Russo suggests that the personal narratives of those who have experienced mental and emotional distress now constitute a diverse and dispersed, nonetheless considerable, body of knowledge that is of interest to non–user/survivor researchers. The issues she raises about the potential use of that knowledge pose practical and ethical challenges to both user/survivor researchers and those from other research traditions. On reading this paper, I became conscious of my own work, where I have explored my personal experiences in the (...) context of clinical research and the history of psychiatry. In one such piece, I describe myself as “a voice crying out from the data”, and use my... (shrink)

Victim/survivor stories have become one of the primary means for conveying human rights abuses. Even as these kinds of stories have captured our collective imagination, we do not know much about how they operate in a transitional democracy: whether they are transformative and contribute to the peacemaking process, or disruptive and can thwart the process.This article discusses the value of such stories and asks, first, whether an emerging democracy has an ethical obligation to provide spaces for (...) victims and survivors to tell their stories of the harms that befell them under the former regime. It concludes that victim/survivor storytelling can assist former victims in finding and building of voice that enables them to become contributing citizens in the new country. It enables them to become less alienated from and suspicious of the state, and to become empowered enough to participate in governance. It is thus in a country’s best interest to encourage storytelling activities. Second, the article attempts to provide a framework by which we might recognize different kinds of stories and begin to distinguish between those that a country should support and those that it should discourage. (shrink)

Narratives by survivors of abuse offer compelling entries into the experiences of abuse and its effects on health. Reading such stories can enlarge the clinician's understanding of the complexities of abuse. Furthermore, attention to narrative can enhance the therapeutic options for abuse victims not only in mental health arenas, but also in other medical contexts. In this article we define the genre of survivor narratives, examine one such narrative in particular (Push by Sapphire, 1996), and explore the clinical (...) implications of narrative in abuse victims' clinical care. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:74 Feminist Studies 46, no. 1. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Jennifer L. Holland “Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust”: Children and Young Adults in the Anti-Abortion Movement During the last three decades of the twentieth century, children across the United States regularly encountered adults who both hailed them as survivors of a holocaust and pleaded with them not to perpetrate one. These adults were not talking about war, (...) at least not in a traditional sense. They were talking about legal abortion. Children and young adults often heard this pitch in school presentations like one made in the mid-1970s by a California anti-abortion group, United Parents Under God, in which pictures of aborted fetuses (whose “feet will never kick a football... run on a playground... or play hopscotch”) and their imagined lost life stories were the centerpiece. Next to pictures of aborted fetuses were pictures of two prematurely born infants of color (the only people of color in the presentation) who were supposedly in danger under Roe v. Wade. With murder hovering in the air, activists asked their teen audience, “Is someone you love next?” According to these California anti-abortion activists, young people were physically and intellectually vulnerable to pro-choice views because they inhabited “atheistic” classrooms “where evil can no longer be called ‘evil.’” “You are quite literally ‘trapped’ in a completely ‘pagan’ situation in our secular society and schools and we must reach you anyway we can,” they continued. In the so-called “pro-life” worldview, liberals were brainwashing children and young people through the media, public schools, and many other institutions. Jennifer L. Holland 75 “Women’s liberal abortion speakers,” political scientists, “who typically work for the STATE” and for whom the “ends justify the means,” and new “secular-science textbooks”—all were trying to frighten teenagers to “into killing [their] OWN OFFSPRING,” activists said. Anti-abortion women, “ordinary women... who LOVE you” according to the California presentation, sought to protect children while feminist “witches... distort [ed] God’s purposes of sexuality.”1 In order to counteract what they viewed as corruption, anti-abortion activists had to wage a counter -battle, politicizing children in order to make them innocent again. In practice, that meant bringing the abortion wars—with their attendant graphic imagery and discussions of immorality, murder, and “holocausts ”—into the haven of childhood. From the movement’s early days, anti-abortion activists waged their fight in the name of innocent young people; abortion, they said, was a genocide of children. While these activists were certainly not the only US movement to use the supposed vulnerability of children to elicit public support for their cause, they also did something different. For the anti-abortion movement, children and young adults were more than just endangered innocents; they were also potential perpetrators. Young people, it seemed, were more liberal than their elders, having allegedly been reared in and indoctrinated by liberal culture. They seemed, in short, to be a potentially pro-choice generation. Thus, adult activists spoke more to and about young people at the end of the century. Adults needed young people to speak for fetuses as “Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust,” but they also needed to convert and save America through them. The anti-abortion narrative of childhood vulnerability offered the restoration of social hierarchies as a solution to the problem of abortion. It was “women’s liberal abortion speakers” and feminist “witches” who were the sources of societal indoctrination. Pro-choice women separated sex and reproduction, thus undermining women’s role in society and changing their relationships with men. More subtly, anti-abortion 1. United Parents Under God, “That They May Live: A Presentation on Abortion,” n.d., folder 1, United Parents Under God Ephemeral Materials, Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements, Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas. This publication was probably created in the early to mid-1970s because the few citations contained within are from between 1970 and 1973. 76 Jennifer L. Holland activists—who were almost always white—mourned the loss of past racial hierarchies while also envisioning theirs as a civil rights movement. In the California presentation mentioned above, activists explicitly compared abortion to mandated... (shrink)

This study examines how Hiroshima atomic bomb survivors linguistically construct favorable selves – that is, selves that they want to present to others – in stories about events where they may feel survivors’ guilt. While discourse analysts started studying Holocaust narratives in the past decade, the field has not yet investigated narratives from Hiroshima survivors, nor has guilt been extensively investigated linguistically. In narrating those episodes where guilt can be attributed, Hiroshima survivors use various prosodic and syntactic devices to (...) maintain their favorable selves by describing their powerlessness in a chaotic situation. Focusing on the telling of the same experience by three different survivors, the analysis reveals that narrators use various linguistic strategies to protect their positions as moral persons. The study contributes to a better understanding of the linguistic management of emotion, especially survivors’ guilt. Furthermore, linguistic examination of Hiroshima stories brings a discourse perspective to the study of global tragedies. (shrink)

The article focuses on Kurt Vonnegut’s lesser-known and underappreciated 1987 novel Bluebeard, which is analyzed and interpreted in the light of Marianne Hirsch’s seminal theory of postmemory. Even though it was published prior to Hirsch’s formulation of the concept, Vonnegut’s novel intuitively anticipates it, problematizing the implications of inherited, second-hand memory. To further complicate matters, Rabo Karabekian, the protagonist-narrator of Bluebeard, a World War II veteran, amalgamates his direct, painful memories with those of his parents, survivors of the Armenian Genocide. (...) Both the novel and the theory applied to it centre on the problematics of historical and personal trauma, engendered by two genocides which are often the object of comparative analyses: the Armenian Genocide, also referred to as the Armenian Holocaust, and the Jewish Holocaust. The latter is central to Hirsch’s interdisciplinary work in the field of memory studies, encompassing literature, the visual arts and gender studies. In Bluebeard, Vonnegut holds to account a humanity responsible for the atrocities of twentieth-century history: two world wars and two genocides for which they respectively established the context. The article examines the American writer’s reflection on death and violence, man’s destructive impulse and annihilation. In a world overshadowed by memories of mass extermination, Vonnegut interrogates the possibility of a new beginning, pointing to women as agents of renewal and sociopolitical change. He also identifies the role that art plays in the process of potential reconstruction, the story of Karabekian, a failed artist and highly successful art collector, being a Künstlerroman with a feminist edge. (shrink)

An examination of the physical and sexual abuse perpetrated by Ashtanga yoga leader Pattabhi Jois and the culture, structures, and mythos that enabled it, grounded in investigative research and real survivor stories.

