1,720,987 research outputs found
Conversations in the wildwoods:Narrators, readers and the rise of the ecological self
Get PDFNew nature writing has been gaining popularity in the English-speaking world. Using participant observation of a book group, this paper finds that reading such ecological writing can facilitate reader shifts in perceptions and the valuing of non-human organisms and the more-than-human world. Shifts are enabled when readers experience reading as an imagined conversation with knowledgeable, friendly author/narrators. Readers construct representations of author/narrators using textual and extra-textual information. Evaluative, narrative and aesthetic feelings, alongside inferences about author/narrators’ abilities to provide accurate natural history information, evoke intellectual pleasure in readers which can transform difficult emotions. By modelling a self that values nature and brings together science and poetic language, author/narrators of ecological writing offer an alternative vision of the self that challenges problematic dualisms in society. Such a sense of self was adopted and developed upon within book group discussions, highlighting the importance of aesthetic, emotional and relational contexts for using ecological literature in environmental education
Regulation and negotiation of queer subjectivities in post-Soviet Kazakhstan
Get PDFThere is a limited amount of academic research within social sciences investigating the experiences of queer people in post-Soviet Central Asian countries. My study aims to address this gap in the literature by focusing on the everyday narratives of queer people in Kazakhstan within a framework of power and agency, primarily using the theories of Michel Foucault and other scholars such as Hannah Arendt and Erving Goffman. In this study, ‘queer’ is understood as broadly encompassing the whole spectrum of nonheterosexual and non-cisgender identities. By looking at the narratives of queer people within their socio-historical context, this study aims to elucidate two key issues: in Kazakhstan, what regulates queer lives, and how do people negotiate their queer subjectivities? The qualitative study uses a Foucauldian-informed thematic analysis of interviews with eleven people who identify as queer and live in Kazakhstan. The findings reveal that practices of regulation of queer people in Kazakhstan range from legal and medical regulation, surveillance within different everyday contexts, limiting career prospects, and internalised gaze and oppression. Crucially, I argue that despite the manifold regulatory practices, the narratives of queer Kazakhstani participants of this study highlight the artful ability to navigate and negotiate the existing regulatory and power structures to live fulfilling and authentic lives. This study contributes to the scholarship on post-Soviet gender and sexualities by developing a deeper understanding of nonheterosexual and non-cisgender subjectivities in the context of Kazakhstan
Therapeutic relationships to landscapes: the role of place in panic and panic recovery
Get PDFPanic disorder has commonly been understood through the lens of clinical literature, in which panic is a ‘disorder’ defined by the experience of recurrent and unexpected panic attacks. These are understood as divorced from the spatial, social and embodied contexts in which a person is. Recovery from panic disorder is understood as the palliation of panic attack symptoms or the disappearance of panic attacks altogether. Treatment for panic has focused on treating the ill body, either pharmacologically or through cognitive and behavioural training. Yet, even within clinical literature, the efficacy of these treatment options remains debated.
In geography, the field of ‘therapeutic landscapes’ explores interactions between people and their environments, and the impacts of environments on people’s health. Although contributors to the field of therapeutic landscapes have argued for a ‘relational’ conceptualisation of place and space, authors have not engaged explicitly with what this actually means and the implications of this for processes of recovery. This has been accompanied by the tacit assumption that some places are inherently therapeutic.
Bringing these areas of research together, this thesis offers a spatial and phenomenologically informed approach to panic disorder and recovery. By combining existential phenomenology and relational conceptualisations of space and place it investigates what therapeutic landscapes might ‘mean’ and how places might become ‘therapeutic’.
The thesis uses semi-structured interviews, go-along interviews and drawing methods undertaken with four individuals. It draws on the Voice-Centred Relational method to analyse the material generated and a series of ‘relational poems’ inform the substantive thematic analysis.
Drawing on interview material the thesis develops a relational and spatial conceptualisation of panic, identifying three key relational elements: between self and others, between self and space, and between self and the body. The experience of panic disrupts these relational elements and leads to the fragmentation of space into a patchwork of safe and phobic places. Phobic places emerge as bounded units of space in which the physicality of space takes on an ‘aggressive’ tone, and where the relationships to others becomes problematic. This creates a tension between individual and societal images of place and leads to a sense of deep existential outsideness.
