The past if past: The use of memories and self-healing narratives in refugees from the former Yugoslavia

Especially in the case of refugees, the past and its memory tend to be definitional components for personal and social constructions of identity. At the same time, the relationship with the past is frequently problematic and challenging. This study identifies two main narratives and subject positions adopted by refugee participants from the former Yugoslavia: ‘the past is past’ and ‘the past is our strength.’ I analyse the complexity implicit in these two narratives about the past. Although these narratives at first appear contradictory, the participants’ stories illustrate the ways in which they co-operate for the development of mental health in refugees. The ongoing dialogue between the two narratives allows for the participants’ endorsement of subject positions that refer to both individual and collective identities. The strategic use of history permits reinterpretations and relocations of traumatic memories as well as the formation of self-healing narratives that reframe refugee identities in the light of ethnic history and shared experience. I critically discuss the implications of this narrative reframing in relation to aspects of dominant discourses about refugee mental health and postmodern considerations in psychology and counselling

Toward a critical reflexivity in qualitative inquiry: Relational and posthumanist reflections on realism, research's centrality, and representationalism in reflexivity

To critically understand the complexity of the concept and practice of reflexivity, I offer an exploration of some of its epistemological and ontological foundations. Specifically, I discuss 3 assumptions that tend to be entailed in most views of reflexivity: realism, humanism, and linguistic representationalism. I provide for each of them a social constructionist or posthumanist reinterpretation on the basis of relational views of ontology and on constitutive understandings of knowledge. I suggest some alternatives to these 3 assumptions in order to foster a plurality of viewpoints about practices of reflexivity and entanglements of objects and subjects. In particular, posthumanist theories may provide the language to counter postpositivist inclinations within qualitative inquiry and to offer horizontal, diffractive, and transformative modes of knowing that more fully embrace reflexivity not as a tool or strategy but as a discursive and performative practice—that is, as inquiry in itself

Between researcher and researched: An introduction to countertransference in qualitative inquiry

When doing research on topics that are sensitive and involve core dimensions of the researcher’s identities and subjectivities, the process of inquiry is likely to generate significant emotions, attachments, and reactions that transgress traditional forms of data and research positions. If embraced and addressed, the researcher’s emotional reactions can be an important source of reflexivity and data as well as creativity, motivation, and engagement. This relational aspect of the research parallels psychotherapists’ experience of reacting to their clients’ concerns and narrations. This process—called countertransference (CT)—may leave the researcher open to vulnerability and the need to account for the necessary presence of personal biographies and identities in qualitative inquiry. From my research with refugees, I provide examples of my CT reactions and interpretations and the ways in which they became crucial assets to the study

Counseling and psychotherapy in italy: Historical, cultural, and indigenous perspectives

The field of psychotherapy in Italy shows a plurality of voices that makes it hard to depict it, if not in broad strokes. At the same time, some common elements characterize the main discourses that inform the knowledge, training, and practice of psychotherapy in Italy. Some of these elements are about potentially constructive aspects of the Italian therapy scenario, like the professional regulations given by the Italian Order of Psychologists and the Ministry of Education, University and Research, the humanitarian role of the Roman-Catholic Church, the challenges and opportunities offered by the recent immigration, and the emphasis on relational and ecological (as opposed to detached, laboratory-style, and individualist) approaches to psychology. While other aspects may be deemed questionable and detrimental to the field, like the closed oligarchy of the university system, the relative international isolation of Italian psychotherapists, and the limited dedication to research studies in counseling and psychotherapy, especially concerning issues of cultural diversity and clinical or training outcomes

Neoliberal and pandemic subjectivation processes: Clapping and singing as affective (re)actions during the Covid-19 home confinement

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the restriction of free movement and the sheltering-in-place became worldwide strategies to manage the virus spread. Especially at the beginning of the pandemic, community-based affective events helped people feel less isolated and support each other. In this manuscript, we explore how two of these social practices—clapping and singing—were useful to counter the emotions entailed in the subjectivation processes that accompanied the pandemic. We then argue that, seen as affective happenings, singing and clapping heightened emotions and affects that were already implicit in neoliberalism, mainly anxiety, loneliness, and a sense of precariousness, disposability, and inadequacy. On one hand, singing and clapping were liberatory practices of solidarity and resistance against the changes induced by the pandemic and its biopolitics. On the other hand, they contributed to the primary narratives on social resilience, docile bodies, and biopolitics that informed the crisis management. Singing and clapping also operated as neoliberal technologies of the self by bringing the focus on individual agency, behavioral control, and the sacrifice of specific subjects (e.g., the healthcare workers described as heroes). In short, singing and clapping were affective happenings that instantiated an entanglement of subjectivation practices in which the power to affect and the power to resist coincided

“Keep them out to save our inside:” discourses on immigration by the Spanish far right

Vox is a far-right, Spanish political party that has steadily grown to become the third main party in the national congress. Immigration is a major presence in Vox’s political agenda. Through Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), we analyze the party’s public speeches and Twitter communications on immigration in the last 3 years, from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 to the Ukraine-Russia war in 2022. These contexts have provided a fertile ground for Vox’s concerns with the protection of national borders, the criminalization of African and irregular immigrants, and the Spanish Government’s ineffectiveness to protect the Spaniards’ homes. Vox’s main discursive strategies entail constructions of migrants and migration based on dichotomous binaries, culture clash, exclusionary discourses of domopolitics, and fears of imminent social and cultural changes. These constructions are based on the unproblematized belief on essential and unchangeable values that forge the identity of the homeland, which is implicitly threatened by immigrants. Against the migratory invasion, Vox constitutes itself as the ethical protector of the Spanish society and nation, “out of care for the insiders and not out of hatred for outsiders.

