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Abstract
In this essay, I articulate the ways in which my scholarship and personal life collided when I became an involuntary member in the antepartum unit of a major university hospital. I draw on research examples taken from my dissertation work in prison and my time in the hospital to illustrate the interconnectedness of these involuntary experiences. After I share these stories, I offer a brief interlude to reflect on the meaningfulness of approaching membership from a continuum-based perspective and the relative implications for health communication scholars, before ending with an articulation how this experience brought me to a more crystallized view of involuntary membership.
... Perhaps most importantly, my lived experience continued to inspire more opportunities for self-reflection in my role as researcher, coparticipant, and co-creator in the production of meaningful scholarship. (Peterson, 2016(Peterson, , p. 1050 Scholars in the social sciences and humanities design research and creative projects that explore, analyze, and portray the human condition. They pose questions and pursue answers. ...
... For some authors, their lived experiences gave rise to research and creative projects (Elman, 2017;Scherr & Mattson, 2012;Tikkanen, 2017;Willer, 2018). In other cases, scholars' lives came to echo the very issues they had studied for years (Golden, 2018;Peterson, 2016;Veksler, 2016;Yamasaki, 2018). With raw honesty, narrators reflect on the fragile boundaries between "insider" and "outsider" status (Johnson & Quinlan, 2017) and the thorny mesh of dilemmas that emerge when personal subjectivity is at the forefront of scholarship (Bute, 2011). ...
Health Communication launched the “Defining Moments” forum in 2009 to showcase the social and material power of storytelling. On its 10-year anniversary, we take stock of how authors have enacted “Defining Moments” including what was narrated, by whom, and why. In eight loosely coupled thematic clusters, we revisit the more than 75 published essays to date, finding value in ways that speak to the emerging and enduring issues of concern for health communication scholars. Across the essays, the maturation of health narrative theorizing is revealed by the sheer scope of topics addressed, coupled with the expanded voices and ways of voicing experience. Collectively, these essays have enlarged academic conventions and offered diverse entry points for refiguring the experience of illness and well-being.
... Other CHC scholarship uses narrative and performative frameworks to illuminate embodied power dynamics surrounding health and illness as they intersect with disability and ableism (Scott, 2012(Scott, , 2015Spencer, 2019) (in)fertility (Johnson and Quinlan, 2016); pregnancy (Peterson, 2016), heteronormativity (Arrington, 2012;Silverman et al., 2012;Hudak and Bates, 2018), aging (Roscoe, 2018); and dying (Tullis, 2013;Sharf, 2019). A particularly compelling autoethnographic CHC study explores a researcher's (lack of) credibility when she seeks treatment for chronic pain and encounters health care providers and community members who greet her pain-wracked body with doubt, skepticism, and even ridicule (Birk, 2013). ...
At the center of critical questions posed about power and health communication are issues of embodiment—whose bodies are judged to be healthy and whose are not, which identities are affirmed and privileged and which are stigmatized and marginalized, which material practices are pathologized and which are lauded. Critical health communication (CHC) research may be enacted by critical-interpretive researchers who employ critical embodiment theorizing frameworks that guide their questions posed, co-construction of data, and forms of analysis and representation. CHC researchers are uniquely poised to attend to the embodied aspects of health, illness, health care delivery, and public health in order to improve the health of local and global communities.
... This creates the interesting paradox of mothers holding a "powerless responsibility" being required to undertake and be responsible for mother-work, but "in accordance with the values and expectations of the dominant culture" 45, p.6 . Women in this study were involuntary members of a healthcare environment where they lacked agency over their own experience and that of their late preterm babies 46 . ...
Problem:
There is minimal research exploring women's experiences of caring for a late preterm baby. The emphasis in the literature is mostly baby centric.
Background:
The number of babies born late preterm is rising and women's views are largely unknown.
Aim:
What are the experiences of women who are caring for a late preterm baby?
Methods:
A feminist lens was the key philosophical underpinning. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 14 women.
Findings:
Women who become mothers' of late preterm babies have a complex journey. It begins with separation, with babies being cared for in unfamiliar and highly technical environments where the perceived experts are healthcare professionals. Women's needs are side-lined, and they are required to care for their babies within parameters determined by others. Institutional and professional barriers to mothering/caring are numerous.
