“Here nobody holds your heart”: Metaphoric and embodied emotions of birth and displacement among Karen women in Australia (original) (raw)
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Polemics of Healing: Storytelling, Refugees and Futures
2008
The plight of refugees has been well documented in a number of countries. Refugees represent the fail- ure of nation states to live peacefully and endow human rights to their citizens. A significant aspect of refugees'; stories concerns the ways in which they express their distress. In this paper we locate storytelling in the lives of Afghan refugee women living in Australia. We explore the tie between the body and metaphor and how the later is articulated via a language of distress. We also tie current constructions of refugees to the wider social sphere. Here, refugees are viewed in an array of negative stereotypes which mirrors the moral crisis of post-modernity. We suggest for the fostering of empathy towards refugees in the future as their stories allow us to become more humane, thereby providing a means of developing a higher level of consciousness.
2013
This study uses narrative analysis to explore the question: How do forced evictions impact the psychosocial health of displaced women in Phnom Penh, and what sources of risk and resilience frame how they manage the exigencies of displacement? I use Stress and Coping Theory to frame analysis of the narratives of evicted women in order to understand their lived experiences and pathways of adaptation. Analysis of 27 interviews with 22 women demonstrated highly diverse experiences and divergent outcomes. I present a typology of post-eviction socioeconomic pathways because women's coping strategies and adaptation are deeply grounded in the nature and degree of economic harm that they experienced. From this context, I explore how women coped with their displacement. Stress tended to manifest in the form of somatic ailments and rumination. Social support and livelihood capacity emerged as key protective factors. The better-off participants for whom eviction tended to represent harm to assets, community, and aspirations typically exhibited a great deal of anger and/or anxiety, and they experienced forced eviction as a discreet, tragic, and even traumatic event. By contrast, those who lived in poverty tended to manifest depression, hopelessness, and passive resignation. These women spoke of their forced eviction as a terrible but somehow normal event within lives characterized by the exploitation and suffering shouldered by the very poor. I conclude with recommendations for policymakers and social work practitioners. i Table of Contents Acknowledgements and Dedication .
Springer, 2019
This chapter illustrates the epistemological importance of the researcher's emotional reflexivity in ethnography conducted among vulnerable groups exposed to humanitarian interventions. I draw upon my research on the everyday experience and identity processes of children who live in the slums of Bangkok and who are supported, as disadvantaged 'slum children' (dek salam), by several local and international aid organizations. By means of ethnographic case studies, I shed light on the role of 'humanitarian emotions' in shaping affective interactions between compassionate social workers and victimized slum children. As I show, this emotional exchange responds to a broader set of cultural values, political-economic practices, and scientific discourses, including psychology. The chapter demonstrates how looking at the researcher's affects as epistemic data brings a deeper level of understanding to findings obtained during ethnography, especially in (but not limited to) humanitarian contexts. In Thomas Stodulka, Samia Dinkelaker and Ferdiansyah Thajib (eds.), 2019, Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography, New York: Springer, 29-48.
European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling, 2016
The mental health of refugees has been an increasingly-researched area, but has been criticised for having an individualised and symptom-focused approach to understanding the experience of forced migration. This paper attempts to respond to calls to address this culturally limited and incomplete way of conceptualising responses to experiences of persecution and terror bound up within global hegemony and power inequalities. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) was employed to analyse semi-structured interviews undertaken with six refugee mothers, with the aim of exploring how participants made sense of, and created meaning around parenting and family life in the UK. Three main themes emerged from the data analysis (a) loss as a constant companion to parenting; (b) a shifting view of the self as a mother; and (c) taking the good with the bad in family life. Methodological limitations, as well as implications for future research and clinical practice are discussed.
American Journal of Community Psychology
Research has highlighted the importance of Indigenous knowledge and cultural practice in healing from ongoing histories of trauma, dispossession, and displacement for Indigenous peoples in Australia and elsewhere. Connection with culture, Country, and kinship has been identified as protective factors for Aboriginal social and emotional well-being and as facilitating cultural healing. This paper draws on stories mediated through cultural practice specifically, Wayapa and bush-dyeing workshops, to explore how women resignified experiences and engaged in "healing work." Our collaborative analysis of the stories shared resulted in three main themes that capture dialogs about the need for culturally safe spaces, vulnerability and identity, and culture, Country, and place. Centering Aboriginal knowledge, our analysis shows the meanings of Country, spirituality, and the coconstitution of people, culture, and the natural environment. Through Indigenous cultural practice, the women "grew strength in relationship" as they engaged in the psychosocial processes of deconstruction, reclamation, and renarrating personal and cultural identities.
Medical personnel in public clinics in Fiji routinely contend that state-funded medical resources are misallocated on patients who complain of, but do not actually experience, physical pain. Frequently, these patients are identified as being Indo-Fijian women (i.e., women of South Asian origin in Fiji). In this article, I examine clinical interactions between medical staff and female Indo-Fijian patients to demonstrate how "real" and 'unreal' pain are distinguished in the clinical setting and to indicate some of the roles clinical encounters play in community processes that ascribe alternative meanings to physical pain. Focusing on how both physicians and women patients foster certain interpretations of physical pain over others, I argue that the category of 'unreal' pain, as employed by Fiji's physicians, consists of pain that medical professionals consider to be induced by psychological or physical, work-related stresses. I then show how Indo-Fijian women engage in a complementary but distinct discourse that emphasizes links between physical labor and pain and suggests that, in some cases, expressions of physical pain are as much an idiom of pride as an idiom of distress.
Narratives of forced migration are open to a variety of interpretations. In mental health, refugee narratives of arduous journeys in the face of systemic macro socio-political forces are often transformed from this context into a medicalized micro context of inner individual worlds. Both the dominant patho-genic lens of trauma studies and the growing salutogenic lens embodied in resilience research, often reflect a western cultural idiom of focusing on the individualized nature of these phenomena. Using qualitative data collected among refugees from Burma now settling in Australia, the article emphasizes the need for a more reflexive and expansive account of both suffering and hope within refugee narratives. It recounts these narratives within a conceptual framework which acknowledges the importance of the connections between the micro, individual experience and the macro, socio-political context. This is not only a question of political principle, but also a matter of listening to the voice of those who know most about the relationship between macro forces of
Gema Online Journal of Language Studies , 2017
Diverse methods and approaches have been utilised in researching the cultural bases of health, illness and wellbeing. Understanding the cultural representation of health and illness of particular communities becomes urgent especially when the community concerned is underserved in healthcare. In this project, we sought to examine the representations of health and illness by members of the Semai indigenous community through the use of metaphor analysis, a qualitative method in applied linguistics that attend to how people use language in real-world discourses to understand their conceptualisations of abstract ideas and emotions. From semi-structured interviews with the indigenous Semai people in a village in Malaysia, metaphors of health and illness were identified from the oral stories told by participants. Metaphors were identified and analysed following Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) conceptual metaphor theory that explains how people understand one idea in a conceptual domain through accessing resources in another conceptual domain. The results show that universal metaphors are dominant in representing embodied experiences while culturally influenced metaphors are important as vehicles of expression derived from their environment and folk beliefs. We argue that while culturally influenced metaphors may mark the participants as strange in their ways of thinking, a closer look at their underlying frameworks finds that they connect with universal bases that are intrinsic to all human experience. Understanding conceptual metaphors can contribute to the expansion of the locus of shared understanding between healthcare providers and the communities they serve.