to first-time motherhood in the UK, this paper will explore how women narrate and reconcile their decisions either to return to paid work or not to, following the birth of their first child (Miller 2005). These findings are considered alongside a companion study on men's experiences of transition to first-time fatherhood (Miller 2011). The comparison shows that women articulate work and caring decisions in narratives which convey a sense of ‘guilt’, whilst the men are able to talk more freely – and acceptably – about ‘career progression’ and the importance of work to their identity and their new family. Even though recent research points to some changes in men's involvement in caring and women's increased activities in the work-place, particular aspects of these arrangements remain seemingly impervious to change.     

Letters from the future: an exercise with child welfare predictions

Abstract

The article presents an empirical exercise about predictions in child welfare. In the exercise, social workers imagined letters which they could receive from a child and his/her parents in five years’ time. The children had been in care for one year at the moment of letter-writing. When the social workers wrote the imaginary letters, they used their professional imagination, based on practice knowledge and experience, and were involved in a role-play. The analysis of the letters (34 from ‘children’ and 33 letters from ‘parents’) demonstrates four themes shared by the letters: ordinary life, family contacts and return home, social problems as shadows and assessment of the placement. Two narratives were performed: the narrative of future of ordinary life and that of the troubles. It is suggested that imaginary letters are helpful in highlighting practitioners’ sense of the future, professional imagination as well as the empowering and critical points in practice.     

Researcher Emotions: A Way Into The Experiences of Frail Older People

This paper explores the importance of the researcher's emotional experience in practice-near research. It details a journey towards positioning researcher emotions within a doctoral project exploring the everyday stories of older people deemed frail. Data from the experiences of interviewing and analysing the story of one couple are used to exemplify the emergent method. The method combines the Biographic Narrative Interpretive Method with the psychoanalytically informed Tavistock Observation Method. The paper details the utilisation of the method and the frame it gives the researcher to move beyond the purely text based, cognitive responses of participant and researcher, to the less rational, and unspoken aspects of the research encounter.

The paper argues that the emotional experiences of the researcher as well as the participant are important data in understanding the experience of ‘being frail’. However, there is the need for an over-arching theoretical framework to give validity to these emotional processes. It argues that psychoanalytical approaches, which emphasise the quality of the emotions experienced and the internal psychological processes which mediate social experience, are helpful in underpinning both methodology and methods of practice-near research.     

Winning a Race: Narratives of Healing and Psychotherapy in Children and Adolescents Who Have Been Sexually Abused

This article explores the process of recovering from sexual abuse according to children and adolescents who have been sexually abused and have successfully completed psychotherapy. In this qualitative study, interviews were conducted with 20 participants from 8 to 18 years of age and then subject to narrative analysis. Results show that participants’ narratives of recovery involve an improvement of psychological well-being. Moreover, they feel better equipped to overcome future challenges, feeling empowered and able to retake control of their lives. Factors that support and inhibit recovery are examined, as are developmental differences. Discussion underlines the valuable role of psychotherapy in helping children and adolescents in their healing process, changing the meaning of the abusive experience, and developing new capacities.