Parent Education Beyond Learning: An Ethnographic Exploration of a Multi-family Program for Families in Post-divorce Conflict

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Whose Life is it Anyway? Exploring the Social Relations of High-Conflict Divorce Cases in Southern Norway

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Staying with the conflict – parenting work and the social organization of post-divorce conflict

Author's accepted manuscript.Available from 06/07/2022.This is an Accepted Manuscript version of the following article, accepted for publication in Journal of Family Studies. Bertelsen, B. (2021). Staying with the conflict – parenting work and the social organization of post-divorce conflict. Journal of Family Studies. It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.acceptedVersio

Bruddlinjer som utgangspunkt for analysearbeid i institusjonell- etnografisk utforsking

In this chapter, we use material from two research projects to show how institutional ethnography’s sensitivity toward disjunctures has put us as researchers on the trail of everyday life problematics. In institutional ethnography, disjuncture refers to the contradiction between institutional discourses and authoritative texts by which society is governed, and the local experiences that people have. One of the research projects was concerned with the experience of parents who were institutionally identified as part of a “high-conflict divorce case”. This exploration began from parents’ accounts of meetings with professionals from the welfare, legal and therapy apparatus and then examined how professionals accounted for the same type of meetings. The second research project explored school-related stress and assessment practices among girls in upper secondary school. Here, a disjuncture between the girls’ experience of daily homework and preparing for tests on the one hand, and school policy guidelines and official intentions on the other, was explored. In this project, the exploration of the disjuncture was accomplished by looking specifically at how the girls explained their use of certain texts in school, tracing their authority to more general or “boss” texts.publishedVersio

A qualitative fallacy: Life trapped in interpretations and stories

This paper points out some problematic aspects of qualitative research based on interviews and uses examples from mental health. The narrative approach is explored while inquiring if the reality of life here is forced into the formula of a chronological story. The hermeneutic approach, in general, is also examined, and we ask if the reality of life in this scenario becomes caught up in a web of interpretations. Inspired by ideas from Bakhtin and phenomenology, we argue for interview-based research that stays with unresolvedness and constantly question the web of interpretations and narratives that determine our experiences. This also chimes with certain dialogical practices in mental health in which tolerance of uncertainty is the guiding principle. Concludingly, we suggest that interview-based research could be a practice of ‘un-resolving’ in which researchers, together with the participants, look for cracks, contradictions, and complexities to prevent the qualitative fallacies of well-organized meanings and well-composed stories.publishedVersio

The world asks something from us:An interview With Gert Biesta about encountering subjects in education and mental health work

This interview with Gert Biesta is part of an ongoing research initiative to explore the relationship between reality, social construction, and professional practices within the mental health field. Biesta’s work has been a critical source of inspiration for this project. Biesta’s work centers on the purpose and aims of education, emphasizing subjectification or the process of engaging with one’s own freedom and becoming a subject capable of navigating the world. Biesta argues for a world-centered rather than child-centered or curriculum-centered education. This is not only because education should provide students with the knowledge and skills necessary to act effectively in the world, but most importantly, because the world is where our existence as human beings takes place. Biesta thus engages with ethics and the connection between education and broader philosophical themes and challenges instrumental approaches in favor of seeing education as having intrinsic value for human growth and democratic citizenship. Although Biesta’s work is primarily concerned with educational questions, his ideas transcend education and can prove productive in other domains. In the interview, we extend the conversation to mental health, seeking areas where Biesta’s ideas resonate. In the concluding paragraph, the authors highlight the parallels between education and mental health, particularly their shared emphasis on subjectivity and the challenge of navigating reality. It is suggested that education and mental health intersect in their concern for “subjectness” and how individuals must relate to what the world demands of them.</p

Whose Life is it Anyway? Exploring the Social Relations of High-Conflict Divorce Cases in Southern Norway

publishedVersionPaid Open AccessUNIT agreemen

A qualitative fallacy: Life trapped in interpretations and stories

This paper points out some problematic aspects of qualitative research based on interviews and uses examples from mental health. The narrative approach is explored while inquiring if the reality of life here is forced into the formula of a chronological story. The hermeneutic approach, in general, is also examined, and we ask if the reality of life in this scenario becomes caught up in a web of interpretations. Inspired by ideas from Bakhtin and phenomenology, we argue for interview-based research that stays with unresolvedness and constantly question the web of interpretations and narratives that determine our experiences. This also chimes with certain dialogical practices in mental health in which tolerance of uncertainty is the guiding principle. Concludingly, we suggest that interview-based research could be a practice of ‘un-resolving’ in which researchers, together with the participants, look for cracks, contradictions, and complexities to prevent the qualitative fallacies of well-organized meanings and well-composed stories