Discussion:
Some of the women who were separated from their babies immediately after birth had difficulties conceiving themselves as mothers, and others faced restrictions when trying to access their babies. Women described care that was centred on their babies. They were allowed and expected to care for their babies, but only with 'powerless responsibility'. Many women appeared to be excluded from decisions and were not always provided with full information about their babies.
Conclusion:
Women whose babies are born late preterm would benefit from greater consideration in relation to their needs, rather than the focus being almost exclusively on their babies.
... an antepartum floor (Peterson, 2016), and the stigma of C-sections (Cripe, 2017). call. ...
This piece examines a 2-hour wait in an exam room and the impact the wait has on doctor/patient communication. Specifically, I detail part of the events that occurred during my 16-week prenatal check-up and how these events impacted my communication with my doctor and with the doctor’s office. I discuss the communication breakdown, the after effects of the events, as well as what this appointment and experience taught me about motherhood and myself.
Children with incarcerated parents (CIP) face higher burdens of mental illness owing to an accumulation of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) marked by racialized and classed stigma. Utilizing instruments co-created by our CIP advisory board youth within a broader Youth Voice project, semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 30 CIP, forming the primary data set for analysis within the present manuscript, in addition to two advisory board focus groups and 21 questionnaires. Drawing upon the culture-centered approach (CCA), this study explores CIP’s articulations of agency and positive identification, including narratives of strength, survival, and “good DNA” in making meaning of mental health experiences. Demonstrating a complex interplay of silence and voice, CIP agentically reframe mainstream narratives about problematic behavior as overt responses to inadequate structural support, challenge notions of the absent incarcerated parent, engage in the praxis of retailoring state mental health resources to align with their lived experiences and participate as active content creators and storytellers within community media spaces.
In this autoethnographic account of my experience as a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) mother, I bring attention to socially silenced health issues begging our acknowledgment. The lack of discourse about complications with pregnancies and births leave too many women and men shocked and traumatized by experiences that are far more common than we believe. Currently, 10 percent of pregnancies in the United States end in preterm birth, which are often accompanied by a variety of serious health conditions requiring newborns to be admitted to a NICU. Postpartum depression rates among NICU mothers are 40 percent and parents of NICU children are at high-risk for post-traumatic stress disorder. As I lived and continue making sense of this journey, narrative medicine has been a constant source of strength. My hope is that my family's story might enlarge our understandings of narrative medicine and its remarkable capacities as we live amid health challenges and learn to live with their lingering effects on our stories. Specifically, narrative medicine is a dynamic, relational experience capable of cultivating hope within contexts scattered with hardship, transformative in its immediate and long-term affective force.
Increasingly, women are subjected to examination throughout pregnancy and childbirth. Historically, pregnancy and childbirth were considered a natural, normal, woman-centered event. Presently, they are conceptualized as a dangerous time when a woman's health and that of her baby are at risk, thus requiring constant medical monitoring and intervention, often under the control of male physicians. As a consequence, women negotiate their experiences with pregnancy in a medicalized and fetocentric ideological context. The collection of stories in this article reveals the social and cultural contexts of women's lived experiences with pregnancy through a feminist lens. Short stories are used to give voice to women's experiences and to assert that women are the experts of their own health and well-being. Moreover, the use of narratives contributes to the dialogue of creative analytic practice and representation fostered by qualitative inquiry and feminist epistemologies.
Leading groups can be challenging and difficult. Leading groups in which members are involuntary and negative increases the level of difficulty and creates new dynamics in the group leading process. This article proposes specific skills and strategies for dealing with three specific issues related to involuntary members in groups: groups where all members are involuntary; groups where some members are involuntary; and groups with open membership where involuntary members join groups that are already in progress. The emphasis is on leaders using creative and multi-sensory interventions to insure that members are actively engaged in the group process.
- Ellingson L. L.
Researching life and living research: A story of prisons in the US and Norway
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How medical interaction shapes and reflects the physician-patient relationship The Routledge handbook of health communication
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Qualitative research methods: Collecting evidence, crafting analysis, communicating impact
- S J Tracy