I investigate the role of safe places play in recovery through the concept of therapeutic landscapes, the concept of ontological security, and relational conceptualisations of space and place. Safe places play a key role in recovery. They allow individuals to rest, and to restore a sense of security, enough to begin transforming phobic places. This transformation is done through three strategies: using elements of space as affective resources, bringing objects to transform the embodied being-in phobic places, and creating exits. These strategies provide the possibility of new and safe experiences in phobic places. And this slowly dissolves the boundaries between safe and phobic places. Yet, safe places emerge hand in hand with phobic places.
This has two important implications for the way in which we conceptualise therapeutic landscapes. First, therapeutic landscapes emerge through the experience of illness. Second, if the emergence of therapeutic landscapes is tied to the emergence of phobic places and thus, the experience of illness, what is therapeutic about therapeutic landscapes is not their particular ‘healing’ properties, but instead, the therapeutic relationships to those places. These relationships become therapeutic because they enable us to establish new relationships to the rest of the space in which we move through and live
Homos in the woods: queer shame and body shame in the context of trekking experiences
Get PDFIn this Doctorate of Psychotherapy and Counselling Dissertation, I offer a variety of
different perspectives on queer shame and body shame in the context of trekking
experiences. The overall project of this thesis is to offer some glimpses into the ongoing
and ever-changing process that surrounds these topics. I draw methodological
inspirations from Mason’s (2011) conceptualization of Facet Methodology as well as
Gale’s (2018) conceptualization of Methodogenesis. I approach this with a poststructuralist
perspective that follows flashes of insight through various assemblages,
drawing on Deleuze and Guattari (1987). Being inspired by Haraway (2016), I attempt to
foster a more-than-human view of the world. I employ a variety of methods for this
inquiry, drawing largely on writing-as-inquiry (Wyatt, 2019; St. Pierre, 2008; Richardson,
2008) and autoethnography (Holman Jones & Harris, 2019; Gale, 2018; Wyatt, 2019).
Emphasis is also drawn from dialogue and the unfinalizability of subjects (Bakhtin, 1984;
Frank, 2004; Willis, 2009; 2013). I draw on themes from queer theorists including
Halberstam (2011; 2015), Holman Jones and Harris (2019), and Butler (1997), among
many others. The chapters of this thesis each contribute something to understanding
queer shame and body shame experiences, and then offer something that we might use
to work with that shame productively. I have concluded by emphasizing the entangled
nature of our realities, and our interconnectedness. We strive to build lives work living,
lives which allow us to live and die well together. The greatest source of strength in
precarious times is the making of queer kin. Connecting with our queer families that are
more-than-human and stretched across aeon time opens the door of possibility for us to
make use of (at least) six different ways of working with queer shame and body shame:
Decoding, Multiplicity and Becoming Queer, Daemonizing, Suffering/Resisting/Hoping
with, (Re)Storying, and Being Together in Precarity
Not our script: a narrative exploration of voluntary childlessness in Ecuador
Get PDFVoluntary childlessness, also called “childfreeness”, is not a new phenomenon, it is currently discussed in the media, and there is abundant literature on the topic available. Nonetheless, literature pertaining to Latin America is scarce compared to other regions in the world, and literature exclusive to Ecuador is not available. The present study explores and analyses voluntary childlessness in Ecuador by drawing from narrative theory and decolonial feminism. The data was produced through individual narrative interviews with nine voluntarily childless Ecuadorian women living in Ecuador, ages ranging from 25 to 49. The material emerged in the dialogical encounters between the storytellers (participants) and the listener (me-the researcher) and was analysed narratively taking into account the broader social context of Ecuador. The findings reveal how voluntary childless women in Ecuador construct their narrative identity and negotiate their social positionings while also creating counterstories that protect their identity as childfree women in a pronatalist context. The material also allowed me to discuss the status of bodily autonomy in Ecuador and to understand the social underpinnings of master narratives that conflate womanhood with motherhood. This study contributes to the growing scholarship on voluntary childlessness in Latin America
Restorying the Self, Restoring Place:Healing through Grief in Everyday Places
Get PDFIn this paper, I think with ecological memoirs about emotion and healing within places and in relationship to place. I argue that by staying with and exploring painful emotions, instead of palliating them, healing transformations become possible for individuals, societies and places. I engage in dialogue with two books: Terry Tempest Williams' Refuge and Linda Hogan's The Woman Who Watches Over the World. Similarly to processes advocated by narrative counsellors, in each of these memoirs the author works through her grief by restorying her self. In both books, the act of restorying the self is only made possible through a concurrent restorying of place. By focusing on the stories people tell about healing, this paper moves away from the dichotomization of therapeutic and non-therapeutic – or even anti-therapeutic – landscapes towards an understanding of how people and places can be healed. I suggest that academics can contribute to healing of and in place through empathically bearing witness to the stories people tell and by the circulating and amplifying alternative narratives of transformation
“Oh no! I think I am mentally colonised!” A phenomenological exploration of the governmentality of western discourses in shaping counsellors’ experiences in Kuwait
Get PDFThis study investigates the challenges counsellors face in their day-to-day work in Kuwait, in both private and public sectors. Based on in-depth interviews with eleven counsellors, their narratives demonstrate the various levels on which Western colonial discourses dominate the governance of counselling in Kuwait and impact participants’ experiences.