A life-threatening illness such as cancer can bring about much existential suffering and a disconnect to self in spite of surviving cancer. In my recent research project, I interviewed 14 long-term cancer survivors on being post cancer. Contrary to common assumptions about long-term survivorship, my interviewees reported grave existential difficulties in finding a firm footing in their sense of self, fostering a variety of stories of despair. This article examines long-term cancer survivors’ suffering from the vantage point of selfhood (...) and provides a philosophical interpretation of the reintegration of the self by illuminating their stories of despair through the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s seminal work The Sickness Unto Death. The participating survivors described how the cancer experience had quaked old perceptions of self, instigating them to question the depth of their self-understanding before the cancer and who they really were. In relating to themselves, they realized the dynamic process of becoming who they are by continuing to balance opposing poles within the self. This act of relating to self revealed the limit of the autonomous self in the creation of selfhood. The article intends to illustrate how a philosophical reading of selfhood and suffering in survivorship can inform medicine and inspire models for follow-up cancer care for long-term survivors. (shrink)

ExcerptThis article compares two fairly recent autobiographical works about the experiences of two highly publicized global disasters: Josef Haslinger's Phi Phi Island: Ein Bericht (2004) and Kathrin Röggla's really ground zero: 11. september und folgendes (2001). Röggla was in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001. Haslinger was a victim of the 2004 tsunami in Thailand, where he vacationed with his family. Both tell stories that are at once intensely personal, relating threats to the narrator's very existence, and decidedly public, (...) as the events in question were broadcast around the world and subject to prolific media commentary and overwhelming visual representation. (shrink)

Abstract:This paper explores multiple encounters between activist-survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery (“comfort women” or halmonis, meaning “elderly women” or “grannies” in Korean) and solidarity activists. I mainly focus on the stories of two foundational figures in the ongoing justice campaign for the survivors, both of whom faced that forceful military act (between 1932 and 1945) as teenage girls in colonized Korea, although in dramatically different ways: Yun Chung-ok, a leading scholar and activist who, having managed to escape the (...) fate of many other peers, first spoke out about Japanese military sexual slavery, and Kim Bok-dong, a survivor and human rights activist. This paper will address the multiple encounters and dialogues of memories to resituate subjects, which led to overcoming personal trauma and reaching out to others and continues to drive the redress movement. Drawing on oral history interviews, feminist ethnography, and various documented resources including survivors’ testimonies, which have been archived for around twenty years as part of my own scholar-activist work, I juxtapose these women’s lives to show how a community of responsibility has been formed to decolonize androcentric history. The women involved in the movement for the resolution of the Japanese military sexual slavery issue reinterpreted their experiences as having been formed by imperialism, colonialism, and patriarchy. While caring for and healing with one another, they suggested the possibility of a new subject formation. Through mutually constructed identities, activist-survivors broke away from social stigma and became agents who led transformation of a postcolonial society. (shrink)

In this article, we draw on feminist trauma studies with the aim of deconstructing the theoretical and methodological binary between individual and collective trauma. Based on first-hand interviews with Bosnian survivors of rape, we attempt to ‘think against’ the private/public split that trauma studies work often unintentionally reifies. We draw upon recent methodological innovations that have been influenced by thinkers such as Derrida and Deleuze. Specifically, we work with what Jackson and Mazzei call rhizomatic and trace readings in the threshold. (...) Through a rhizomatic and trace reading of narrative pieces extracted from the interviews, we engage with the following questions: 1) How do we theorise what Davoine and Gaudilliere call ‘the sociopolitical faultlines’ between collective/public accounts of trauma and those traditionally constructed as private/personal? 2) How do accounts of war rape, which narrate the eruption of the past into the present, elucidate the myriad links between the private and public in a number of ways; among others, the echoes or traces of the everyday ‘before’ in subjects’ stories of the monstrous ‘after’? And 3) What is the relationship between the ‘unspeakable’ in the traumatic memories of the survivors and the ‘speakable’ collective memories of traumatic humanmade events? How does the collective desire ‘not to know’ or ‘to forget’ impact on the individual survivor’s ability to reconstitute their post-trauma identity in a personal as well as a social context? The aim of the analysis is to show that the multifaceted nature of the traumatic reality demands a multifaceted approach that resists binary constructions relating to self/other, private/public, individual/collective. (shrink)

This article analyzes narratives about encounters between police officers and domestic violence victim/survivors in the context of domestic violence calls. Narratives are sites in which individuals create relationships between themselves and others, oriented around a set of unfolding events. Narrative is a motivated, engaged retelling of prior or anticipated events produced in interaction with others, in a particular context stocked with constraints and affordances. In the process of telling stories, identities emerge. In order to understand the relationship between narrative (...) and identity, I analyze stories told about police interactions with domestic violence victim/survivors from the perspectives of both the police and the victim/survivors. Working empirically with a data set of 48 interviews, I use critical discourse analysis and discourse analysis to analyze the ways both groups narrate domestic violence and confrontations with police officers, the ways they create story worlds stocked with characters, the ways story characters are formed and deployed, and the ways those characters are positioned against/with/by the storyteller, allowing the storyteller’s identity to emerge. This article is an analysis of the relationship between the storyteller and the story world and the storyteller’s process of constructing an/other in order to position in relation to that other. Ultimately, I argue that identity emerges for the storyteller in the way she or he constructs characters in a story and then positions in relation to those characters. (shrink)

Remarkable stories of resilience and forgiveness have been reported in the wake of the internationally recognised peace process in Colombia. From the perspective of Christian spirituality, this study seeks to understand the individual and communal values, beliefs and practices that made the reconciliation and restoration of a community possible after severe dislocation and violence, some of it of neighbour against neighbour. Interviews conducted in the field and transcribed by the author were used as texts. Transcripts were studied taking into (...) account cultural, geographic and historical contexts. I found that a deeply rooted family- and community-based Catholic culture, brought by the Spanish in the 16th century and continuing to influence this rural area, offered values, beliefs and devotional practices that gave meaning, strength and empowered the ability to forgive. Also, psychological and pastoral tools for grieving, together with sociological and political values about reconciliation and the rebuilding of a community’s fabric, intertwined with the religious values to deepen the capacity for reconciliation and community rebuilding. The experiences of these interviewees reveal a form of Christian spirituality lived through family and community ties that was augmented and empowered by values and practices of non-religious institutions, making possible significant personal and communal journeys of transformation and the concomitant remarkable resilience. (shrink)

