Smadar Ben Asher - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Smadar Ben Asher
Social Identities
The desire of a minority group to integrate into society on equal terms with the majority is ofte... more The desire of a minority group to integrate into society on equal terms with the majority is often expressed through the first-generation university degree holders of children sent by their parents to the schools of the majority group. The present study describes the multi-identities of Bedouin men and women who studied in the majority education system, a Jewish public school with Hebrew as its language of instruction with a different ethnic, religion, political, and cultural milieu. From the perspective of the theory of social representations, the findings point to a variety of strategies that Bedouin students have utilized in refusing to perform stereotypically minority identities. They force us to reframe their identities showing that they are capable of adopting emancipated representations to create a space in accord with the changing nature of Bedouin society. From their retrospective view, we learned that men built a space that combines representations of what we call “both worlds” while women found themselves managing multiple identities, conflict between roles, social relationship and life stages. The contribution of the research lies in the in-depth understanding of the interpersonal processes associated with social experiences of minority students in their own land (not immigrants), showing how they develop, adopt, and retain multiple identities, straddling social borders.
Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, Dec 15, 2022
We test Foster’s enduring assertion that “the best vocational education is an academic degree” by... more We test Foster’s enduring assertion that “the best vocational education is an academic degree” by examining a case study of Israeli Bedouin women and men, young professionals who shared with us their personal stories of their parents taking them out of their local separate but equal schools and moving them to the majority schooling system. The narratives we collected enabled us to follow the education journey of Bedouin children whose achievements are attributable not to institutional initiatives but to grassroot alternatives where parents and their children secured their own vocational future. We outline the professional journey of 16 men and women who moved to a Kibbutz school, mastered the majority language, matriculated, and confidently acquired academic degrees. Their narratives attest to professionalization and self-fulfillment but also awareness of the context of their upbringing and the daily pressures to sustain their social equilibrium. These young professionals fashioned themselves in the interstices between identities, developing both a hunger to participate in the global marketplace and loyalty to the local. Ending up holding jobs that contributed to their own society, and refusing to perform stereotypically minoritized vocational identities, they achieved the kinds of lives they have reason to value. Compelled to honor their journeys, we conclude that our case study corroborates Foster’s finding that the best vocational education is an academic degree, as reflected in professional achievement and enhanced opportunities for social mobility.
Qualitative Health Research
Introduction Although extensive research examined time perceptions among patients in the emergenc... more Introduction Although extensive research examined time perceptions among patients in the emergency department (ED), studies on temporal awareness among emergency physicians is scant. Salutogenics is the theoretical anchor. Methods The sample comprised ten emergency resident physicians from an Israeli public tertiary hospital. Narrative interviews were conducted. To determine the theme of the study, Adlerian narrative analysis was performed. To identify categories, semantic and content analyses were performed. Results Adlerian narrative analysis highlighted temporal awareness as a strong theme across interviews. Semantic and content analyses identified categories within temporal awareness. Analyses revealed a movement among three subcategories: A clinical task in which physicians rapidly shift along seven distinct times, temporal awareness shaping their work experience, and temporal awareness as inhibiting or enabling relationships with patients. Data-analyses identified two groups o...
Frontiers in Public Health, 2022
Purpose: Hospitals aspire to provide patient-centered care but are far from achieving it. This qu... more Purpose: Hospitals aspire to provide patient-centered care but are far from achieving it. This qualitative mixed methods study explored the capacity of hospital directors to shift from a hospital systemic-view to a suffering patient-view applying the Salutogenic theory.Methods: Following IRB, we conducted in-depth narrative interviews with six directors of the six Israeli academic tertiary public hospitals, focusing on their managerial role. In a second meeting we conducted vignette interviews in which we presented each director with a narrative of a suffering young patient who died at 33 due to medical misconduct, allowing self-introspection. Provisional coding was performed for data analysis to identify categories and themes by the three dimensions of the sense-of-coherence, an anchor of Salutogenics: comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness.Results: While at the system level, directors reported high comprehensibility and manageability in coping with complexity, at the...
