Biographical Life Research Articles

Krieg, Flucht und Vertreibung

No AccessKrieg, Flucht und VertreibungGefühlserbschaften der Vergangenheit in der Begegnung mit Flüchtlingen heuteBettina AlbertiBettina AlbertiAuthors email:[email protected]Praxis-Gemeinschaft MeesenringMeesenring 223566 LübeckDeutschlandSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:Mar 2017https://doi.org/10.13109/weme.2017.69.2.173SectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail AboutAbstractWe as the post-war generation do not know war, flight and displacement from our own experience anymore. Nonetheless it is possible to find unwitting inheritances of feelings and hints of traumatic experiences in the families of the perpetrators and victims until today. A transgenerational point of view that includes the German contemporary history and thereby extends life biographies can help to understand oneself and others, especially in the encounter with the refugee topic, and can help to perceive and to acknowledge the effort of development. Previous article Next article FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Download book coverVolume 69Issue 2March 2017 ISSN: 0043-2040eISSN: 2196-8284HistoryPublished online:March 2017 PDF download

Searching for ‘success’: generation, gender and onward migration in the Iranian diaspora

This article uses the concepts of ‘transnational social fields’ and ‘habitus’ to explore the multifaceted role families play in shaping the aspirations of onward migrating youth. The article draws on biographical life history interviews conducted with the children of Iranian migrants who were raised in Sweden but moved to London, UK as adults. The findings of the study suggest that from a young age, all the participants were pressured by their parents to perform well academically, and to achieve high level careers. These goals were easier to achieve in London than in Sweden for several reasons. Interestingly, however, participants’ understandings of what constituted success and their motivations for onward migration were nuanced and varied considerably by gender. The study contributes to an understanding of the role of multi-sited transnational social fields in shaping the aspirations of migrant youths, as well as the strategies taken up by these migrants to achieve their goals.

Moved by the Spirit: Theological Literatures of LGBT Advocacy

ABSTRACTDebate over the question of how to effectively acknowledge and advocate for the presence of LGBT people as legitimate members of religious denominations and a population entitled to ministry has generated a substantial body of monographic literature within the field of theology. The earliest works were published during the era of the homophile movement in the 1960s prior to the Stonewall riot in 1969 that marks the beginning of the contemporary gay and lesbian civil rights movement. The subsequent decades have witnessed an expansion and diversification of this genre with the emergence of specific liturgies and ceremonies addressing significant LGBT life events, autobiographies and biographies of openly lesbian and gay clergy, and writings confronting issues of ethnicity and activism.

Quiet power of thinking (reflections on the fate of the historian of philosophy in the modern world)

The article discusses the creative way of Gennadiy Alyaev in the context of the history of philosophy, its tasks and specifics. Bibliography as a visible result of the philosopher’s creative activity can be explained not only in terms of the topics and problems studied, but also by taking into account his biography and socio-cultural realities of life. Therefore, region study is used as the methodology which involves studying “memory places”, the connection of “place”, “time” and “thought” of the philosopher, using verbal and non-verbal sources in the analysis. The history of philosophy is understood, firstly, as the history of philosophies, which are a polyphony of unique intellectual and ideological positions that recreate the work of individuals, secondly, as the activity of philosophical communities, helping to discover talents and to form a philosophical worldview. In the first aspect the philosophical and scientific work of G. E. Alyaev is aimed at studying the philosophy of S. L. Frank – the thinker who uses both ethical and philosophical-anthro­po­lo­gi­cal discourses in order to understand the spiritual foundations of social being and create intellectual conditions for the moralization of social and political relations. The second aspect of the activity of the historian of philosophy is as important as the first one because it implies the historian of philosopher being responsible for the Others and for the actuality of Philosophy, that is, for creating the proper philosophical culture of people.

Confessions and Indiscretions: Translating the Self in the Southern Mahjar

Autobiographies constitute an important but understudied dimension of literature from the Southern Mahjar, the South American countries that received large numbers of Syrian and Lebanese migrants throughout the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A powerful example of the genre’s role in negotiating migrant identities is found in the two-part autobiography of the prominent Southern Mahjar writer Tawfīq Ḍuʿūn, published in São Paulo, Brazil under the titles Sīrat ḥayātī (The Biography of My Life) and Dhikrā al-hijrah: risālat al-muhājirīn al-sūriyyin wa-l-lubnāniyyin ilā ikhwānihim al-mutakhallifīn (Memories of Migration: A Message from the Syrian and Lebanese Emigrants to Their Brothers Left Behind) in the mid-twentieth century. Ḍuʿūn also released both volumes in Portuguese under the titles Confissões e indiscrições: meio século de experiências em quatro continentes (Confessions and Indiscretions: A Half-Century of Experiences on Four Continents) and A emigração sirio-libanesa às terras de promissão (Syro-Lebanese Emigration to the Promised Lands). This article traces the production of modern subjectivities across all four volumes of Ḍuʿūn’s autobiography. It considers how the heterogonous articulations of the modern subject highlighted in the texts often refashion categories of modernity in order to challenge their authority. The article draws particular attention to the role that self-translation plays in both producing and disrupting the stability of modern subjectivities, pointing to other possibilities for subject formation.

