Biographical Experiences Research Articles

Changing from Visibility to Invisibility—An Intersectional Perspective on Mixedness in Switzerland and Morocco

In the context of intermarriage, mixedness can take different forms. Most often, it refers to a mix of class, religion, nationality, ethnicity or ‘race’ in a couple. In this article, I go beyond a separate analysis of categories, analyzing the interrelation of these factors. The article discusses how and under which circumstances mixed children become visible in Switzerland and Morocco using a comparative and intersectional approach to mixedness. Based on 23 biographical narrative interviews, I analyze three situations of stigmatization: racialization, language practices and othering due to religious affiliation. Stigmatization processes due to mixedness, it is argued, are a relational phenomenon depending not only on markers such as ‘race’, ethnicity and religion but also on their interplay with gender, class, language and biographical experiences. The results suggest that mixed individuals have found creative ways to navigate their visibility: they normalize their binational origin, look for alternative spaces of belonging, emphasize their ‘Swiss-ness’ or ‘Moroccan-ness’, use languages to influence their social positioning or acquire knowledge about their binational origin in order to confront stigmatizations. The study reveals further that processes of othering due to mixedness are not only an issue in ‘Western’ societies that look back on a long history of immigration and have pronounced migration discourses. Even in Morocco, a country where immigration has so far been a marginal phenomenon, the importance of social hierarchies for the positioning of people of binational origin is evident.

Queer subjectivities in hospitality labor

AbstractThis paper explores the experiences of queer workers in the service economy with a focus on hospitality labor. Studies of gender, sexuality and service labor approached mainstream service work as a scene of compulsory heterosexuality, while literature on the position of queer workers has tended to approach work in terms of structural inequalities that prevent queer workers from participating in the labor market, and has therefore focused on notions of diversity and inclusion as frameworks for understanding how the heteronormativity of service relationships can be overcome. This paper shifts focus to examine how queer subjectivities are enacted within the disciplinary requirements of service labor, and on the way that workers negotiate and contest their positioning at work. The paper situates the subjectivities and laboring practices of queer workers at the nexus of tensions between heteronormativity and the politics of diversity in service venues, and examines how workers negotiate and contest their positioning at work. We explore the normativities that shape permissible queer embodiment at work and show how biographical experiences specific to queer workers inform their laboring practices. The paper shows that queer workers in mainstream hospitality venues are enrolled into a specific mode of interactive service labor that capitalizes on their queer biographies, requires highly cultivated relational capacities, and repositions work as a site of political intervention.

Educational Transitions in War and Refugee Contexts: Youth Biographies in Afghanistan and Austria

This article addresses educational transitions under conditions of multiple insecurities. By analyzing empirical data of two research projects with youths in Afghanistan and refugee students in Austria, we show how young peoplemake sense of the social and educational inequalities they encounter on their educational pathways within different national, socio‐political, and institutional contexts. We present in‐depth analyses of two cases to elaborate how young people in different parts of the world conceive of their futures when basic security needs are not met, and how they make sense of the social and educational inequalities they face during their transition processes. After living through repeatedly fractured perspectives, young people have to make sense of their biographical experiences and continuously (re)design their plans while facing uncertain futures. In the Afghan Youth Project, we reconstructed a collective—and morally charged—biographical orientation of future plans. This orientation can also be understood as a critical response to persistent fragility and inequality and suggests an imagined generational hold and sense of belonging. In the Austrian project Translating Wor(l)ds, we reconstructed continuing experiences of educational exclusion, marginalization, and devaluation in different migration societies throughout refugee routes. Educational transitions, which can be challenging for all young people, take on special relevance under these conditions. Combining biographical and socio‐psychological research perspectives allows us to reconstruct educational processes as cumulative, non‐linear processes and to reveal the ambiguities, contradictions, and ruptures woven into them, as well as the subjects’ constructions of sense and agency.