Journal of Refugee Studies, 2020
The study focuses on refugee children who live in a temporary transit camp on the Island of Lesbo... more The study focuses on refugee children who live in a temporary transit camp on the Island of Lesbos in Greece, and attend a unique school, which, in the camp’s temporary conditions, endeavours to provide the children with safety, security, and an adaptive learning experience. It examines hope among the refugee children by means of the Children’s Hope Scale (Snyder, 1997), which was administered to 132 children aged 6-16 who attend the school. The general hope scores among the refugee children were similar to those found in other children’s populations. Hope scores in the Adolescent group (aged 12-16) were lower than in the other groups, and highest in the Intermediate group (aged 9-12). Additionally, differences were found between groups of children from different countries of origin. The findings indicate that the Adolescent children are more aware of the difficulties and dangers entailed in fleeing, and of the price they have paid for leaving their homes and being cut off from thei...
Qualitative Research in Psychology, 2018
Life stories have been the focus of narrative theory and research in psychology for decades. Desp... more Life stories have been the focus of narrative theory and research in psychology for decades. Despite the wealth of knowledge accumulated on this narrative type, a central aspect has remained disregarded, that is, the different styles in which life stories unfold. Although there are references to the process within which life stories are produced, emphasizing selection as its organizing principle, no efforts have been made to explore the diverse modalities within which narrative selection forms a life story. In this study we seek to identify and characterize styles of narrative selection in crafting life stories and contribute to filling the existing gap in their understanding. In analyzing the life stories of 38 Israeli educational counseling students, according to the selection mechanism model, we identified five typical crafting styles: bead-threading, weaving, patchworking, collage-making, and stitching-unstitching. We demonstrate these styles and discuss possible links between crafting style and the well-studied aspects of narrative content and form/structure. The essential question of what may explain one's "choice" of a particular crafting style is addressed.
Papers on Social Representations, 2003
This study examines how a dialog functions when new information constituting emancipated social r... more This study examines how a dialog functions when new information constituting emancipated social representations and involving external threat, undermines the confidence of parents of reserve naval commandos in their hegemonic representations. They get together as a group and through joint dialogue coconstruct polemic representations from the former hegemonic and emancipated ones. This chain of events followed news regarding high incidence of cancer and other virulent diseases in soldiers who during their military service trained in the waters of a river contaminated with hazardous petrochemicals. This news was incompatible with the hegemonic representations that acknowledge the existence of an underlying contract with the state, according to which the state undertakes parental responsibility for soldiers' well being. A group of parents of elite naval commandos, whose previous representations were shaken, got together to take action. Through the communication among parents the new emancipated and the former hegemonic representations were constructed into polemic ones, which also enabled them to construct also new action scenarios for fighting against the authorities. Their aim was to get the state to acknowledge its responsibility for the health of the soldiers who fell ill. Consequently, the parents were able to re-adopt previous hegemonic representations that enabled them to resume their lives as civilians who have faith in the traditional contract between the individual and the state.
Mortality, 2020
This study aims to examine the experience of national widows, who are expected by the state to pr... more This study aims to examine the experience of national widows, who are expected by the state to practice commemoration labor. We claim that the state puts pressure on the widows, either openly or covertly, to perform commemoration labor, thereby depriving them of their right to private grief suited to their personality and needs. It is further claimed that the demand on the widows for commemoration labor corresponds closely to the phrase coined by Bourdieu “symbolic violence”. Fifteen national widows whose husbands were killed in military action or by terrorism recounted in-depth interviews their social and emotional experiences in relation to bereavement. We show how these widows are expected to serve the State of Israel in collective ceremonies as commemoration torchbearers. The symbolic violence exercised upon the war widows to play their role in rituals as stipulated by the state is manifested in the system of pressure exerted on them to take part in the reproduction of militaris...
