I Yelled At My Mother: Narrative Introspection into the Multifaceted Emotions of Sympathy & Compassion in Care-giving

Sympathy, empathy and compassion have been widely studied in many different disciplines but there has been little agreement among researchers. Studies often address the process of giving sympathy but little has been done with the process of receiving sympathy or the complex intersection of the two. This paper is an autoethnography that explores the relational way we develop an understanding of sympathy and compassion. I use an introspective process to study how I have come to understand compassion and sympathy in care giving for my mother. I seek a different approach to compassion and sympathy as a social process of symmetry and connection rather than of hierarchy or power. It is in finding loving kindness for myself that I strive to extend compassion to others without condescension. In Start Where You Are: a Guide to Compassionate Living Pema Chödrön advocates for a change in the traditional way we view sympathy and compassion as the helper and the one in need of help; “In order to have compassionate relationships, compassionate communication, and compassionate social action, there has to be a fundamental change in attitude” (p. 103). Through the narratives in this paper I seek to create evocative stories which will induce emotional responses for the readers in the hope that they will experience sympathy and compassion in a different way

Narratives of Workers on the Crisis Line: Dialogic Conversations about Domestic Violence

This paper is my exploratory study of the interpersonal communication between domestic violence workers who answer crisis calls and the callers who seek help. I am focusing on the perception of those who answer the crisis lines. This is part of my on-going research into the meaning and experiences of the women who work against domestic violence. There are approximately 1,900 local domestic violence programs and state coalitions in every state, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. This paper is based on the experiences of women working in one local program, CASA. I will briefly compare the CASA advocates work on the crisis line to communication practices and theories of crisis intervention by telephone. However, my primary goal is to present their stories in a way that will allow readers to understand the workers’ experiences and how they communicate those experiences. Following the workers’ narratives of I will offer my reflections on the narratives and on the way the workers communicate their experiences to me. There are two levels of interpersonal communication to be considered (1) the communication between workers and callers, (2) the communication between workers and me as they describe the crisis calls. In both it is apparent that the workers use stories as their way of knowing and communicating. They hear the stories of victims and they communicate their sense of their work and relationship with callers through stories. These domestic violence workers embody Robert Coles’ philosophy that stories are how we come to know our world, develop our identity and understand others. As a model of postmodern theory I see their communication as transactive not representational because “people understand through communication not prior to it” (Soukup, 1992, p.5)

Collaborative Research: Narratives of Domestic Violence Workers & Volunteers

My research paper focuses on multiple layers of retrospective sensemaking based on a university colloquium about “Developing the Research Relationship.” The original idea for the colloquium panel was a presentation by two research assistants about our research relationship with staff members of CASA, a community organization that works against domestic violence. When we expanded the panel to include two staff members from the research site who actively participated in the research project, it became an enactment of the relationships. The panel became a relational experience that was part of the continuing relationships and an occasion for reflexivity on my identity as a researcher. I took Karl Weick’s definition from Sensemaking in Organizations as my goal, “Research and practice in sensemaking needs to begin with a mindset to look for sensemaking, a willingness to use one’s own life as data, and a search for those outcroppings and ideas that fascinate” (p. 191). Jane Jorgenson’s article on Co-constructing the Interviewer/Co-constructing ‘Family’ provided my inspiration for this paper. Jorgenson cites the research process as communicative rather than elicitative and further shows that research is meta-communicative. Jorgenson wrote about her interview experiences in the field and co-construction of the researcher’s identity. In my paper I write about my experience in presenting my fieldwork to a research audience in the company of CASA staff members who participated in the research and could be considered co-researchers. This research paper is an academic sensemaking exercise, a storied example of sensemaking about an occasion of sensemaking, so I am writing a type of meta-sensemaking. Another way to describe the process might be as an example of the second order cybernetics of the observing the process. This is a type of reflexivity that Frederick Steier calls ecological constructionism (Steier, p. 165). My work is a reflexive description of an occasion of reciprocal reflexivity with researchers, reciprocators, and a university community of students and faculty. The experience reveals multiple layers of sensemaking and frames within frames. My paper is a complex example of the interplay between individual and social activity that demonstrates key points from theories of sensemaking and reflexivity. “Self-reflexive methods can become “interdependently reciprocal, and the term ‘reflexive’ applied not to one researcher, but to relations between and among investigator and research participants” (Gergen & Gergen, p. 93). My intent is to demonstrate research as a relationship and the research relationship as a multifaceted social process