Weed Central: Cannabis Specialists and Polydrug Vendors in Mexico City

Findings discussed in this article addressed a gap in the literature on cannabis markets in Mexico. This article primarily draws on interviews with ( N = 64) street drug dealers including 24 incarcerated ones, and ethnographic work in 3 impoverished neighborhoods in Mexico City. We find that cannabis sellers enter the profession through early biographical experiences that are reinforced throughout adolescence. Dealing in the context of this cannabis culture is not only acceptable in the present but also viewed as inherently part of their future. Further analysis reveals a typology of dealers that tends to be marked by the transition from cannabis specialists to polydrug vendors. As dealers progress to more profitable sales of hard drugs, they tend to lose the trust and support of neighborhood residents who view their suppliers, clients, and associates as dangerous. We conclude with policy interventions uniquely derived from ethnographic research that are intended to minimize the risk of escalating to more serious drug distribution while preserving community stability and cohesion.

Motherhood of a woman with intellectual disability – retrospection of biographical experiences

Patentowo of people with intellectual disability is stilo a sensitive and controversial issue. Despite of implementation of the concept of normalization, subjectivity and emancipation, the right to fulfill parental roles is taken away from these people. It comes from a social perception of people with intellectual disabilities as unable to self-reliant and responsible functioning. Previous studies show needs of this group of people, who want not only to get married, but also to express themselves in parental roles.
 The aim of the article is to present the result of studies related to subjective interpreting and constructing biographies of mothers with intellectual disabilities. The researches were governed by those people’s insufficient knowledge about defining motherhood and willingness to get answers to questions related to things, which from mother’s perspective, are individual and inimitable. Researches were set in an interpretative paradigm and biographical method was used. In thematic narrative interviews took part six women/mothers with intellectual disability who have children. During analysis there were separated few categories, which shows motherhood from subjective mothers’ experiences perspective. Categories isolated during analysis and interpretation made a wide range of individual meanings given to motherhood, which is experienced by women with intellectual disability. The studies, based on mothers’ personal interpretations, showed different faces of motherhood, which is defined as love, happiness, satisfaction, dream, but also as duty, difficulty, fear, loneliness, helplessness or even failure. The studies also showed social and cultural context in which mothers were set. Meanings given to a motherhood were based on subjective women’s experiences and they may be a result of lack of full acceptance of people’s with intellectual disabilities relationships and their parenthood. It may also be a result of participants’ struggles not only with children’s behaviour and growth issues, but also with effects of their own disability.

Bourdieusian Self-Analyses as a Japanese Sociologist

Iso's article painstakingly reviews his research on the epistemology of PB's sociology. His biographical experience (especially the transition across three different countries, Japan, the US, and France) is presented and interpreted by using bourdieusian categories. The author argues that Bourdieu's conception of reflexivity should not remain pure speculation but has to be concretely put into practice, with regard to everyday life situations

Parentification: identification and analysis of educational environments. Biographical perspective

Parentification is a phenomenon of reversal of intrafamily roles between children and parents (Minuchin, 1968). Children become persons responsible for the family system, assuming the roles, instrumental and emotional, of adults – parents. The available literature on the subject of research allows for the identification of specific family situations as circumstances favourable for the occurrence of this process. Each family as a group with specific bonds functions in various contexts, which in social pedagogy can be called "environments". This article transmits the category of educational environments to the biographical experiences of parentified people. The author identifies, analyses and describes them using fragments of (auto)biographical narrative interviews. Retrospective approach to family experiences allows, by narrators, to define the distinguished environments as a potential and a biographical reference point that helps to apply individual strategies of coping with difficult, sometimes traumatic experiences, related to the reversal of roles in the family.

Becoming an Artist: A Surprising Biographical Project

The aim of the following essay is to provide a more precise analytical insight into the development of artistic mastery and artistic identity. The professional biography of a young sculptor, told by herself, serves as the qualitative data basis. The interpretation method applied here is a variant of the so-called ‘reconstructive hermeneutics’ developed in a range of own qualitative studies. Theoretical background is Michael Polanyi’s phenomenological knowledge theory. The interpretation discovers interesting stages of the protagonist’s artistic development: hidden influences from childhood and youth, ambivalent experiences during the various studies, a surprising ‘coming out’ as an artist, a sort of ‘inauguration’ and finally a deep trust in her own artistry. The surprising result is not only a profound insight into the complex process of artistic creativity and the paradoxical becoming process of artistic identity, but also the discovery of clear limits of Polanyi’s knowledge model as it ignores the undeniable influence of biographical experience on the tacit knowing of gaining artistic mastery.

