Demonstrating the therapeutic values of poetry in doctoral research: autoethnographic steps from the enchanted forest to a PhD by publication path

We rarely acknowledge the achievements of doctoral candidates who fought with all they had but still lost the battle and dropped out – we know so little about what becomes of them. This reflective article is about the betrayals of PhD supervisors in one institution, the trauma and stigma of withdrawing from that institution, writing poetry as a coping mechanism and the triumph in completing a Thesis by Publication (TBP) in another institution. Thus, I build on Lesley Saunders’s idea about using poetry to operate on ‘a personal capacity’ in educational research. Accordingly, I present an original autoethnographic poem and other poetic artefacts as well as reflections to sharpen the sociological eye of my story. In it, I merge two different segments of experiences in poetry – trauma and triumph – to draw an image of my doctoral journey, in the moment and in retrospection. By doing so, I illuminate the struggles involved in becoming an independent researcher. I also encourage practitioners to conceive that their negative experiences in doing educational research can be transformed into an achievement depending on the stand they take when faced with it. Certainly, poor academic performance can be closely associated with abandoning doctoral studies, but that is not always the case. Therefore, it is my hope that this autoethnographic work may instill hope in doctoral candidates who are still in the struggle to find a voice

Digging Them Out Alive

From 2013-2018, we taught a collection of interrelated law and social work clinical courses, which we call “the Unger clinic.” This clinic was part of a major, multi-year criminal justice project, led by the Maryland Office of the Public Defender. The clinic and project responded to a need created by a 2012 Maryland Court of Appeals decision, Unger v. State. It, as later clarified, required that all Maryland prisoners who were convicted by juries before 1981—237 older, long-incarcerated prisoners—be given new trials. This was because prior to 1981 Maryland judges in criminal trials were required to instruct the jury that they—the jury—had the ultimate right to determine the law. Our clinic helped to implement Unger by providing a range of legal services and related social services to many of these prisoners. Through the five years, the great majority of the Unger group were released by agreements, on probation, and not retried. In all, approximately 85% of the 237—that is, 85% of all state prisoners in Maryland convicted by juries of violent crimes before 1981—were released. This article describes why and how we created the Unger Clinic; why we made it interdisciplinary; what the students and we learned in it and from our clients; and what we would do differently. We believe the clinical education model we developed—an interdisciplinary clinic working in partnership with a major legal services provider and a citizens’ advocacy group—can be used effectively to address other significant access-to-justice problems nationally. In the end, the Unger Project has been a criminal justice laboratory. The qualitative experiences support many criminal justice reforms with the overriding lesson being that the continued incarceration of older, long incarcerated prisoners convicted of violent crimes serves no public safety purpose

Cross-Examining The Brain: A Legal Analysis of Neural Imaging for Credibility Impeachment

The last decade has seen remarkable process in understanding ongoing psychological processes at the neurobiological level, progress that has been driven technologically by the spread of functional neuroimaging devices, especially magnetic resonance imaging, that have become the research tools of a theoretically sophisticated cognitive neuroscience. As this research turns to specification of the mental processes involved in interpersonal deception, the potential evidentiary use of material produced by devices for detecting deception, long stymied by the conceptual and legal limitations of the polygraph, must be re-examined. Although studies in this area are preliminary, and I conclude they have not yet satisfied the foundational requirements for the admissibility of scientific evidence, the potential for use – particularly as a devastating impeachment threat to encourage factual veracity – is a real one that the legal profession should seek to foster through structuring the correct incentives and rules for admissibility. In particular, neuroscience has articulated basic memory processes to a sufficient degree that contemporaneously neuroimaged witnesses would be unable to feign ignorance of a familiar item (or to claim knowledge of something unfamiliar). The brain implementation of actual lies, and deceit more generally, is of greater complexity and variability. Nevertheless, the research project to elucidate them is conceptually sound, and the law cannot afford to stand apart from what may ultimately constitute profound progress in a fundamental problem of adjudication

1983 Vol. 31 No. 5

https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/lawpublications_gavel1980s/1026/thumbnail.jp

The Halifax North End Project

Criminology is the unhappiest ship afloat in the sea of social science research. No one has been able to find the answer to the two simple questions that are a permanent plague: Why do people commit crime? How do you persuade them not to do it again? Each generation or so, any number of experts from diverse disciplines and political philosophies burst upon criminology with the answer to the crime problem. In the last fifty years they have taken the discipline, such as it is, through borstal training, open institutions, guided group interaction, open ended research designs and any number of other innovations, alterations and fads. Unfortunately, none of these magical formulae have been able to achieve anything near the success hoped for by their proponents. Some have occasionally enjoyed limited successes, but none has been able to cut a path across the entire wilderness that is crime. Undaunted, criminologists continue to search for an answer to the two questions. Any answer that sounds reasonably plausible, can be tested through traditional social scientific methods, guarantees employment, and has a good chance for funding, is sure to receive attention if not credibility. Nowadays many criminologists are singing either or both of two tunes, each one struggling for its rightful place among the discarded fads in the junkyard of criminology. One is critical criminology and the other is diversion

The poetics of reciprocity in selected fictions by J. M. Coetzee

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 93-96).David Attwell, in the interview that prefaces "The Poetics of Reciprocity" section of Doubling the Point, identifies a recurrent concern with the function of reciprocity in the work of J. M Coetzee. 1 "The I-You relation ... connects with larger things in the whole of [Coetzee's] work, what I would like to call broadly the poetics of reciprocity." (Attwell 1992: 58) This dissertation seeks to examine the poetics of reciprocity as an aesthetic-ethical concern of Coetzee' s fiction. By establishing Coetzee's works as an extended critique of reciprocity in their thematic and structural elements, this dissertation presents a notion of reciprocity that acknowledges both an ethical imperative to engage with others and the aesthetic problems of depicting that ethical engagement in art. The aim of the dissertation is therefore to show the use of a poetics of reciprocity in raising and examining particular ethical and aesthetic issues in Coetzee' s work

The Nuclear Threat: A Homeland Security Perspective

On December 8, 1987, the United States and Russia signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Since then, it has been a common misconception that this solidified the end of the Cold War and the Nuclear Arms Race. To this day, nuclear installations are plaguing bordering countries within the European Union. As a result, severe transnational issues become evident as transnational crime groups grow and technological advancements of terrorist groups continue to gain ground within the nuclear power threshold. Furthermore, countries within the Asian Peninsula and the Middle East continue to demonstrate nuclear prowess via mass media attention as a sense of glorification and societal threat. Since the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, four reviews of internal and external nuclear policies including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Nuclear Posture Review have been completed by the United States. The purpose of each review is to assess nuclear threats and deploy policy initiatives to prevent adversary actions. The primary focus of this study was to establish a comprehensive qualitative analysis of the movement and illegal proliferation of nuclear material. The study highlights the dangers of the proliferation of both nuclear material and nuclear weapons by organized crime syndicates and terrorist groups and correlates their effect to important United States assets. This was completed through a comprehensive document analysis of missing nuclear material in conjunction with confiscated material found to be distributed by these groups. The results of this study provide the Department of Homeland Security resources in preventing nuclear proliferation by internal and external groups in an effort to assure the protection of United States critical infrastructure and key resources