Detained asylum seekers, health care, and questions of human(e)ness

Abstract This paper contains some personal observations of life inside Woomera Detention Centre and certain aspects of the detained asylum seeker experience. This is from my own reference point as a psychiatric nurse who in 2002 undertook a six‐week contract at Woomera, and from my subsequent sociological reflections on this experience. I draw attention to the disintegrative effect of detention on the individual and the bleakness of everyday life symbolically expressed in for ms of self‐harm. Then, through the example of medication administration, I show the vulnerability of those in detention to bureaucratic procedures that become micropolitical sites, providing the machinery for dehumanising acts. I conclude by calling for sociologists, health care workers, and the public health community in general to take a more active political stance against a Government and its policies that actively erode spirit, the body and, for some, even life

Memory workers doing memory-work on memory work: exploring unresolved power

The use of memory-work as a qualitative method in feminist social research is well established in Australia and New Zealand. Memory-work, though, still brings with it many theoretical and methodological dilemmas and issues. To open some of these issues to collective discussion, a group of experienced feminist researchers used the process of memory-work to explore specific experiences of working with memory-work groups. Our exploration suggested that using memory-work within the dominant positivist discourses and patriarchal structures of academia could, at times, leave feminist researchers feeling powerless. Through this collective we expressed concern about method and methodological process in ways which had not been articulated through our earlier memory-work projects

Unresolved power for feminist researchers employing memory-work

Memory work is a feminist social constructionist method, which was developed in Germany by Frigga Haug et al. (1987 [with a second edition in 1999]). The method was developed explicitly to bridge the gap between theory and experience. It provides a way of exploring the process whereby individual woman become part of society and the ways in which women themselves participate in the process of socialisation. It is a group method, involving always the collective analysis of individual written memories. It is feminist in being explicitly liberationist in its intent