It is argued that the stories of the survivors of the Srebrenica massacre in 1995 have been neglected by the memorial culture of Bosnia and by the various national reports that investigated how the massacre could have taken place. The author argues that a satisfactory history of the genocide has to include the voices of the survivors, in this case, the women. These are stories of trauma that are hard to listen to. She compares listening to them to (...) the difficulty historians experience in listening to the stories of other genocides like the Shoah/Holocaust, they are stories based on silence about what cannot be told. The argument relies on the oral history literature on listening to trauma as personal and subjective accounts of survival. They are not straightforward referential narratives. One narrative, the narrative of Sabaheta who lost her child and husband, is central to the piece. She is one of the women interviewed by the author. The interview expresses sorrow about loss and rage about the international community; these stories are interwoven. The narrative also describes through the eyes of the victim what she felt happened. The author is Dutch, so is part of the one nation – more than any other – that is accused of “doing nothing.” It was the Dutch army that was supposed to protect the civilian population of Srebrenica. The government of The Netherlands has halted any negotiation on financial support for the research as “the project does not help to overcome trauma.” She argues that giving a voice to the victim is a necessary step toward closure. (shrink)

Oral history is more than an epistemology of the subaltern who do not have any other avenues of narrating and preserving their ontologies. It transcends the academic domain and ventures into the field of therapy as it heals the broken hearted, the subjugated, the bereaved and in the process oscillating to an archive of memory and feelings. It is an epistemology that offers therapeutic healing not only to the downtrodden of the earth but also to the affluent members of the (...) community. In this era of COVID-19 where people have suffered untold and unbearable pain, oral history comes handy as an epistemic memorialisation tool that can be used to offer therapeutic healing to the survivors, the affected, the infected and the nations. The article is based on the author’s views on how South Africa may memorialise COVID-19 through oral history and memorials among others. The article reviews literature on the world’s intentions in memorialising the pandemic and how South Africa can learn or unlearn from the proffered examples. The article also interrogates how oral history approaches, such as crowdsourcing of COVID-19 stories, can be manipulated so that it accommodates the pandemic’s narratives of the commoners found in the locations of South Africa. Research findings reveal that South Africa can learn a lot from the countries that have started to memorialise the pandemic in the sense that it has the experience, skills and infrastructure to do so. Contribution: The study contributes to the ongoing debate about how to memorialise the COVID-19 pandemic taking into consideration the memory politics of inclusion and exclusion. The study is linked to the scope of the journal in the sense that it touches on the national memorialisation of the COVID-19 pandemic through oral history and memorials among others. (shrink)

This paper describes a community event organized in response to the appropriation and overreliance on the psychiatric patient “personal story” within mental health organizations. The sharing of experiences through stories by individuals who self-identify as having “lived experience” has been central to the history of organizing for change in and outside of the psychiatric system. However, in the last decade, personal stories have increasingly been used by the psychiatric system to bolster research, education, and fundraising interests. We explore (...) how personal stories from consumer/survivors have been harnessed by mental health organizations to further their interests and in so doing have shifted these narrations from “agents of change” towards one of “disability tourism” or “patient porn.” We mark the ethical dilemmas of narrative cooptation and consumption, and query how stories of resistance can be reclaimed not as personal recovery narratives but rather as a tool for socio-political change. (shrink)

Simonet, Emanuel Nicolas Cortes Christine Bryden is a survivor of dementia and has been a passionate advocate for persons with dementia for more than 20 years. She has written 4 books. Her latest 2 books - Before I Forget and Nothing About Us, Without us! - give an insider's perspective into the lived experience of a person with dementia. This article provides a review of these 2 books which detail Christine Bryden's life story, and in doing so, highlight some (...) of the key messages expressed by the author. These key messages include examining the various misconceptions about persons with dementia, the required care for persons with dementia, as well as the need for building a dementia-friendly society. (shrink)

Roy Morrison offers a compelling blueprint for building a sustainable ecological civilization by applying a smart, not painful, prescription to today's troubled industrial world. He calls for abolishing income taxes and instead taxing pollution, unlimited growth through trade in information, investing in jobs through a National Trust bank, and ending welfare and poverty through a negative income tax linked to national service.Eco Civilization 2140 is set in the small town of Warner in the year 2140 after the great ecological crisis (...) of the 21st century has passed. It is a peaceful time, where 150 years old is middle age, where virtual reality and the world wide web allows us to snorkel in the Great Barrier Reef from our living rooms and where we grow crops as inputs for nanotech production. "Eco Civilization 2140 is a brilliant, practical recipe for extricating ourselves from impending failure. This kind of imaginative thinking promises a blueprint for success." ?Phil Bosserman, author of More of Us Than You Think "Chock full of ideas of tomorrow that we can use today, Eco Civilzation 2140 is a remarkable work of imagination and vision."?Sonia Shah, author of Crude: The Story of Oil $12.95 / paperback / 114 pages / Writers Publishing Cooperative / 2006 / ISBN 1-930149-37-9.Roy Morrison is an energy consultant, writer and cooperative organizer. He is involved in pioneering work in developing wind hedges and was a former leader of the Clamshell Alliance that used non-violent action to oppose the construction of the Seabrook nuclear power plant. (shrink)

The research is based on a study of short story collections by Israeli writer Ida Fink’s, All the Stories, and French writer Charlotte Delbo’s, Auschwitz and After, to reflect the impact of the Holocaust on autobiographical elements in their work. The authors are representatives of the first generation of Holocaust survivors, which means that the mass systematic genocide during World War II was a personal traumatic experience for them. The works of female writers are studied using the theory of (...) trauma at the genre level. Since autobiography has been considered a documentary genre with its own peculiarities, works about the Holocaust were seen as historical evidence of this event. However, based on the works of Juri Lotman and some principles of Philippe Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact”, we can conclude that autobiography is similar to fiction if it can meet certain aesthetic functions. Under the influence of trauma, the genre of autobiography can be modified in the literary text in such a way that the line between autobiography and fiction is blurred. Ida Fink and Charlotte Delbo write short stories with fictional narrators, but all the situations are certainly the experiences of the writers themselves, who turn to the autofiction and conventions of Philippe Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact” to transfer their memories to literary heroes. The aim of the study is to define the peculiarities of the autobiographical genre, analyze its functions in Holocaust literature, identify poetic elements of autobiography, and prove that there is no canonical form of narration about the Holocaust-Era, as the writers were searching for how to articulate their traumatic experience in experimental forms. (shrink)

The focus of my article is a unique place, the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, which connects Yiddish culture with the American one, the experience of the Holocaust with the descendants of the survivors, and a modern idea of Jewishness with the context of American postmodernity. Created in the 1980s, in the mind of a young and enthusiastic student Aaron Lansky, the Yiddish Book Center throughout the years has become a unique place on the American cultural map. Traversing the (...) continents and crossing borders, Lansky and his co-workers for over thirty years have been saving Yiddish language books from extinction. The Center, however, has long stopped to be merely a storage house for the collection, but instead has grown into a vibrant hub of Yiddishkeit in the United States. Its employees do not only collect, distribute, digitalize and post online the forgotten volumes, but also engage in diverse activities, scholarly and cultural, that promote the survival of the tradition connected with Yiddish culture. They educate, offering internships and fellowships to students interested in learning Yiddish from across the world, translate, publish, and exhibit Yiddish language materials, in this way finding new users for the language whose speakers were virtually annihilated by the Holocaust. To honour their legacy, a separate project is aimed at conducting video interviews that record life testimonies of the speakers of Yiddish. Aaron Lansky’s 2004 memoir, Outwitting History, provides an interesting insight into the complexities of his arduous life mission. Today, the Center lives its own unique life, serving the world of academia and Yiddishkeit enthusiasts alike. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to contribute to the existing literature on continuing bonds with a deceased relative by exploration of discursive dimensions of the bonds through which the survivors construct their relationship with the person who died. The data come from five interviews with family members who survived the suicidal death of their relative. We argue that a focus upon the form and content of the survivors’ stories offers a complicated and heterogeneous picture of ‘bonding actions’. And (...) so, assuming a constructionist view of discourse, we show two kinds of bonds. First, it is a bond related to social expectations of bereaved families. Second, it is a personal bond, part of which is a bond with a reverse direction, established and maintained by the deceased person. (shrink)