Teaching in Higher Education, 2021
The importance of reflective pedagogy is widely acknowledged in HE and is a cornerstone of the he... more The importance of reflective pedagogy is widely acknowledged in HE and is a cornerstone of the helping professions curricula, enhancing students' self-awareness and reflective skills. The literature emphasizes the virtues of reflection for the students' personal and professional growth but insufficiently addresses the emotional pain entailed. To contribute to filling this gap, we examined how 103 students of social work and educational counseling experienced growth and emotional difficulty during a three-stage Life Story Reflection (LSR). Content analysis of the students' written reflections upon completing the LSR and interviews conducted a year later revealed a strong sense of personal and professional growth, coupled with emotional difficulties. These two were perceived as intertwined components of the LSR, where feeling pain is necessary to develop personal and professional identity and skills. We discuss the implications for understanding students' autobiographical reflection and offer practical recommendations for implementing LSR in HE.
The present paper reports a case study about public deliberations in three Israeli kibbutzim rega... more The present paper reports a case study about public deliberations in three Israeli kibbutzim regarding a disputed school issue: whether to maintain a traditional in-kibbutz high school despite a heavy financial burden or to close it and send kibbutz youths to a public regional school The results served as a demonstration of a 'thinking group' (i.e. of how the collective aims of a group are achieved by the coordinated rhetorical behaviour of individuals according to the formal rules of the collective deliberations). First, video-recordings of six general assembly meetings in which the issue was discussed was analyzed as to their argumentative content. Second, the extracted arguments were presented to a sample of 342 kibbutz members to capture the distribution of opinions in the population. It is proposed that most kibbutz members were willing to preserve their collective living and saw the closure of their in-kibbutz school as a threat to their traditional collective identity. We observed a distinct form of public rhetoric during the deliberations in the general meetings which provides a podium for the disputed opinions, preserves the kibbutz shared identity representation and avoids social friction.
Social Sciences
The aim of this paper is to describe a unique, bottom-up model for building a school based on hum... more The aim of this paper is to describe a unique, bottom-up model for building a school based on humanistic intercultural values in a post-disaster/refugee area. We think that this model will be of use in similar contexts. This single-case study can teach us about the needs of refugee children, as well as provide strategies to reach these needs with limited resources in additional similar contexts. Additionally, this paper will outline a qualitative arts-based methodology to understand and to evaluate refugee children’s lived experience of in-detention camp schools. Our field site is an afternoon school for refugee children operated and maintained by volunteers and refugee teachers. The methodology is a participatory case study using arts-based research, interviews, and observation of a school built for refugee camp children in Lesbos. Participants in this study included the whole school, from children to teachers, to volunteers and managers. The research design was used to inform the ...
Journal of Political & Military Sociology
Journal of Human Rights and Social Work
The Journal of Experimental Education
Radio Journal:International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media
the spontaneous discourse of radio presenters in states of security emergency aBStract Scholars f... more the spontaneous discourse of radio presenters in states of security emergency aBStract Scholars from various research disciplines have focused on ways of helping a civilian population withstand mass natural or human-instigated disasters. The present study examines the theoretical principles suggested by Hobfoll et al. (safety, calming, efficacy, connectedness and hope) by an analysis of the spontaneous discourse of educational radio presenters during emergency broadcasts when the region's residents live under the constant danger of rocket fire. This study analysed 198 broadcasting hours sampled from three different periods of military conflict (2008−14). The radio presenters' spontaneous discourse was analysed by content, drawing a distinction between resilience-promoting (function) and resilience-impairing (dysfunction) messages. The findings show that despite the presenters' intention to help the community contend with the difficult situation, numerous resilience-impairing messages also appeared in their spontaneous discourse. The present study contributes by providing an additional layer of theoretical research on interventions in community stress situations and looks at utilizing the potential inherent in educational radio as a tool to aid development of community resilience.