Developing Leadership in a Multitype Library Consortium: Ten Years of SEFLIN Sun Seekers

The Southeast Florida Library and Information Network (SEFLIN) has presented the Sun Seeker Leadership Institute biennially since 1997. SEFLIN, a multitype library consortium headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida, was one of the first groups to sponsor a library leadership institute held as a monthly series of events over the period of a year. One hundred library staff members from all types of libraries, large, small, public, and academic, have completed the leadership institute. After twelve years and six cohorts, SEFLIN is reviewing the project’s impact. This article outlines how and why the leadership institute was created, the program’s goals and format, and presents the results of a survey of past participants. The authors suggest further study of how participants are affected by the leadership styles modeled by their supervisors

EP79

Walter A. Barker & Elizabeth W. Curry, Getting the most out of county extension meetings, Kansas State University, Nov. 2000

Narrative As Communication Activism: Research Relationships In Social Justice Projects

When they talk about CASA or the project, Deb and Elizabeth use the words “we, our, or us,” not “them or they.” Deb and Elizabeth are part of CASA because they understand us. They get it. Lots of people study domestic violence, but they were the first researchers interested in us, the workers. We felt validated because university researchers thought what we did was important, and they asked us to help them understand our work. They didn’t lecture us; they listened to us. These are some of the staff’s observations about our participation in the University Community Initiative Project (UCI), a grant-funded research collaboration between Community Action Stops Abuse (CASA) and the University of South Florida’s (USF) Communication and Sociology Departments. CASA is a community service organization located in St. Petersburg, Florida that advocates for victims and survivors of domestic violence by providing both emergency assistance and long-term support. USF is a large, metropolitan, state-supported university that seeks to connect with its surrounding community by forging partnerships designed to assist with social problems

Demonstrating Collegiality: A Co-Constructed Narrative Inquiry

“Demonstrating Collegiality: A Co-Constructed Narrative Inquiry” seeks to define a collegial relationship through the experiences of two first year doctoral students at a large state-supported university. The techniques used to develop the co-constructed narrative parallel the authors’ development of a collaborative relationship. Using autoethnographic essays and interactive interviews, the authors co-construct several narratives that describe the process of moving from a friendly, social relationship to a scholarly, collaborative relationship, as well as the process of moving from peer reviewers to co-authors. An introductory narrative frames the paper; each of the “interior” narratives is accompanied by an extensive analytic introduction and the interpretation section is presented as a co-constructed narrative of the interpretive process. The authors attempt to categorize shared characteristics and values that were important to their development of a collegial relationship

Aggressive Outreach to Homeless Mentally Ill People

Historically, people with chronic mental illnesses have been particularly at risk for homelessness. In 1984, the Connecticut Department of Mental Health (DMH) articulated policy to insure housing for mentally ill persons. One facet of that policy is to increase mental health services to homeless people. The Greater Bridgeport Community Mental Health Center has addressed this need through the formation of the Homeless Outreach Team (HOT). This article describes the development, organization, clinical work, and future of HOT. The team is run jointly by the Mental Health Center (funded through DMH) and Family Service-Woodfield, a United Way-funded agency that provides case management services. Members of the team identify homeless mentally ill persons at local soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and through a network of community contacts. HOT functions by taking clinical services into the community, offering supportive interventions as accepted by its clients. Its success is reflected in numbers of persons housed, psychiatrically stabilized, and participating in rehabilitative services either at the Mental Health Center or through other providers in the community. Several clinical vignettes illustrate HOT\u27s work

Play with the Slinky: Learning to Lead Collaboration Through a State-wide Training Project Aimed at Grants for Community Partnerships

How can training develop the philosophical commitment that library staff members need to successfully lead collaborative projects? How does conversation as a training model and play as an activity shape the collaborative learning process? How do we stimulate libraries and library staff to assume leadership roles in community building? This article is a study of a statewide training process designed to create opportunities for librarians to learn to lead collaborative community projects. It highlights the content, exercises, and methods used to stimulate learning. The workshops were facilitated as models of collaboration, and play, as well as sites of conversation about collaborative philosophy and techniques