Hate groups targeting unauthorized immigrants: discourses, narratives and subjectivation practices on their websites

The narratives and images on websites of US hate groups that oppose undocumented immigrants represent and reproduce discourses that contribute to the subject formation of group members, who feel ethically obliged to counter unauthorized immigration. Left alone by the government, which is seen as unreliable and uncaring of patriotic values, they position themselves as heroic saviours of the nation. We argue that these hate groups’ ‘games of truth’ develop in response to the perception that irregular immigration threatens specific social orders and values, for instance about citizenship, national identity and otherness. This article helps to understand the ways in which anti-immigrant narratives serve the functions of countering these threats and of asserting the group members’ ethical obligation as a form of care of the self. In other words, from a Foucaultian viewpoint, we interpret the problematizations of ‘illegal’ immigration as discursive practices for the subject formation of hate group members

Critical Reflexivity and Intersectionality in Human Rights: Toward Relational and Process-Based Conceptualizations and Practices in Psychology

Within traditional social, community, and clinical psychologies, the human rights framework has typically been interpreted and adopted from a person- or patient-based perspective. While useful and well meaning, ideological values concerning empowerment, agency, and resiliency have often framed human rights interventions or programs within psychology. We propose in this manuscript a theoretical shift for psychology to decentralize the role of the individual human being while at the same time avoiding forms of social behaviorism that tend to portray the person as passive or as reacting to external stimuli. Following this first shift from the individual to the collective, we suggest adopting anti-essentialist discourses about the parties, agents, and issues involved in human rights. To this goal, the philosophical framework of process or relational ontology may be especially useful. Based on critical theory, critical feminism, social constructionist, and post-human views of knowledge and reality, process ontology considers reality as complex, fluid, discursive, and dialogical. The separations between the personal and the political are questioned to underscore the entanglement and inseparability of dimensions of possibility and actions, which are continuous reconstructions. To conclude, we reflect on the ways in which these two movements toward anti-individualism and relational ontology might inform specific practices and reflections within human rights frameworks in psychology

Moving Auto-Correlation Window Approach for Heart Rate Estimation in Ballistocardiography Extracted by Mattress-Integrated Accelerometers

Continuous heart monitoring is essential for early detection and diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases, which are key factors for the evaluation of health status in the general population. Therefore, in the future, it will be increasingly important to develop unobtrusive and transparent cardiac monitoring technologies for the population. The possible approaches are the development of wearable technologies or the integration of sensors in daily-life objects. We developed a smart bed for monitoring cardiorespiratory functions during the night or in the case of continuous monitoring of bedridden patients. The mattress includes three accelerometers for the estimation of the ballistocardiogram (BCG). BCG signal is generated due to the vibrational activity of the body in response to the cardiac ejection of blood. BCG is a promising technique but is usually replaced by electrocardiogram due to the difficulty involved in detecting and processing the BCG signals. In this work, we describe a new algorithm for heart parameter extraction from the BCG signal, based on a moving auto-correlation sliding-window. We tested our method on a group of volunteers with the simultaneous co-registration of electrocardiogram (ECG) using a single-lead configuration. Comparisons with ECG reference signals indicated that the algorithm performed satisfactorily. The results presented demonstrate that valuable cardiac information can be obtained from the BCG signal extracted by low cost sensors integrated in the mattress. Thus, a continuous unobtrusive heart-monitoring through a smart bed is now feasible

Scaling and intermittency of brain events as a manifestation of consciousness

We discuss the critical brain hypothesis and its relationship with intermittent renewal processes displaying power-law decay in the distribution of waiting times between two consecutive renewal events. In particular, studies on complex systems in a "critical" condition show that macroscopic variables, integrating the activities of many individual functional units, undergo fluctuations with an intermittent serial structure characterized by avalanches with inverse-power-law (scale-free) distribution densities of sizes and inter-event times. This condition, which is denoted as "fractal intermittency", was found in the electroencephalograms of subjects observed during a resting state wake condition. It remained unsolved whether fractal intermittency correlates with the stream of consciousness or with a non-task-driven default mode activity, also present in non-conscious states, like deep sleep. After reviewing a method of scaling analysis of intermittent systems based of event-driven random walks, we show that during deep sleep fractal intermittency breaks down, and re-establishes during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, with essentially the same anomalous scaling of the pre-sleep wake condition. From the comparison of the pre-sleep wake, deep sleep and REM conditions we argue that the scaling features of intermittent brain events are related to the level of consciousness and, consequently, could be exploited as a possible indicator of consciousness in clinical applications