Social Identities
The desire of a minority group to integrate into society on equal terms with the majority is ofte... more The desire of a minority group to integrate into society on equal terms with the majority is often expressed through the first-generation university degree holders of children sent by their parents to the schools of the majority group. The present study describes the multi-identities of Bedouin men and women who studied in the majority education system, a Jewish public school with Hebrew as its language of instruction with a different ethnic, religion, political, and cultural milieu. From the perspective of the theory of social representations, the findings point to a variety of strategies that Bedouin students have utilized in refusing to perform stereotypically minority identities. They force us to reframe their identities showing that they are capable of adopting emancipated representations to create a space in accord with the changing nature of Bedouin society. From their retrospective view, we learned that men built a space that combines representations of what we call “both worlds” while women found themselves managing multiple identities, conflict between roles, social relationship and life stages. The contribution of the research lies in the in-depth understanding of the interpersonal processes associated with social experiences of minority students in their own land (not immigrants), showing how they develop, adopt, and retain multiple identities, straddling social borders.
Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, Dec 15, 2022
We test Foster’s enduring assertion that “the best vocational education is an academic degree” by... more We test Foster’s enduring assertion that “the best vocational education is an academic degree” by examining a case study of Israeli Bedouin women and men, young professionals who shared with us their personal stories of their parents taking them out of their local separate but equal schools and moving them to the majority schooling system. The narratives we collected enabled us to follow the education journey of Bedouin children whose achievements are attributable not to institutional initiatives but to grassroot alternatives where parents and their children secured their own vocational future. We outline the professional journey of 16 men and women who moved to a Kibbutz school, mastered the majority language, matriculated, and confidently acquired academic degrees. Their narratives attest to professionalization and self-fulfillment but also awareness of the context of their upbringing and the daily pressures to sustain their social equilibrium. These young professionals fashioned themselves in the interstices between identities, developing both a hunger to participate in the global marketplace and loyalty to the local. Ending up holding jobs that contributed to their own society, and refusing to perform stereotypically minoritized vocational identities, they achieved the kinds of lives they have reason to value. Compelled to honor their journeys, we conclude that our case study corroborates Foster’s finding that the best vocational education is an academic degree, as reflected in professional achievement and enhanced opportunities for social mobility.
Qualitative Health Research
Introduction Although extensive research examined time perceptions among patients in the emergenc... more Introduction Although extensive research examined time perceptions among patients in the emergency department (ED), studies on temporal awareness among emergency physicians is scant. Salutogenics is the theoretical anchor. Methods The sample comprised ten emergency resident physicians from an Israeli public tertiary hospital. Narrative interviews were conducted. To determine the theme of the study, Adlerian narrative analysis was performed. To identify categories, semantic and content analyses were performed. Results Adlerian narrative analysis highlighted temporal awareness as a strong theme across interviews. Semantic and content analyses identified categories within temporal awareness. Analyses revealed a movement among three subcategories: A clinical task in which physicians rapidly shift along seven distinct times, temporal awareness shaping their work experience, and temporal awareness as inhibiting or enabling relationships with patients. Data-analyses identified two groups o...
Frontiers in Public Health, 2022
Purpose: Hospitals aspire to provide patient-centered care but are far from achieving it. This qu... more Purpose: Hospitals aspire to provide patient-centered care but are far from achieving it. This qualitative mixed methods study explored the capacity of hospital directors to shift from a hospital systemic-view to a suffering patient-view applying the Salutogenic theory.Methods: Following IRB, we conducted in-depth narrative interviews with six directors of the six Israeli academic tertiary public hospitals, focusing on their managerial role. In a second meeting we conducted vignette interviews in which we presented each director with a narrative of a suffering young patient who died at 33 due to medical misconduct, allowing self-introspection. Provisional coding was performed for data analysis to identify categories and themes by the three dimensions of the sense-of-coherence, an anchor of Salutogenics: comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness.Results: While at the system level, directors reported high comprehensibility and manageability in coping with complexity, at the...