TRAJETÓRIAS ATIVISTAS DE MULHERES IDOSAS NA PÓS-DITADURA DO CHILE

Abstract: Old age among older women is usually described as a stage in which multiple changes, losses and gender discrimination are experienced. However, little has been explored about the biographical experience of aging. In this article, we identify how older women activists of the Agrupación Bordadoras por la Memoria in the city of Valparaíso, Chile, narratively construct trajectories of political action. We conducted a qualitative study with biographical interviews following proposal of life narratives. Their biographical itineraries show a continuum in their political action and a questioning of the neoliberal system. Through their embroideries, they contribute to the struggle for memory and social justice. They re-signify their activism in old age, including new repertoires of action and projects, through practices of sorority. We conclude the importance of disputing old age from the conventional life cycle, making room for agentialized feminine trajectories.

The biographical experience of being a teacher as the essence shaping lifelong learning practices

The biographical experience of being a teacher as the essence shaping lifelong learning practices

Parnicki a Rosja. Rekonesans

The article considers issue of the connections between Teodor Parnicki, the Polish author of historical novels, and Russia. His attitude has its origins in biographical experiences. Knowledge of Russian culture is evident especially in the early work of Parnicki, and above all – in literary criticism of the interwar period. Careful reading shows that the sketches and reviews are a conservative critical project, the subject of which is Soviet social and cultural policy and communism in general. This article also complements the current state of research (who did not address this issue), while being a contribution to further research.

Educational Support of a Student with ADHD. An Analysis of Parents’ Biographical Experiences

The aim of this paper is to present the results of a study on the subjective interpretation and the construction of biographies by parents of children with ADHD. The research was driven by insufficient knowledge regarding the definition of the support offered at school to a child with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder among parents and to determine what is important and unique from a parental perspective. The presented studies were constructivist, interpretative studies using the biographical method. Narrative interviews were conducted with parents of children with ADHD living in Poland. Reconstruction of their parental experiences allowed an understanding of their individual feelings and experiences, which showed “the truth” about the educational support provided to a child. The aim of the studies was a reconstruction of the narrative and an analysis of the subjective meanings which parents give to the educational support that is offered to their children at school. The central thesis took the form of a question: How did parents interpret their own experiences related to educational support given at school to a child with ADHD? The analysis of the narration shows different parental experiences regarding the educational support received. The reality reconstructed by examined parents is complex and consists of hope and expectations, but also doubts, powerlessness and helplessness. Some parts of the narration are poignant, sorrowful and rife with feelings of loneliness, which is a consequence of misunderstanding a specific child’s needs. The other parts of the narrative are dominated by happiness and joy caused by the support that a student received and its effects. By speaking about the help which was received at school, the parents expose their personal feelings towards that event, and they show their individual interpretation of the reality that they experienced. They give subjective meaning to a narrative that they feel is significant.

Experiences of women with Zika virus (ZIKV) versus the provision of health services in two cities in Colombia: A qualitative study.

In February 2016, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the epidemic of the ZIKA virus (ZIKV) in Latin America to be a public health emergency. In Colombia, 11,944 pregnant women registered a ZIKV infection during the epidemic. So far, little is known about the experiences of women infected with ZIKV during their pregnancy, especially those relating to the provision of health services during the period of the epidemic. To explore the experiences of pregnant women diagnosed with ZIKV infection about the provision of health services in two Colombian cities, considering the perspective of sexual and reproductive rights. Qualitative study under the grounded theory approach, which uses semi-structured interviews as tools to explore the biographical experience of mothers during their gestation process and ZIKV infection, dividing the interview into two broad categories: before and during pregnancy. Twenty-two women were interviewed, 10 in Cali and 12 in Villavicencio. The average age at the time of pregnancy was 27.6 years. Most women were not planning at the time of pregnancy and the pregnancy was unwanted. Most campaigns focused on mosquito eradication rather than on sexual and reproductive health campaigns. The quality of health care was not sufficient, adequate, or appropriate. Also, the breakdown of the health system to deal with the pandemic was also noted. Some women were treated with disrespect by health professionals. Voluntary termination of pregnancy was inadequately advised, and women lost autonomy regarding decisions about their health. In the health care of ZIKV epidemics, it is necessary to include the gender perspective, more specifically, sexual and reproductive rights. In addition, these epidemics must be addressed through a comprehensive, appropriate, and not fragmented health system, in which sexual and reproductive rights must be mainstreamed in all health promotion and prevention programs.

