Throughout history, the media's rendering of slavery depicts vulnerable groups caught in a network of trafficking looking for a better life. Scholars of trafficking cite challenges in understanding the health care needs of domestic forced labor trafficking survivors in the United States. Seminal trafficking findings have shown that variations of trafficking affect the survivors' health after surviving trafficking. Therefore, in this qualitative, narrative inquiry I sought to understand how 8 survivors of forced labor trafficking, ages 25 years and older, described their health following trafficking beyond 5 years. The theory of social constructionism constituted the theoretical foundation, and the salutogenic model of health is the conceptual framework. The research questions for the study focused on understanding how adult survivors described experiences of entering and exiting trafficking, and their physical health, post-trafficking involvement. Criterion sampling facilitated identifying survivors of forced labor trafficking. Semi-structured interviewing guided the survivors' narrative storytelling. For analyzing the narratives, I used Braun and Clarke's Thematic Analysis strategy. The results of the pilot and main study showed that survivors suffer from an array of ongoing cognitive and general health concerns beyond surviving trafficking. The findings suggest that these ongoing health conditions influenced survivors' well-being beyond surviving trafficking. The results of the study may lead those in the medical field (e.g. health administrators) to identify other conditions influencing survivors' health after surviving trafficking.

This thesis explores a dialogical approach – in relation to supervision, therapy and research. I have as supervisor inquired into my relationship with groups of supervisees who were training to become family therapists or systemic practitioners. Through my doctoral portfolio, I speak from within my practice and I show in some detail the micro processes in relational encounters which help dialogue to evolve. I also address grand narratives about what it means to be a human being, and show how perceiving a human being as dialogical has extensive and governing consequences for how we think about a person’s movements in the world, how we think about them as person, in relation to other people, and how we understand problems, and approach problem solving. My research has been a doing, an experiencing and a creation of knowing in a reflexive flow. My research philosophy, mode of approaching my practice as therapist and supervisor (and as a person in the world) has reflexively been created through my being in practice. I show how an embodied belief in fluidity and complexity, enables me as supervisor to contribute to a space in the context of supervision which welcomes the freedom of a kind of orientation which is open towards situated, emerging, novel and provisional understanding. By attending to here-and-now interactions, becoming answerable in the moment and by embracing intuition, ambiguity and relational compassion, we have been able to welcome risk-taking and improvisation. This mode of dialogical supervision demonstrates a willingness to spontaneously dive into the uniqueness of every new encounter and every new movement. I see this as the poetics of the dialogical meeting. I have experienced how this space has opened up quite unexpected aspects of the supervisees’ experiences and has served as an incitement for them to question different aspects of their relationship to life. This has reflexively created a certain spirit and atmosphere that has invited us all to be bolder in our sharing and exploration of our lives, practice and our ideas. This thesis makes a contribution concerning: how we can be with people in ways that opens up more understanding and creates a sense of belonging and liberation; challenging and transgressively exploring discursive boundaries which attempt to define and fix what research is, what therapy is, what supervision is, and welcomes the infinity of opportunities and possibilities life may offer us. Thus I suggest that it may become significant for the profession to review the usefulness and legitimacy of distinct categorization between therapy and supervision. Through my choice of genre I offer the reader a possibility to respond emotionally as well as intellectually to my writing. I believe the way I have chosen to re-present my research through a mix of genre and evocative texts not ‘frozen’ findings, permits and anticipates novel ways of going on in relation to research in a manner that I don’t believe have been described in this way before within the community of family therapy and systemic practice.

This doctoral portfolio is a collection of papers and pieces of creative writing arising out of therapeutic, supervisory and training conversations and in relation to a wide range of texts. I have wanted to find ways of writing ethically so as to avoid objectifying people and appropriating their words, their life stories. I find ways of writing in which the values and practices of a collaborative, dialogical and reflexive ways of being with people are echoed in the texts. I show how writing and reading are relational practices in that I speak with the participants in the texts as well as with the reader and also with other writers. To do this, I experiment with a variety of written forms and employ literary devices so as to speak from within a range of practice relationships, from within inner dialogue, with real and fictitious characters. Technically and ethically, I try to write in a way which not only captures the sound of talk but which also speaks with the reader who would be reading, and perhaps hearing these accounts of conversation. By sharing a rich level of detail from my polyvocal inner dialogue, I invite the reader into a unique and privileged alongside position as a participant-observer in my work. Inspirational research methodologies include: writing as a method of inquiry, reflexivity, autoethnography, performance ethnography and transgression interpreted by many areas of systemic theory and practice. To support this innovative work, I offer several theoretical and practical papers offering novel developments on systemic practice theory. I situate systemic practice as a research method and demonstrate many family resemblances between systemic inquiry and qualitative inquiry. I offer a reflexive model for systemic practice and practice research which I call Praction Research which regards therapy and research as political acts requiring an activist agenda. Linked to this I politicise ideas of reflexivity by introducing local and global reflexivity and create a political connection with a concept of theorethical choices in theory and ethics in practice research. I propose a new form of ethnography suited to systemic practice, Relational Ethnography in which I draw attention to reflexive relationships between writer and readers, between the voices of inner and outer dialogue in research texts.

No description available.