For the researcher, long-term qualitative investigation of a given subject matter represents an opportunity to acquire comprehensive knowledge of that subject matter in all of its dynamism and complexity. The author of this paper has been carrying out such research among Holocaust survivors, mainly employing the oral history method. This paper is an impressionistic story, a genre not commonly found in Slovak ethnological literature. It constitutes a first attempt to revisit material emerging from years of collaborative investigation with one particular (...) female survivor. The paper alternates between reflections of selected situations and interpretations of events and processes which resulted from the research partner’s activities between 1995 and 2015. (shrink)

Stroke survivors undergo a thorough cognitive diagnosis that often involves administration of multiple standardized tests. However, patient’s narrative discourse can provide clinicians with additional knowledge on patient’s subjective experience of illness, attitude toward current situation, and motivation for treatment. We evaluated the methods of analyzing thematic content and story types in relationship to cognitive impairment in stroke survivors with no aphasia (including 9 left hemisphere damage – LHD patients, and 16 right hemisphere damage – RHD patients). Cognitive impairment was evaluated (...) in comparison to a group of 25 patients with orthopaedic injury not involving the brain. Our findings primarily show that higher elaboration on own cognitive problems, physical ailments or coping strategies in LHD patients and cognitive problems, emotional issues and circumstances of illness onset in RHD patients is related to deficits in executive functions and retrieval of information from memory. Furthermore, RHD patients who use more chaos story type show lower executive functioning. However, these results did not survive the significance threshold ofp< 0.05 after Bonferroni adjustment for multiple comparisons. In conclusion, this study provides preliminary evidence that stroke survivor’s narrative can constitute an additional source of clinically-relevant information regarding patient’s experience of illness and attitude toward recovery. This knowledge can aid clinicians and nurses in everyday interactions with the patients and support individualized strategy to treatment. Still, the current results need be confirmed with future studies in a larger cohort of stroke patients. (shrink)

How have and how might philosophers contribute to linking disability and activism in these peri-COVID-19 times, especially in forms of public engagement that go beyond podcasted talks and articles aimed at a public audience? How do we harness philosophical thinking to contribute positively to those living with disability whose vulnerabilities are heightened by this pandemic and the ableism highlighted by collective responses to it?

This article illustrates the practical usefulness of transdisciplinary work for practical theology by showing how input from an occupational therapist informed my understanding and interpretation of the story of Hannetjie, who had been sexually abused as a child. This forms part of a narrative practical theological research project into the spirituality of female adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Transdisciplinary work is useful to practical theologians, as it opens possibilities for learning about matters pastors have to face, but may not (...) have knowledge about. A short retelling of Hannetjie’s story is given to provide information about the context of the research. Next, the transdisciplinary process that was followed is mentioned, and the questions that the transdisciplinary team had to respond to are discussed. Following that, I focus more specifically on the occupational therapist’s answers, and the knowledge gained from her contribution, as an example of how a co-researcher from a divergent discipline can inform a theological study. In this case, knowledge was shared about sensory integration and how the brain processes traumatic stimuli, such as sexual abuse. Lastly, the interrelationship between Hannetjie’s body stories, mind stories and spirit stories is discussed to show how the learning received from occupational therapy affected my thinking about Hannetjie’s stories and the relationships between them. Thus, it is concluded that transdisciplinary work has great value for practical theology, especially in the pastor’s daily work with people who are struggling with difficult stories, because we cannot listen to people’s spirit stories in isolation. They are inextricably intertwined with all our stories about ourselves. (shrink)

This narrative ethics exploration stems from my happy prostate-specific antigen (PSA) story, though it should not have been, as I annually refuse my family physician’s recommendation to purchase PSA screening. The reason for my refusal is I teach ethics to medical students and of course must walk the talk, and PSA screening is not publicly funded in the province of Ontario, Canada. In addition, I might have taken false comfort in ‘but all you need is a good index finger’ to (...) detect prostate cancer, expounded by a senior physician at a national medical conference in 2010, and applauded by the large audience of physicians. I was compelled to begin this exploration out of survivor guilt, although I will not be a survivor for long, and as a mea culpa to the men similarly situated to me in having late diagnosis of prostate cancer, aggressive tumours and multiple metastases, but who unlike me are dead because they did not experience the physician–educator-based exceptionisms and coincidences that permit me to still be alive. Although my PSA story will always be a happy story, even when my life ends in a few years, the initiation of public funding of PSA screening for all men over 50 would make my PSA story an even happier story. (shrink)

On July 4, 1990, while on a morning walk in southern France, Susan Brison was attacked from behind, severely beaten, sexually assaulted, strangled to unconsciousness, and left for dead. She survived, but her world was destroyed. Her training as a philosopher could not help her make sense of things, and many of her fundamental assumptions about the nature of the self and the world it inhabits were shattered.At once a personal narrative of recovery and a philosophical exploration of trauma, this (...) book examines the undoing and remaking of a self in the aftermath of violence. It explores, from an interdisciplinary perspective, memory and truth, identity and self, autonomy and community. It offers imaginative access to the experience of a rape survivor as well as a reflective critique of a society in which women routinely fear and suffer sexual violence.As Brison observes, trauma disrupts memory, severs past from present, and incapacitates the ability to envision a future. Yet the act of bearing witness, she argues, facilitates recovery by integrating the experience into the survivor's life's story. She also argues for the importance, as well as the hazards, of using first-person narratives in understanding not only trauma, but also larger philosophical questions about what we can know and how we should live.Bravely and beautifully written, Aftermath is that rare book that is an illustration of its own arguments. (shrink)

The fifth book of Xenophon's Anabasis presents a puzzle which Mr. Tarn has not discussed in his most stimulating chapter on the ‘Ten Thousand’ in the Cambridge Ancient History. Xenophon is telling the story of the retreat along the shore of the Black Sea. At Cotyora, at Xenophon's own suggestion a general кαθαρμός was held by the survivors. For some time past the troops had been beginning to get badly out of hand. There had been a particularly disgraceful scene at (...) Cerasus, which they had left a week before their arrival at Cotyora. Certain local tribes of the Colchi had sent ambassadors to the Greek army, which was actually leaving the town at the moment of their arrival. Most of the troops were already outside the walls; but some stragglers who were still within the town stoned the ambassadors to death, and a general riot ensued. Now, not a word of this story is told by Xenophon in its proper place in the narrative, where we are simply told that the Greeks left Cerasus, some by sea and seme by land. The whole story is told later in great detail, and in a curious form: as a digression which Xenophon makes in a speech immediately preceding the court of enquiry at Cotyora. (shrink)