Race, Genealogy, and the Genomic Archive in Post-apartheid South Africa

From the early 2000s onward, scientists, politicians, and intellectuals have presented the South African gene pool as a new archive for the new nation, suggesting a non-racial unity in diversity through common human origins. In this discourse, population genomics and genetic ancestry allude to metaphors of shared kinship to overcome the legacies of race. However, a focus on the underlying practices of measuring and classification reveals how the genomic archive is implicated in the history of apartheid and its racialized subjectivities. Similarly, individual interpretations of genetic ancestry show that race is constantly brought forth in this archival process. The genomic archive interweaves measuring practices in the sciences with the politics of social and biographical experience—a relationship that is at the heart of genetic genealogies.

“No Such Faery Land, So Like the Real World”: Miles Coverdale’s Performance of the Utopian Spectacle

ABSTRACT Ticknor and Fields advertised The Blithedale Romance as a glimpse into Hawthorne’s six-month participation in George Ripley’s Brook Farm experiment. While Brook Farm had been largely forgotten by 1852, the novel’s appeal lay in its connection to its author, a sudden celebrity in the wake of The Scarlet Letter’s commercial success in 1850. As his novels attracted a growing fanbase, readers sought out Blithedale for the purpose of learning about Hawthorne’s past. Ticknor and Fields’s marketing efforts had expanded their print sphere beyond the immediate locality to address a national audience, thrusting fame and recognition on authors to a degree that could not have been previously imagined. Vexed that American readers had not critically examined the ramifications of this expanding print sphere, Hawthorne composes Blithedale to correct the equation of a fictional narrator with a novel’s author, a product of the evolving culture of literary celebrity. Insisting his text be classified as a romance, Hawthorne subverts any recognizable feature of the genre to elicit feelings of disorientation, frustration, and disappointment in readers expecting to access the author’s biographical feelings and impressions of the defunct transcendentalist commune. By situating his romance within a chapter from his own life and then failing to provide any insight as to his biographical experience, Hawthorne invites the reader to consider the changing dynamics of the relationship between author and audience.

The professionalisation of Islamic religious education teachers

ABSTRACT Although Islamic religious education (IRE) has been offered in Austrian public schools since 1982, public opinion and the general opinions of several stakeholders in the school system tend to be negative. One of the main reasons is the shortage of professionals, which led to recruiting personnel from different disciplines, who often lack the proper qualification for IRE. Public discourses do not consider the possibility of professionalisation after lateral entry into the career as an IRE teacher. Based on empirical research considering the biographical experiences and professional development of IRE teachers, the present paper examines how IRE teachers themselves perceive and asses their professionalisation and professionalism. The study’s findings show that professionalisation and recognition as a professional depend on many factors, such as the degree of teachers’ training and education at academic institutions, their work schedule, state accreditation, different types of employment contract, and more. The research results reveal, moreover, the different beliefs and views of IRE teachers regarding their profession and subject. This article focuses on the concept of performative competence staging as part of the professionalisation processes of IRE teachers in the Austrian context and beyond.

Doing ‘judgemental rationality’ in empirical research: the importance of depth-reflexivity when researching in prison

ABSTRACT Critical realist thought has theorised convincingly that epistemic relativism is constellationally embedded in ontological realism which in turn necessitates judgemental rationality. In social science, judgemental rationality involves acting upon plausible decisions about competing points of view. However, the tools for doing this are, as yet, under-articulated. This paper addresses this absence by articulating triangulation and depth-reflexivity as two tools for doing judgemental rationality in empirical research. It draws on the experiences of a diverse team working on an international comparative research project on conversion to Islam in prisons. It demonstrates how epistemic and relational gaps between researchers and research subjects can be bridged by mobilising the ‘laminated’ properties and personal attributes of a diverse research team that factors in attributes that are absent as well as those present. The biographical experiences of the team are analyzed in a variety of intersecting dimensions: faith, ethnicity/ethno-culture, gender, class and professionality.