Using a reflexive hermeneutic phenomenological approach, this research offers a unique and original contribution to qualitative research in counselling and psychotherapy by studying the subjective experiences of counsellors in Kuwait through the intersection of culture, colonialism, and therapeutic practices. Drawing on the thoughts of Michel Foucault concerning the governing nature of discourse and its impacts on individuals, the concepts of governmentality and regimes of truth are employed to make sense of the differences and divisions that emerge in the study between counsellors in the private and government sectors and those with differing educational backgrounds. This analysis highlights how therapists' professional identities and roles are impacted by Western colonial discourses and explores the complexities of what it means for therapists to negotiate and resist these prevailing discourses while also being implicated within them.
Postcolonial theory, and specifically the perspectives of Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, is applied to comprehend the impact of colonialism on the human psyche and its ongoing effects on the professional lives of therapists in colonised nations. Evident in the therapists' narratives, attitudes, and orientations, this research finds that hegemonic Western discourses dominate the counselling discipline in Kuwait on myriad levels. Simultaneously, the participants' experiences in negotiating their positions between the opposing landscapes of West and East reflect the complexity of their professional situations and the power struggles for legitimacy and authority that are operating within the counselling and psychotherapy discipline as a whole.
Reflexivity is a crucial aspect of this study, as it highlights my personal journey through the research
process and the negotiation of my different positions as a Kuwaiti, Arab researcher at a Western university. This study has been a profound learning experience for me, both intellectually and emotionally, and I am eager to share these insights throughout the research and encourage others to examine their experiences as potential sites of new spaces of existing and resistance to the dominant discourse. The participants' accounts have opened my eyes to the long-lasting impact of colonialism and governing discourses on the human psyche and professional lives of therapists in colonised nations. This has given me a deeper appreciation for the complexities and subtleties involved in exploring the relationship between culture, colonialism, and therapeutic practices.
This research serves as a reminder of the significance of continuing to examine how Western colonial discourses dominate the governance of counselling in Kuwait and impact therapists' professional identities and roles. I hope this work will spark further conversations and introspection within the field and contribute to a deeper understanding of these crucial issue
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
DataVault: Shifting the Narrative: Sensitive Data
No full textThis dataset is complementary to the dataset deposited in DataShare Willis, Alette; Hildmann, Jule; Verhoeven, Arno; Affifi, Ramsey. (2023). Shifting the Narrative: Exploring the role of arts interventions in supporting communities in working across sectors to achieve place-based climate action. , 2022 [text]. University of Edinburgh. School of Health and Social Science. https://doi.org/10.7488/ds/3795. This dataset contains consent forms and survey responses, pseudonymised. The spreadsheet contains all the columns including two columns which were removed from the public dataset on DataShare, namely, Gender. ## Access ## This dataset is held in the Edinburgh DataVault, directly accessible only to authorised University of Edinburgh staff. External users may request access to a copy of the data by contacting the Principal Investigator, Contact Person or Data Manager named on this page. University of Edinburgh users who wish to have direct access should consult the information about retrieving data from the DataVault at: https://www.ed.ac.uk/is/research-support/datavault
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