We say that celebrated accidents shape public perception of safety and risk in health care. Take the so-called celebrated story of the three Colorado nurses who, by administering bezathine penicillin intravenously, caused the death of a neonate. The nurses were charged with criminal negligence, with one pleading guilty to a reduced charge and another fighting the charge and eventually being exonerated. “Celebrated” accidents seem to follow a predictable script and cast participants in recognizable roles. They present heroes, survivors, and victims. (...) And, of course, they put villains, or anti-heroes, center stage – the chief protagonists of a fatal plot. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the possibilities to constitute meaning in the?borderline- situations? of the social sphere, such as the loss of validity of orientation within and experience of reality in the socially shared structures of the lifeworld. On the one hand, I will refer to A. Schutz? and his constitution-analysis of foreign understanding and of shared meaning; on the other hand, I bear onto I. Kert?sz literary project to narrate the biography of an Auschwitz-survivor as close to his experiential (...) perspective as possible. I will focus both on the concept of constitution and of interpretation with respect to their enabling of the transcending of a typologized everyday?s world which suppresses subjective meaning and its individual articulation. The main guideline is the problem how identity? i.e. a life-story? is configured out of subjective meaning without recourse to everyday reality. A. Schutz?s and Th. Luckmann?s note on a range of social transcendences and on biographical categories referring to the constitution of a socially shared meaning offer a theoretical perspective for dealing with constitutive differences within the reach of understanding social meaning; Kert?sz? narrative mode expandes this theoretical stance as it problematizes exemplary subjective experience. nema. (shrink)

John Bayley’s Elegy for Iris, his memoir about living with Iris Murdoch after the onset of dementia, unsettles models of mind and agency that ignore human relationship, dependency, and the vulnerabilities of the cared for and the carer. Experiencing Iris as ambiguously absent and present while he attentively cares for her, Bayley frames his memoir as an elegy, a reflection on love and loss that conventionally represents two subjects—the author and the one he lost. Bayley’s acts of care and his (...) stories about his wife, both as she was and as she has become, sustain her moral worth as a person. Writing as an elegist, a survivor entitled to be heard, Bayley moves his experience of caring and loss from personal to social realms, from speaker to listener, opening ethical space for consolation and for social responsibility for the vulnerable. (shrink)

Dissociation is an important aspect of responses to traumatic events. According to a number of influential theories, it negatively impacts cognitive performance including encoding of the trauma memories, leading to an increased risk of later conditions such as posttraumatic stress disorder . We tested this hypothesis experimentally in two studies by inducing dissociation in the laboratory and investigating the effects on several aspects of cognition, including time estimation, digit and spatial span, and story recall. Dissociation was related to decrements in (...) time estimation, digit span, and story retention, but did not affect perceptual attention, spatial span, or immediate story recall. The results are discussed in the context of theoretical models of PTSD and their implications for official questioning of traumatized individuals such as sexual assault survivors. (shrink)

This article reports on interviews conducted with 11 women at the Thohoyandou Victim Empowerment Programme, a centre located in Sibasa, Thohoyandou, in the Limpopo province of South Africa. The centre provides support and advocacy to female survivors of domestic violence. The participants were victims of gender-based violence and the study aimed at exploring the spiritual experiences of women assaulted by their partners. Interviews were conducted over 4 days and were held on the TVEP premises. This article discusses how women of (...) faith found meaning and support through their religious beliefs when experiencing violence in intimate spaces. Furthermore, the article drew insights from spiritual perceptions held by women that make them feel safer and assist them to find ways to cope with violence in intimate relationships. However, the study found that women prayed for divine intervention and change in their families and for God to help their husbands by removing all evil spirits from their lives. It was found that apart from prayer, the women do not have any other spiritual resources to combat gender-based violence. The authors suggest the deconstruction of harmful religious discourses towards healing religious discourses as a type of ‘intervention’ in the lives of the interviewees.Contribution: The article contributes towards understanding the harmful impact of religious discourses on the lives of women who are vulnerable towards domestic violence. Religious discourses that are either harmful or healing are here identified through the stories of women who have been violated in their intimate relationships, thus contributing to the body of knowledge in gender studies and to religious and social sciences in general. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Coeditors’ IntroductionRetro III: As We RestartAlyson Cole and Kyoo Leethe covid-19 pandemic drags on, and, as the world is now trying to recover from it by learning to at least live with it better, philoSOPHIA has arrived at the third and final issue of RETRO. The fact that this series ended up being framed by the turbulent temporality of the current pandemic is something that some future editors of (...) philoSOPHIA, too, might find worth remembering.For now, we return to the now-point, as expected. To that end, here we have assembled articles on historical, individual, and gendered stigmas and wounds and traumas, among others, focusing also on their relationships to existential time, namely, present moments that persist.We turn first to the pressing issue presented by “Shackling Pregnant Women: US Prisons, Anti-Blackness, and the Unfinished Project of American Abolition”: Brady Heiner offers a lucid “interpretation of the social meaning of shackling imprisoned pregnant women and its persistence despite widespread normative consensus in favor of its abolition,” a joltingly specific, haunting reminder of how deeply the legacy of slavery is embedded in the US criminal legal system and the ways in which American abolition remains an “unfinished project.”Finally, RETRO III marks an ending and a restart of another kind. As of this issue—or, rather, this volume—philoSOPHIA is transitioning from a biannual to an annual publication schedule. In recent years, the journal has transformed in various ways. In 2018, we adopted a new transContinental approach and, with it, a new subtitle. We have expanded to include different [End Page v] genres, media, and voices, always aiming to reflect on our current moment and rethink persistent feminist philosophical questions from divergent angles. Publishing one volume per year is, we are certain, the best way to sustain this breadth of inquiry and continue deepening our alliances with critical race, disability, literary, media, and queer studies, among other fields. As we restart, readers can expect us to keep pushing boundaries, as we always have, while maintaining the same high quality and standards. This is essentially a change in the journal’s format, not in its substance.Wound/stigma as process also emerged as a key notion in Retro III partly because of our preliminary editorial conversation with Annette-Carina van der Zaag about three years ago, who, in response to our call for proposals on “retro” themes, had proposed an idea of guest editing an issue. Although that plan unfortunately did not materialize as we dealt with various pandemic challenges still faced by so many of us on a daily basis, Annette did write a spirited article while encouraging some other colleagues to explore related ideas, for which we remain grateful. In this piece, “Touching Wounds: On the Fugitivity of Stigma,” which explores stigma’s queer-responsive “transformational energy,” van der Zaag articulates ways of “inhabiting” wounds on three registers—material, affective, and fugitive—as an open-ended, future-embracing pathway beyond identity-bound ontology. Ghalya Saadawi, in turn, in her engagingly autobiographical essay “Critical Incision: Hypochondria, Autotheory, and the Health-Illness Dialectic,” autotheoretically draws out “critical” energy from this critical “illness” of hers, hypochondria, to the effect of destabilizing the temporally linearized and medically coordinated discursive ideals of health and being/living well.Survival, at the end of the day, often requires some literal transcending. A case in point has been movingly portrayed and theorized by Na-Young Lee, a sociologist and justice activist who, in “Multiple Encounters and Reconstructed Identities,” revisits questions of historical trauma and collective stigma. Here, she introduces and reflects on her oral history interviews with Korean “Halmoni Activist-Survivors of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery as Postcolonial Subjects,” with whom she herself continues to fight in solidarity. Focusing on the stories of two foundational figures, “Yun Chung-ok, a leading scholar and activist who, having managed to escape the fate of many other peers, first spoke out about Japanese military sexual slavery, and Kim Bok-dong, a survivor and human rights activist,” Lee shows how “overcoming trauma and reaching out to others continues to drive the redress movement” and how “through mutually constructed identities, activist-survivors broke away from... (shrink)