Soundtrack of life: An fMRI study

Most people have a soundtrack of life, a set of special musical pieces closely linked to certain biographical experiences. Autobiographical memories (AM) and music listening (ML) involve complex mental processes ruled by differentiate brain networks. The aim of the paper was to determine the way both networks interact in linked occurrences. We performed an fMRI experiment on 31 healthy participants (age: 32.4 ± 7.6, 11 men, 4 left-handers). Participants had to recall AMs prompted by music they reported to be associated with personal biographical events (LMM: linked AM-ML events). In the main control task, participants were prompted to recall emotional AMs while listening known tracks from a pool of popular music (UMM: unlinked AM-ML events). We wanted to investigate to what extent LMM network exceeded the overlap of AM and ML networks by contrasting the activation obtained in LMM versus UMM. The contrast LMM>UMM showed the areas (at P < 0.05 FWE corrected at voxel level and cluster size>20): right frontal inferior operculum, frontal middle gyrus, pars triangularis of inferior frontal gyrus, occipital superior gyrus and bilateral basal ganglia (caudate, putamen and pallidum), occipital (middle and inferior), parietal (inferior and superior), precentral and cerebellum (6, 7 L, 8 and vermis 6 and 7). Complementary results were obtained from additional control tasks. Provided part of tLMM>UMM areas might not be related to ML-AM linkage, we assessed LMM brain network by an independent component analysis (ICA) on contrast images. Results from ICA suggest the existence of a cortico-ponto-cerebellar network including left precuneus, bilateral anterior cingulum, parahippocampal gyri, frontal inferior operculum, ventral anterior part of the insula, frontal medial orbital gyri, caudate nuclei, cerebellum 6 and vermis, which might rule the ML-induced retrieval of AM in closely linked AM-ML events. This topography may suggest that the pathway by which ML is linked to AM is attentional and directly related to perceptual processing, involving salience network, instead of the natural way of remembering typically associated with default mode network.

“You Can Make a Difference”: Teachers’ Agency in Addressing Social Differences in the Student Body

Teachers are key players in transforming the education system (van der Heijden et al., 2015). They shape educational processes, influence school policies, and make day‐to‐day decisions that have a direct effect on students (Vähäsantanen, 2015). Yet we currently know very little about whether they can contribute to the creation of social equality of opportunity. This article focuses by way of example on the experiences and interpretative schemes of teachers in Germany, as the country is known for its highly selective school system. It draws on data from an exploratory study based on 20 narrative interviews (Rosenthal, 2018) with schoolteachers at three comprehensive schools in East and West Germany, which were selected because comprehensive schools in Germany see themselves as a more equal‐opportunity form of education. The article begins by identifying four types of teacher action orientations in addressing the social differences of schoolchildren. Unexpectedly, only a few teachers exhibited a socially conscious inclination to act—for example, by providing targeted support to schoolchildren from socially disadvantaged households. In the second step, by comparing teacher biographies, school environments, and historical imprints, the article attempts to identify certain conditions under which teachers perceive themselves as responsible for addressing social differences among students. Beyond illustrating the interplay of biographical experiences and school culture, the study’s east–west contextualization opens up a new perspective for examining the lingering implications of the German half‐day schooling model even after the introduction of all‐day schooling in 2003. One possible conclusion is that the transformation of the German school system from a half‐day to an all‐day model has not taken the tasks of teachers into account, which, as this article points out, would be important in making them aware of schoolchildren’s different social backgrounds and their effects on achievement.

Bruno Schulz i cyrk. Obrazy, metafory (auto)identyfikacje

The article is an attempt at analyzing the circus motifs in the work of Bruno Schulz. The first part is about circus activities during the life of Schulz, that he could see or hear about. His biographical experiences and also the influences of other artists made that he alluded to the circus in his work. He recalls in his novels famous characters associated with circus such as Bosco the magician, famous director of the American circus of curiosities, Barnum. He alludes to the events that actually took place – the arrival of the Panopticon in Drohobycz in 1913. In his stories and letters he uses circus metaphors. In prose, graphics and drawings there are figures of circus performers, clowns, freaks. He identified himself with Pierrot in his self-portraits. Not only Schulz perceived himself in this role –apparently Witkacy was supposed to paint a portrait of him in a Pierrot costume.