STUDI METODOLOGI HUKUM ISLAM: FIKIH PEMBAHARUAN DALAM PANDANGAN GAMAL AL-BANNA DAN RELEVANSINYA DENGAN PERKEMBANGAN FIKIH DI INDONESIA

This study is based on library research examines the discourse of fiqh reform in view of Gamal al-Banna. Gamal al-Banna is one of the younger brothers of Hasan al-Banna. This study has some questions: first, what is Gamal al-Banna’s opinion; second, how social and political biography that covers the life of Gamal al-Banna; third, how their relevance to the development of jurisprudence in Indonesia. By the qualitative research methods, analytical content, historical approach and content analysis are used to investigate the books related in gaining datas of Gamal al-Banna’s thought, while historical approach try to investigate how scope and biographies are in the neighborhood of Gamal al-Banna. The results of this study are: first, Gamal al-Banna reforms fiqh more moderate than his brother Hassan al-Banna; secondly, to know Gamal al-Banna's life biography; and third, determine its relevance to the development of Fiqh reform in Indonesia. Kata Kunci : Fikih, Pembaharuan, Gamal, Relevansi

Fitzgerald and Hemingway on Film: A Critical Study of the Adaptations, 1924–2013

Fitzgerald and Hemingway on Film: A Critical Study of the Adaptations, 1924–2013

Fitzgerald and Hemingway on Film: A Critical Study of the Adaptations, 1924–2013

Fitzgerald and Hemingway on Film: A Critical Study of the Adaptations, 1924–2013

Effects of personality on postdivorce partnership trajectories

Personality is known to be a key predictor for several aspects of close relationship functioning. Most likely, the influence of this psychological factor is even growing in contemporary societies, where the individual life biography is increasingly the result of personal preferences and less influenced by normative expectations and cultural institutions. In an era of high relationship instability, more and more people engage in a second union. Although it becomes increasingly relevant to study the effects of personality on close relationship functioning in higher order unions, this remained understudied until now. This study examines the impact of personality on partnership trajectories following divorce. First, we construct a typology of eight partnership trajectories, capturing the occurrence, order, and timing of different partnership events (e.g., repartnering, cohabiting, getting married) in the first 7 years after separation. Then, we use multinomial logistic regression to examine the association between personality and the post-separation partnership trajectories, thereby controlling for sociodemographic variables. The analyses are based on data from a large-scale representative survey, the Divorce in Flanders Survey. Results show that personality and sociodemographic factors are both important determinants for explaining post-separation partnership trajectories. Extraversion tends to increase the likelihood and speed of repartnering. Neuroticism lowers the stability in partnerships. Conscientiousness is related with a higher likelihood to remarry. A higher age at separation and the presence of children at home decrease the likelihood to repartner, while education increases this. The present study delivers an important contribution for unraveling part of the complex association between personality and partner relationship dynamics.

There is no Future in Humanitarianism: Emergency, Temporality and Protracted Displacement

The humanitarian system and people living with and in long-term refugee situations envisage the future differently. This article explores different notions of the future that may be found in humanitarian policies and among humanitarian workers. Understandings of emergency, crisis and ethics in humanitarianism have particular impacts on how situations of protracted displacement are understood. The policy context for Syrian refugees in Jordan is analysed with particular reference to the ‘humanitarian reason’ which tends to separate between biological and biographical lives. Here, the future and past are separated from the present in a process that decontextualizes forced migrants both temporally and spatially. Through focusing on what humanitarian workers do, practices that challenge currently accepted humanitarian ethics are identified. By way of conclusion, and supported by feminist discussions of temporality and the ethics of care, the article suggests some possible ways of integrating a concept of the future in humanitarianism.

Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature

Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature

Romantic turning points and patterns of leaving home: contributions from qualitative research in a southern European country

ABSTRACTThe process and timing of leaving home in Europe has been gaining academic attention the past decades. This is so because this demographic and transitional event provides evidence about the cultural and structural heterogeneity in Europe. Types and timing of conjugality and differences about housing markets, together with cultural contexts and values, are usually given as conjoint causes for the mentioned heterogeneity. But the effects of love-related events in the process and timing of leaving home do not begin or end at conjugal unions. Ruptures, heartbreaks, disputes and conjugal orientations have strong consequences in the trajectories towards adulthood. These effects can only be grasped through qualitative research, capable of giving love and affection the analytical protagonist role they deserve. Only accumulation of comparison-friendly qualitative knowledge on romantic trajectories can allow the study of the heterogeneity of conjugal trajectories. In this research, 52 Portuguese young adults were inquired by biographical interviews and life calendars. Holistic-form analysis provided evidence that the love-related events are significant for changes in the residential trajectories. Five cases were chosen to illustrate the three clusters identified: ‘long relationships and delayed departures’, ‘heartbreaks and breakups, speeding up residential autonomy’ and ‘out of the closet, into a new home’.

Introduction to the Special Issue: Advancing Career Intervention for Life Design

Life design has emerged as a new paradigm and practice for career intervention in the 21st century (M. L. Savickas, 2012). The creation of a multinational collaboration (Nota & Rossier, 2015; M. L. Savickas et al., 2009), the life-design paradigm and its practical uses amplify person-environment fit and developmental career models and methods that predominated during the 20th century. Life design does this by offering career development practitioners and researchers a contextualized approach and lifelong, holistic, contextual, and preventive counseling intervention framework that aims to increase (a) activity to shape interests, capacities, and aspirations; (b) career adaptability to cope with changes in self and situation; (c) narratability to articulate a clear identity and coherent personal life/career story; and (d) intentionality to give meaning to activities and experiences related to life career.This special issue of The Career Development Quarterly showcases seven works that apply and advance the life-design paradigm and its practices, particularly through the lens of career construction counseling (M. L. Savickas, 2012). Leading off, Laura Nota, Sara Santilli, and Salvatore Soresi (2016) advance computer-assisted career guidance approaches by describing and providing empirical support for the efficacy of a lifedesign-based online intervention for middle-school-age students. J. G. (Kobus) Maree (2016) then applies career construction counseling to the case of a mid-career, Black, South African man to show how lifedesign methods assist clients across diverse contexts to reconstruct and redesign their lives during periods of instability and change. Responding to the need for life-design career intervention efficacy studies, Annamaria Di Fabio (2016) describes a qualitative assessment tool for appraising client change based on life-design practices and offers initial empirical support for its utility. Revisiting the long-standing, if artificial, distinction between career counseling and personal counseling, Paulo Cardoso (2016) proposes an intervention framework for systematically infusing psychotherapy with life-design counseling practices. Next, Rubina Setlhare-Meltor and Lesley Wood (2016) show how multiple approaches, including interviews, card sorts, and genograms, can be used within a life-design framework and particularly to assist clients living within very marginalized and vulnerable circumstances. Suzanne Savickas and Tracy Lara (2016) then offer an interview with former National Career Development Association and American Counseling Association president Lee Richmond to demonstrate how biographical life portraiture promotes clients' self-reflection to comprehend continuity and coherence in their life-career stories. …

Ansprüche an Arbeit und Leben – Beschäftigte als soziale Akteure

Do employees want to have good working conditions – or do they demand them? The article argues that this makes a fundamental conceptual difference in the analysis of the orientation of employees and their self-constitution as social actors. Thus, we start with the distinction of “wishes” for and “expectations” of good working conditions. It is shown then that expectations made of work cannot be analysed without taking into account the biographical and social life; which are always and necessarily part of the demands made on work and life. At present, however, the self-confidence to make demands for good work has to be regarded as fundamentally unsettled, amongst those “normally” employed, i.e. in relatively stable employment. Yet, this uncertainty is not to be confused with the widely assumed internalisation of neoliberal invocations. It is precisely such internalisation that we do not find in the expectations of employees towards their work.

Democratic Performance and Park Chung-hee Nostalgia in Korean Democracy

Why, a quarter century after democratization, are Korean citizens so nostalgic about the former authoritarian Park Chung-hee government? What are the implications of this support for Korea's democratic deepening? To answer these questions, I offer empirical analyses of selected data from the Korea Democracy Barometer 2010 survey that confirm the relevance of two dimensions of political support to authoritarian nostalgia in Korea: the life biography model and the economic performance model at the system level. The results suggest a double-sided phenomenon: on the one hand, nostalgia based on a retrospective collective memory; on the other, citizens' critical view of the performance deficits of post-Park democratic governments in dealing with inequality in Korean society. As the findings elucidate, in spite of the challenges they face, emergent democratic governments must perform more effectively if they are to win citizens' support.