Journal of Refugee Studies, 2020
The study focuses on refugee children who live in a temporary transit camp on the Island of Lesbo... more The study focuses on refugee children who live in a temporary transit camp on the Island of Lesbos in Greece, and attend a unique school, which, in the camp’s temporary conditions, endeavours to provide the children with safety, security, and an adaptive learning experience. It examines hope among the refugee children by means of the Children’s Hope Scale (Snyder, 1997), which was administered to 132 children aged 6-16 who attend the school. The general hope scores among the refugee children were similar to those found in other children’s populations. Hope scores in the Adolescent group (aged 12-16) were lower than in the other groups, and highest in the Intermediate group (aged 9-12). Additionally, differences were found between groups of children from different countries of origin. The findings indicate that the Adolescent children are more aware of the difficulties and dangers entailed in fleeing, and of the price they have paid for leaving their homes and being cut off from thei...
Qualitative Research in Psychology, 2018
Life stories have been the focus of narrative theory and research in psychology for decades. Desp... more Life stories have been the focus of narrative theory and research in psychology for decades. Despite the wealth of knowledge accumulated on this narrative type, a central aspect has remained disregarded, that is, the different styles in which life stories unfold. Although there are references to the process within which life stories are produced, emphasizing selection as its organizing principle, no efforts have been made to explore the diverse modalities within which narrative selection forms a life story. In this study we seek to identify and characterize styles of narrative selection in crafting life stories and contribute to filling the existing gap in their understanding. In analyzing the life stories of 38 Israeli educational counseling students, according to the selection mechanism model, we identified five typical crafting styles: bead-threading, weaving, patchworking, collage-making, and stitching-unstitching. We demonstrate these styles and discuss possible links between crafting style and the well-studied aspects of narrative content and form/structure. The essential question of what may explain one's "choice" of a particular crafting style is addressed.
Papers on Social Representations, 2003
This study examines how a dialog functions when new information constituting emancipated social r... more This study examines how a dialog functions when new information constituting emancipated social representations and involving external threat, undermines the confidence of parents of reserve naval commandos in their hegemonic representations. They get together as a group and through joint dialogue coconstruct polemic representations from the former hegemonic and emancipated ones. This chain of events followed news regarding high incidence of cancer and other virulent diseases in soldiers who during their military service trained in the waters of a river contaminated with hazardous petrochemicals. This news was incompatible with the hegemonic representations that acknowledge the existence of an underlying contract with the state, according to which the state undertakes parental responsibility for soldiers' well being. A group of parents of elite naval commandos, whose previous representations were shaken, got together to take action. Through the communication among parents the new emancipated and the former hegemonic representations were constructed into polemic ones, which also enabled them to construct also new action scenarios for fighting against the authorities. Their aim was to get the state to acknowledge its responsibility for the health of the soldiers who fell ill. Consequently, the parents were able to re-adopt previous hegemonic representations that enabled them to resume their lives as civilians who have faith in the traditional contract between the individual and the state.
Mortality, 2020
This study aims to examine the experience of national widows, who are expected by the state to pr... more This study aims to examine the experience of national widows, who are expected by the state to practice commemoration labor. We claim that the state puts pressure on the widows, either openly or covertly, to perform commemoration labor, thereby depriving them of their right to private grief suited to their personality and needs. It is further claimed that the demand on the widows for commemoration labor corresponds closely to the phrase coined by Bourdieu “symbolic violence”. Fifteen national widows whose husbands were killed in military action or by terrorism recounted in-depth interviews their social and emotional experiences in relation to bereavement. We show how these widows are expected to serve the State of Israel in collective ceremonies as commemoration torchbearers. The symbolic violence exercised upon the war widows to play their role in rituals as stipulated by the state is manifested in the system of pressure exerted on them to take part in the reproduction of militaris...