This edited collection draws on a range of disciplines in exploring the central place of narrative in social inquiry and understanding the ethical life. It provides scholarly and practical insights into the rewards and potential pitfalls of working in, and with narrative. It offers readers a broad range of carefully considered examples; the use of art in enhancing insight into the plights of rural communities in Australia; the use of illness narratives in medical education; applying narratives of torture survivors and (...) torturers in shaping humane political response and policy in the face of terrorism, and the place of the music, as a vehicle of story telling and moral growth. This volume illuminates the explicit links between the importance of narrative, that is, the telling of stories to create shape and meaning in our lives, and ethical engagement so critical to the achievement of a good life. (shrink)

Background: The occurrence of behavioural changes and problems, and degree of paranoid thoughts, are significantly higher among people who have experienced extreme trauma such as during the Holocaust. People with dementia and traumatic past experiences may have flashbacks reminding them of these experiences, which is of relevance in caring situations. In nursing homes for people with dementia, nursing assistants are often the group of staff who provide help with personal needs. They have firsthand experience of care and managing the devastating (...) outcomes of inadequate understanding of a person’s past experiences. Aim: The aim was to describe nursing assistants’ experiences of caring for older people with dementia who have experienced Holocaust trauma. Research design: A qualitative descriptive and inductive approach was used, including qualitative interviews and content analysis. Participants and research context: Nine nursing assistants from a Jewish nursing home were interviewed. Ethical considerations: The study was approved by the Regional Ethical Review Board, Stockholm. Findings: The theme ‘Adapting and following the survivors’ expression of their situation’ was built on two categories: Knowing the life story enables adjustments in the care and Need for flexibility in managing emotional expressions. Discussion and conclusion: The world still witnesses genocidal violence and such traumatic experiences will therefore be reflected in different ways when caring for survivors with dementia in the future. Person-centred care and an awareness of the meaning of being a survivor of severe trauma make it possible to avoid negative triggers, and confirm emotions and comfort people during negative flashbacks in caring situations and environments. Nursing assistants’ patience and empathy were supported by a wider understanding of the behaviour of people with dementia who have survived trauma. (shrink)

After the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in 1945, both nations experienced a profound need for a new and encompassing story of what it meant to be Japanese, and to be American, in the permanent nuclear age. This article is a thought experiment to juxtapose the writings and personas of two people who helped their respective societies answer those needs and questions during the early Cold War: Takashi Nagai—medical radiologist, and survivor of the American (...) atomic bombing of Nagasaki, and Albert Wohlstetter—leading American civilian nuclear strategist for the RAND Corporation in the 1950s. Using a combination of mythopeic analysis, biography and illuminative juxtaposition, the study discovers surprising similarities and analogies between the two cases. They each enact and propose interesting variations of sacrificial causalities—claims that human nuclear sacrifices past or promised can bring peace by deterrence now or peace by abolition soon enough. This is an important study now, as both Japan’s nuclear pacifism and the American nuclear umbrella in Northeast Asia are coming under more severe questioning than perhaps ever before. (shrink)

Liana Badr's The Eye of the Mirror explores the historical trauma of the 1975–6 siege of the Palestinian refugee camp Tal el–Zaatar in Beirut and the massacre of thousands of its inhabitants by Christian militias. Analogous to Holocaust writing, Badr's fictionalized history, grounded in actual survivor testimonies, enacts a complex politics of cultural memory, but does so from a specifically female perspective. Collapsing the personal and political, private and public, inside and outside through figured violations of bodies and psyches, (...) Badr repositions women at the centre of the Palestinians’ struggle for and story of survival. Badr's novel traces the annihilation of the possibility of address, accompanied by self–loss and the ability to witness, and the laborious recreation of address. Claiming authority on the basis of the emotional, visceral truth of suffering, she seeks to break the endless cycle of an oppressive and impotent masculine history, constructing an alternative history which at least attempts to address the voice of cultural, national, and gender difference. (shrink)

In this interview, Corban Addison exposes the harsh reality of child sex trafficking in India and across borders with his first-hand experiences with victims, survivors, and activists. Addison has written books on human rights, injustice in the world, and its culture. His works include A Walk Across the Sun (2012), The Garden of Burning Sand (2013), The Tears of Dark Water (2015), A Harvest of Thorns (2017), and Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial (2022). Addison, being an (...) engineer, lawyer, and author, began experimenting with writing at the age of fifteen years. He has used his profession as a lawyer in his writing to depict human atrocities, provide validity to victims, and advocate the abolition of modern slavery through his narratives. In this conversation, Addison talks about how he ended up writing A Walk Across the Sun while discussing sexual slavery, his background research, and how he was able to understand the experiences and trauma of sexual violence. He shares anecdotes of his journey to tsunami-affected areas, brothels, and meetings with victims and activists and how he portrays the sexual violence, trauma, and redemption from it. (shrink)

At the center of the following essay is an analysis of At the Mind's Limits by Jean Améry––philosopher and survivor of Auschwitz. The essay tries to define and refine, via comparison and contrast with works by Hannah Arendt and René Descartes, the unique conception of morality that arises from Améry's text. “Victim morality,” as it will be called here, is a non-normative morality which is patient and victim-based rather than agent or actor-based. It is grounded in a heightened exposure (...) and sensitivity to reality and suffering, which results from a reduction of a human being to “a bundle of reactions.” This process cannot be voluntarily undertaken but is violently undergone. The claim is that morality not only survives the loss of humanity but is only fully exposed where humanity falters. My torturers were not interested in degrees of pain. They were interested only in demonstrating to me what it meant to live in a body, as a body, a body that can entertain notions of justice only as long as it is whole and well …. They did not come to force the story out of me of what I had said to the barbarians and what the barbarians had said to me …. They came to my cell to show me the meaning of humanity, and in the space of an hour they showed me a great deal. –J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Truth in WritingAmandaAn excerpt from my journal during a dark period in my life reads:I am a survivor of sexual mutilation, of coerced gender roles, and of perpetual lies all in the name of normalization. Sometimes I have a hard time even thinking about the true extent of what all happened. It’s like my mind doesn’t have that type of scope, like when I think about the (...) word “eternity.”I wrote this after combing through old medical records, reading comments like “her introitus has healed nicely and looks normal, but my exam suggests that her vagina is shortened,” and “reduction clitoroplasty... removal of testes.” The records go on to say that my “external genitalia is quite satisfactory,” and “on perineal exam, her neovaginal orifice is quite compliant and easily accepts my second and third digits.”My journal continues:I chose this fake hole when I was a teenager because I didn’t know there was another option. I was told from day one to be a female, to be heteronormative, to act like all the other girls, and the only way I could fully accomplish this is by looking the part. A fake hole would be necessary, I thought, to go along with the rest of the lies. Sometimes I think about how the doctors told me to lie about my surgeries and my scars. Sometimes I wonder what my parents would have told the world if I had died during one of surgeries. Maybe they would have said “we were just trying to make her fuckable.”My strength is growing from the stories and experiences I write and share. My journal started about four years ago, when I was in my early 20s, near the beginning of medical school. My initial purpose in writing the journal was to help sort through my feelings and experiences related to a newly discovered sexuality and a changing gender identity. Medical school was thousands of miles away from my previous life, my family, and my friends. Away from my old social network, I was free to self–discover on my own terms. In the first journal entry, I lay out reasons why I decided to get in contact with a therapist, something I had not done previously. Some of the reasons were fairly standard reasons one seeks out a therapist, such as moving away from home. But the fundamental reasons I sought out a therapist, and why I chose to journal, had to do with exploring feelings after my first sexual encounter with a woman, and then [End Page 98] accepting my intersexuality. My relationship with that therapist did not last, but the journaling did.In the beginning of the journal, I write:I am from a small, religious, white, non–diverse, family oriented suburb of Milwaukee. I was raised to be the picture–perfect daughter in a household that did not talk about feelings, sex, cultural or religious differences, etc. My brother and I also never talked about personal issues (and still don’t), which is quite remarkable since we are twins, and have grown up doing most everything together, from sharing birthday parties, to being locker buddies... [When my mother told me about having Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS)] knowing this little fact about my body kept me wanting to become as perfectly female in all ways possible.Growing up without being able to talk about having AIS was stifling to say the least. Closing communication implied great shame, and with the shame came even greater repression. My skate-boarding, baseball card collecting, and model car building interests disappeared after learning about my AIS, which I believe was when I was 12 years old, but I cannot remember exactly. Granted, it’s tough to say whether my interests just changed as I grew older, but I do remember having a fear of portraying any masculine tendencies that other girls in my town weren’t displaying (for example, playing soccer was okay, but I had to shave my legs). I also had crafted some pretty good covers for my AIS, including stories about when I first had my (fake) period, or how I acted fearful about a... (shrink)