Overt and Covert Shandyism of Nabokov's Nikolai Gogol

In her article Overt and Covert Shandyism of Nabokov's Nikolai Margarit Ordukhanyan examines Vladimir Nabokov's 1942 novel, an unusual biography of the nineteenth-century Russian author. Ordukhanyan discusses parallels between Nabokov's biography of Gogol and Laurence Sterne's Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. She highlights the direct allusions and textual references Nabokov makes to Sterne's novel and argues that Nabokov uses Tristram Shandy as the model for creating and interpreting his biography of Gogol by fictionalizing Gogol and portraying him as a Shandean character. Further, Ordukhanyan discusses how Nabokov uses Sterne's novel to undermine the genre of literary biography.

Creativity and mood disorders: The enigmatic case of Isaak Il'ich Levitan (1860-1900).

Isaak Levitan (1860-1900) was one of Russia's most influential landscape artists. He lived a very short life, only 40 years, but left more than 1000 paintings. He suffered from mood fluctuations, and died as a result of serious heart disease. After an introduction related to the issue of creativity and mental disorders, a short biography of Levitan's life is outlined, followed by some examples of his mood and behavior. A section on the mood's reflection in Levitan's professional work is followed by a description of his romantic loves and disappointments and his relationship with his contemporary Russian, the writer Anton Chekhov.

Older people living alone at home with terminal cancer.

This study describes the lived experiences of older people coping with terminal cancer and living alone, focusing on how they face challenges of the biographical life changes from their disease progression. Face-to-face semi-structured interviews were conducted in two phases with palliative care clients of a community-based service in Western Australia (2009-2011): Brief interviews with 43 cancer patients who live alone and then in-depth interviews with 8 of them. Using biographical disruption as the analytical framework for interpreting the qualitative data, four main themes emerged: Biographical disruption: adjusting to change; Biographical continuity: preserving normality; Biographical reconstruction: redefining normality; and Biographical closure: facing the end. Biographical disruption was a suitable framework for analysis, permitting identification of the biographical disruptions of the individual's world and the reframing that is undertaken by the individual to maintain autonomy and independence while acknowledging and accepting their closeness to death. Understanding the factors associated with the individual's need to maintain their own identity will enable nurses working with this population to tailor support plans that meet the individuals' needs while maintaining or restoring the person's sense of self. Interventions that directly address end-of-life suffering and bolster sense of dignity and personhood need to be considered.

Constructing the story: How nurses work with families regarding withdrawal of aggressive treatment in ICU – A narrative study.

Specific communication practices used by experienced intensive care nurses who are comfortable working with dying patients and their families in ICU to reach consensus on withdrawal of aggressive treatment and shift to palliative care are lacking in the literature. However, there are seven international qualitative studies relevant to this research. Important themes related to communication were composed of four elements: general communication and relationship building, recognizing the need to transition to palliative care, facilitating palliative care, and providing dignified care through to death. To describe the specific communication practices experienced intensive care nurses' comfortable working with dying patients' use with families to negotiate consensus on withdrawal of aggressive treatment and/or shift to palliative are at end of life. A qualitative narrative study. Purposeful sampling was used to recruit nineteen experienced intensive care nurses. A narrative approach was used for data collection and analysis. Consistent with narrative inquiry the results describe an overall plot: "constructing the story" and five subplots that identify and describe communicative actions relevant to the plot. The five subplots are: (A) organizing and interpreting knowledge of different kinds from different sources; (B) learning who the patient is as a person and putting the medical diagnosis into the biographical life of the patient; (C) helping families see the deteriorating status of the patient; (D) imagining and acting on moral possibilities for end of life care; and (E) facilitating saying goodbye – the end of the story. Findings from this study enrich the understanding of how experienced nurses who are comfortable with dying patients communicate with families as they navigate the difficult path of transitioning from aggressive care to palliative care for their significant other in the intensive care unit. This research provides a beginning language that can enable caregivers to talk about and reflect on the complex communication necessary for good end of life care. The findings of this study have major implications for clinical practice and interdisciplinary education.

Charity Shops and the Imagined Futures of Objects: How Second-Hand Markets Influence Disposal Decisions when Emptying a Parent’s House

This article explores the processes whereby things are donated, or not donated, to charity shops. I draw on in-depth interviews conducted with adults who have sorted through the houses of older family members who have moved into residential accommodation, and in some cases subsequently died. The affective qualities of objects and the informants’ responsibilities to be ‘good’ family members by ensuring ‘safe passage’ for their parents’ possessions worked to ensure that many objects did not enter the second hand market, but were preserved within the family or wider social networks. Competing instincts to be ‘responsible consumers’ by not keeping things unnecessarily, worked to ‘move things along’ into charity shops, where informants believed the objects could come to be valued and singularised by other people. By providing an imagined future where goods can continue to be useful and have the opportunity to extend their biographical life, I argue that charity shops and other second-hand markets can help people to dispose of objects which they do not want to keep, but which they find difficult to throw away.