This qualitative inquiry explores and describes the Refugees Welcome movement in Sweden from 2015 to 2020 by exploring how people became volunteers, their motivation and experience while at the same time describing events, sceneries, and context with the help of their stories. The empirical material consists of 25 interviews with 20 interviewees, the theoretical perspectives come from the fields of volunteering, civil society, and social movements. A thematic analysis is the method used and the results are presented as part 1 Refugees Welcome to Malmö during the refugee crisis in the fall of 2015, and part 2 with the post-2015 Refugees Welcome initiatives separated by the establishment of checkpoints. The volunteers paint a picture of civil society handling an international issue in a globalized world, and what happens when that globalized world closes. The conclusion is that when the states of Europe introduced checkpoints it drastically changed the context of the opportunities to help refugees, cutting off networks of solidarity from the Mediterranean Sea to Malmö Central Station, and when the local authorities took over the responsibility for the refugee reception they cut off civil society and killing the engagement of the volunteers.

No description available.

Supports to improve self-care or self-management are beneficial for many people living with health issues, especially chronic conditions. Yet, socioeconomically marginalized groups have often been neglected from self-management initiatives, despite experiencing an increased prevalence of chronicity and multimorbidity. To this end, there are several established critiques within the self-management literature that are addressed through this dissertation. First, limited attention has been given to equity considerations within self-management, thus there remain gaps in the evidence base around disadvantaged groups. Second, there is a lack of understanding about the mechanisms that make self-management supports work, as well as little evidence to explain the wide extent of non-participation, including understanding the impact of structural barriers. Third, the social embeddedness of self-care has received little attention, despite people highlighting social roles as important concerns within self-care. In addition, the grassroots history of self-care has been neglected, which has resulted in minimal recognition of the role of mutual aid/self-help groups. This dissertation includes two exploratory, qualitative studies that attend to these knowledge gaps: the first explored self-care experiences among people who use drugs with chronic health issues, and the second explored mutual support among people experiencing homelessness within the context of encampments during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study findings are also contextualized by worsening overdose and housing crises. I employed community-based participatory research methods and the transformative framework to contend with social injustice and power imbalance and amplify the worldviews of marginalized groups. We conducted in-depth interviews and reflexive thematic analysis to analyze data. Overarching findings demonstrate the importance of agency in shaping how marginalized groups manage their health and social needs, the critical structural limitations they face in doing so, and the substantial influence of their formal and informal social supports. Thus, findings show the importance of recognizing these groups’ alternative and holistic practices of care, the need to address structural and systemic barriers that inhibit their capacity for care, and the immense value of harnessing social support networks to meet care needs. Programs intended to support self-care among marginalized communities would benefit from incorporating a relational autonomy lens and community-centered approach.

No description available.

This dissertation examines the questions: “What are the experiences of Asian women faculty in the Canadian academy?” and “How do they navigate this space?” The study aims to generate new insights into how this understudied and underrepresented population negotiates various aspects of identity, such as gender, race, language and citizenship, as they pursue their academic careers. It provides an original examination of how “Asian” women faculty who have transnational life experience interpret the Canadian academy. Using a qualitative inquiry methodology with a transnational feminist perspective, I conducted in-depth interviews with nine Asian women faculty members in Canadian universities concerning their motivations, desires, contradictions, struggles, and coping strategies within their academic lives. Themes for the analysis arose from the literature, the conceptual framework, my own background and the data. Four major themes organize the analysis: 1) what impact the socially constructed discourse of Canadian citizenry has in the everyday lives of Asian women faculty and how “Asian-woman-ness” operates in the given contexts; 2) what technical difficulties and social barriers emerge from Asian women faculty’s experiences with spoken and written English language; 3) what “cultural logics” Asian women faculty utilize in order to survive/thrive in their social locations as Asian women in the Canadian academy; and 4) how Asian women faculty create their own legitimate space from their marginalized points of view. Through the dual process of their citizenry being de-legitimized in the academy and the nation-state, Asian women faculty strive to become legitimate through creating alternative understandings and definitions of their academic lives. This study was meant to initiate and promote reconfiguration of study on faculty’s lives by foregrounding the transnational feminist framework, which looks at/beyond the institutional, national and temporal borders and at the same time pays close attention to gender and race within the different types of borders. The study suggests that efforts to make higher education more diverse are more complex than some might imagine.

This dissertation examines the questions: “What are the experiences of Asian women faculty in the Canadian academy?” and “How do they navigate this space?” The study aims to generate new insights into how this understudied and underrepresented population negotiates various aspects of identity, such as gender, race, language and citizenship, as they pursue their academic careers. It provides an original examination of how “Asian” women faculty who have transnational life experience interpret the Canadian academy. Using a qualitative inquiry methodology with a transnational feminist perspective, I conducted in-depth interviews with nine Asian women faculty members in Canadian universities concerning their motivations, desires, contradictions, struggles, and coping strategies within their academic lives. Themes for the analysis arose from the literature, the conceptual framework, my own background and the data. Four major themes organize the analysis: 1) what impact the socially constructed discourse of Canadian citizenry has in the everyday lives of Asian women faculty and how “Asian-woman-ness” operates in the given contexts; 2) what technical difficulties and social barriers emerge from Asian women faculty’s experiences with spoken and written English language; 3) what “cultural logics” Asian women faculty utilize in order to survive/thrive in their social locations as Asian women in the Canadian academy; and 4) how Asian women faculty create their own legitimate space from their marginalized points of view. Through the dual process of their citizenry being de-legitimized in the academy and the nation-state, Asian women faculty strive to become legitimate through creating alternative understandings and definitions of their academic lives. This study was meant to initiate and promote reconfiguration of study on faculty’s lives by foregrounding the transnational feminist framework, which looks at/beyond the institutional, national and temporal borders and at the same time pays close attention to gender and race within the different types of borders. The study suggests that efforts to make higher education more diverse are more complex than some might imagine.