Published in 1542, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s La relación is a chronicle of the Pánfilo de Narváez’s 1527 expedition to the New World in which Cabeza de Vaca was one of the four survivors. His account has received considerable attention. It has been appreciated and critically examined as a narrative of conquest and colonization, a work of ethnographic interest, and a text of some literary value. Documenting and fictionalizing for the first time in European history the experience of travelling/trekking (...) in the region which now constitutes the Southwest in the United States, Cabeza de Vaca’s story testifies to the sense of disorientation, as well as to the importance of psychological and cultural mechanisms of responsiveness and adaptability to a different environment. What allows the Moroccan-American contemporary writer Laila Lalami to follow that perspective in her book The Moor’s Account is an imaginative transfer of the burden and satisfaction of narrating the story of the journey to the black Moroccan slave whose presence in the narratives of conquest and exploration was marginal. In Lalami’s book, Estebanico becomes the central character and his role is ultimately identified with that of a writer celebrating the freedom of diversity, one who survives to use the transcultural experience of the past creatively in ways well suited to the needs of the current moment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Conversion and Religious Identity in Buddhism and ChristianityJohn D'Arcy MayA Benedictine abbey that has been involved in exchanges with Buddhist monks since 1979 was an appropriate setting for serious discussion of double identity and change of identity between Buddhists and Christians. The European Network holds its conferences every two years, and after experiencing the Benedictine hospitality of St.Ottilien once again it was decided that every second conference should be (...) held here in the future, with the intervening ones in different centers throughout Europe. Br.Josef Götz OSB introduced the conference by telling the story of the intermonastic encounters with monks of the Soto, Rinzai, and Shingon traditions over the last twenty-five years at St. Ottilien. Participants in these agreed that they had never learned so much about their own traditions as when they were engaged in dialogue at a spiritual and experiential level with their monastic "others." One Zen monk told the Benedictines, "Working with your carpenter, I understand Christianity," and another asked for baptism in order to participate more fully in the liturgy.The situation in the Buddhist countries of Asia, however, is not necessarily so harmonious, as reports by Fr. Thomas Timpte OSB from Korea and Dr. Elizabeth Harris from Sri Lanka made clear. Just to hear about the religious situation in South Korea, the "great unknown" of East Asian Buddhism, was worthwhile. Though four traditions—Shamanism, Buddhism with elements of Daoism, Confucianism, and Christianity—coexist largely peacefully, the advent of Christianity caused tensions arising from both persecutions and conversions. Though many Koreans would find no contradiction in being both Confucianist (at least in a cultural sense) and Christian, Buddhism itself is coming to be seen as a cultural phenomenon, and those earnestly seeking peace of heart turn to Christianity. Almost half the members of [End Page 189] parliament are either Catholic or Protestant, though there is little evidence of Christian ethics in political practice. Nevertheless, Buddhism is now the fastest-growing religion, as Catholics in particular find themselves attracted to the temple environment, which is experienced as "a kind of homecoming." "Christian in the head, Shamanist in the belly, Buddhist in the heart," though a simplification, sums up the situation.In Sri Lanka, on the other hand, things are considerably more fraught, and with the passage of anticonversion legislation the conference theme of conversion and identity is a charged topic. Elizabeth Harris illustrated the lengths to which certain Christians are prepared to go to win converts, such as working the camps of tsunami survivors. Though British evangelical missionaries had originally been afforded remarkable hospitality by the Buddhists—even being invited to preach in temples —their insistence that if Christianity is right, Buddhism must be wrong polarized relations, and the great public debate of 1815 still sets a precedent. Thus even for contemporary Christian inheritors of the fusion of the European Enlightenment with evangelical Christianity, both the conviction of sin and rational argument assure the superiority of Christianity. In the ethnic conflict presently raging, the religions are "not innocent," with Tamils and Christians being conflated into the "other" against which Sinhalese antipathy is directed. This is all the more tragic in that most Sri Lankan Buddhists accept the traditional ethic of tolerance.Jørgen Skov Sørensen and Kajsa Ahlstrand illuminated the religious situation in Scandinavia from different perspectives. Sørensen reflected on the "soft boundaries" that actually exist in many pluralistic societies, something that puzzled both civil servants and missionaries even in colonial India. There is a danger that contemporary Christians will try to impose the same unambiguous boundaries on postmodern Europe as they did in their former colonies. Ahlstrand's report on an empirical study done in Sweden showed how unrealistic this is. Dual identity as both Buddhist and Christian was more common than complete identification with either, and 42 percent of those who identified completely with Christianity said they did not believe in God!The centerpiece of the conference was a vigorous debate between Paul Williams, a prominent British Buddhist and professor of Indian and Tibetan philosophy who announced his conversion to Catholicism in a provocative book, The Unexpected Way, and two protagonists who disagreed with his reasoning from... (shrink)

The impact of domestic violence and abuse is far reaching not least in terms of both the immediate and longer term physical and mental wellbeing of those who have experienced abuse. DVA also exerts a considerable detrimental impact on the wider family including children. While professional perspectives of working with DVA survivors is increasingly well documented, there remains a paucity of accounts of encounters with healthcare services and/or healthcare professionals from survivors of DVA themselves. A central aim of this study (...) was the exploration of women’s experiences of healthcare encounters told purely as personal narrative rather than framed in more traditional research terms. The focus of this paper therefore is unedited personal stories of encounters with healthcare professionals. The position of narrative as research method and the presentation of narratives in this particular instance are also considered. (shrink)