Teaching in Higher Education, 2021
The importance of reflective pedagogy is widely acknowledged in HE and is a cornerstone of the he... more The importance of reflective pedagogy is widely acknowledged in HE and is a cornerstone of the helping professions curricula, enhancing students' self-awareness and reflective skills. The literature emphasizes the virtues of reflection for the students' personal and professional growth but insufficiently addresses the emotional pain entailed. To contribute to filling this gap, we examined how 103 students of social work and educational counseling experienced growth and emotional difficulty during a three-stage Life Story Reflection (LSR). Content analysis of the students' written reflections upon completing the LSR and interviews conducted a year later revealed a strong sense of personal and professional growth, coupled with emotional difficulties. These two were perceived as intertwined components of the LSR, where feeling pain is necessary to develop personal and professional identity and skills. We discuss the implications for understanding students' autobiographical reflection and offer practical recommendations for implementing LSR in HE.
The present paper reports a case study about public deliberations in three Israeli kibbutzim rega... more The present paper reports a case study about public deliberations in three Israeli kibbutzim regarding a disputed school issue: whether to maintain a traditional in-kibbutz high school despite a heavy financial burden or to close it and send kibbutz youths to a public regional school The results served as a demonstration of a 'thinking group' (i.e. of how the collective aims of a group are achieved by the coordinated rhetorical behaviour of individuals according to the formal rules of the collective deliberations). First, video-recordings of six general assembly meetings in which the issue was discussed was analyzed as to their argumentative content. Second, the extracted arguments were presented to a sample of 342 kibbutz members to capture the distribution of opinions in the population. It is proposed that most kibbutz members were willing to preserve their collective living and saw the closure of their in-kibbutz school as a threat to their traditional collective identity. We observed a distinct form of public rhetoric during the deliberations in the general meetings which provides a podium for the disputed opinions, preserves the kibbutz shared identity representation and avoids social friction.
Social Sciences
The aim of this paper is to describe a unique, bottom-up model for building a school based on hum... more The aim of this paper is to describe a unique, bottom-up model for building a school based on humanistic intercultural values in a post-disaster/refugee area. We think that this model will be of use in similar contexts. This single-case study can teach us about the needs of refugee children, as well as provide strategies to reach these needs with limited resources in additional similar contexts. Additionally, this paper will outline a qualitative arts-based methodology to understand and to evaluate refugee children’s lived experience of in-detention camp schools. Our field site is an afternoon school for refugee children operated and maintained by volunteers and refugee teachers. The methodology is a participatory case study using arts-based research, interviews, and observation of a school built for refugee camp children in Lesbos. Participants in this study included the whole school, from children to teachers, to volunteers and managers. The research design was used to inform the ...
Journal of Political & Military Sociology
Journal of Human Rights and Social Work
The Journal of Experimental Education
Radio Journal:International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media
the spontaneous discourse of radio presenters in states of security emergency aBStract Scholars f... more the spontaneous discourse of radio presenters in states of security emergency aBStract Scholars from various research disciplines have focused on ways of helping a civilian population withstand mass natural or human-instigated disasters. The present study examines the theoretical principles suggested by Hobfoll et al. (safety, calming, efficacy, connectedness and hope) by an analysis of the spontaneous discourse of educational radio presenters during emergency broadcasts when the region's residents live under the constant danger of rocket fire. This study analysed 198 broadcasting hours sampled from three different periods of military conflict (2008−14). The radio presenters' spontaneous discourse was analysed by content, drawing a distinction between resilience-promoting (function) and resilience-impairing (dysfunction) messages. The findings show that despite the presenters' intention to help the community contend with the difficult situation, numerous resilience-impairing messages also appeared in their spontaneous discourse. The present study contributes by providing an additional layer of theoretical research on interventions in community stress situations and looks at utilizing the potential inherent in educational radio as a tool to aid development of community resilience.