Self-understanding is to a great extent defined by narrative: who we are as human beings is determined by the stories we, and others, tell about ourselves. Yet many are unable to compose coherent personal narratives, as their experiences do not fall within the scope of an accepted conceptual framework. Survivors of trauma are particularly apt to fall into this “narrative rift,” where there can be no words to describe, and hence can be no assimilation of, their experiences. Using the (...) example of child sexual abuse, and drawing on the work of Bass, Spence, Schafer, and Guignon, I propose an examination of the nature of narrative fragmentation itself. Philosophical counselling may succeed where psychoanalysis might not: for where the latter has theoretical commitments to specific narratives, the former, through its reluctance to force epistemological or metaphysical assumptions on the narrator, may well facilitate a more comprehensive self-understanding. (shrink)

This article reflects on the challenges of developing academic research that is undertaken to create social change. I describe the ways that my research has been generated and guided by activism. Even though the descriptor of my research interests is generally gender‐based violence and mental health, my research is situated within an ongoing political discourse that fundamentally opposes and normatively challenges ideologies such as those implemented at a governmental level during the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that continue to have power (...) over Afghan women’s lives. I critique the emergence of two research projects that work with women survivors of violence and develop trauma therapeutic interventions using traditional storytelling. My positionality as a woman of Muslim origin and an academic in the U.K. resulted in inescapable juxtapositions and the necessary blurring of the boundaries between personal and professional viewpoints as well as highlighting the potency of traumatic stories in contexts of conflict, oppression, silencing and marginalization. I go on to explain why I have a moral obligation as an ethicist working in global health, with resources and expertise, to systematically develop my research questions and objectives in accordance with the end‐goal of tackling and deconstructing harmful ideologies and practices towards women and girls in societies marred by the violent complexities of national and international conflicts. (shrink)

Sexual violence has become a topic of intense media scrutiny, thanks to the bravery of survivors coming forward to tell their stories. But, unfortunately, mainstream public spheres too often echo reports in a way that inhibits proper understanding of its causes, placing too much emphasis on individual responsibility or blaming minority cultures. -/- In this powerful and original book, Linda Martín Alcoff aims to correct the misleading language of public debate about rape and sexual violence by showing how complex (...) our experiences of sexual violation can be. Although it is survivors who have galvanized movements like #MeToo, when their words enter the public arena they can be manipulated or interpreted in a way that damages their effectiveness. Rather than assuming that all experiences of sexual violence are universal, we need to be more sensitive to the local and personal contexts – who is speaking and in what circumstances – that affect how activists’ and survivors’ protests will be received and understood. -/- Alcoff has written a book that will revolutionize the way we think about rape, finally putting the survivor center stage. (shrink)

In this article, I examine both the problem of so-called postmodern history as it relates to the Holocaust and suggest the ways that Saul Friedlander's recent work successfully mediates between the somewhat overly polemicized positions of "relativist" and "positivist" history. In this context, I find that in his search for an adequately self-reflexive historical narrative for the Holocaust, Hayden White's proposed notion of "middle-voicedness" may recommend itself more as a process for eyewitness writers than as a style for historians after (...) the fact. From here, I look at the ways Saul Friedlander's reflections on the historian's voice not only mediate between White's notions of the ironic mode and middle-voicedness, but also suggest the basis for an uncanny history in its own right: an anti-redemptory narrative that works through, yet never actually bridges, the gap between a survivor's "deep memory" and historical narrative.For finally, it may be the very idea of "deep memory" and its incompatibility to narrative that constitutes one of the central challenges to Holocaust historiography. What can be done with what Friedlander has termed "deep memory" of the survivor, that which remains essentially unrepresentable? Is it possible to write a history that includes some oblique reference to such deep memory, but which leaves it essentially intact, untouched and thereby deep? In this section, I suggest, after Patrick Hutton, that "What is at issue here is not how history can recover memory, but, rather, what memory will bequeath to history." That is, what shall we do with the living memory of survivors? How will it enter the historical record? Or to paraphrase Hutton again, "How will the past be remembered as it passes from living memory to history?" Will it always be regarded as so overly laden with pathos as to make it unreliable as documentary evidence? Or is there a place for the understanding of the witness, as subjective and skewed as it may be, for our larger historical understanding of events?In partial answer to these questions, I attempt to extend Friedlander's insights toward a narrow kind of history-telling I call "received history"-a double-stranded narrative that tells a survivor-historian's story and my own relationship to it. Such a narrative would chart not just the life of the survivor-historian itself but also the measurable effect of the tellings-both his telling and mine-on my own life's story. Together, they would compose a received history of the Holocaust and its afterlife in the author's mind-my "vicarious past.". (shrink)

It has long been held that humans need government to impose social order on a chaotic, dangerous world. How, then, did early humans survive on the Serengeti Plain, surrounded by faster, stronger, and bigger predators in a harsh and forbidding environment? Pirates, Prisoners, and Lepers examines an array of natural experiments and accidents of human history to explore the fundamental nature of how human beings act when beyond the scope of the law. Pirates of the 1700s, the leper colony on (...) Molokai Island, prisoners of the Nazis, hippie communes of the 1970s, shipwreck and plane crash survivors, and many more diverse groups--all existed in the absence of formal rules, punishments, and hierarchies. Paul and Sarah Robinson draw on these real-life stories to suggest that humans are predisposed to be cooperative within limits. What these "communities" did and how they managed have dramatic implications for shaping our modern institutions. Should today's criminal justice system build on people's shared intuitions about justice? Or are we better off acknowledging this aspect of human nature but using law to temper it? Knowing the true nature of our human character and our innate ideas about justice offers a roadmap to a better society. (shrink)

On August 29, 2005, the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States devastated the city of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. Like many others in America and around the world, Chris McLaughlin watched the tragedy of Katrina unfold on a television screen from the comfort of her living room on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. In the devastation afterwards, almost 2,000 people and an estimated 250,000 animals had perished. Miraculously, many pets did manage (...) to survive. But in the months that followed the hurricane, thousands of them were fending for themselves in the ruins of devastated neighborhoods. They roamed the streets in feral packs or struck out alone. Their plight triggered a grassroots rescue effort unlike any this country had ever seen, and while relief organizations such as the Red Cross were tending to the human survivors, and movie stars and celebrities were airlifting food and endorsing seven-figure checks, a much smaller and meagerly funded effort was underway to save the four-legged victims. With no prior experience in disaster response and no real grasp of the hell that awaited them, scores of animal lovers, including McLaughlin, made their way to the Gulf Coast to help in any way they could. Including photos from four-time Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Carol Guzy, Mississippi Barking spans the course of two years as McLaughlin and others ventured into the wreckage of the Gulf Coast to rescue the animals left behind. McLaughlin tells the moving stories of the people she met along the way, both those who lost everything to the hurricane and those working beside her rescuing and transporting animals away from the neglected, derelict conditions in which they barely survived. Within this story of tragedy and cruelty, suffering and ignorance, Mississippi Barking also bears witness to selfless acts of bravery and compassion, and the beauty and heroics of those who risked everything to save the animals that could not save themselves. (shrink)