The prevalence of child sexual abuse remains high with girls 1.5 to 3 times more likely to be victims compared to boys. In addition to psychological and emotional challenges, this abuse can lead to spiritual difficulties that impact survivors’ ability to find meaning in their life, find a sense of purpose, experience hope or believe in a world that is just. Spirituality can facilitate healing and this study contributes to that knowledge base by exploring women’s own perspectives. The purpose of this qualitative narrative study is to understand, from women’s perspectives, the role of spiritual experiences in their healing from the impacts of child sexual abuse. Spiritual experiences were defined as any experiences that have a different reality or feeling compared to our usual everyday reality that may seem extraordinary or unexplainable, or very ordinary yet meaningful. Twenty in-depth individual interviews were conducted with ten women survivors of child sexual abuse. Narrative analysis methods were used to derive key themes that represent participants’ perspectives of how spiritual experiences enhance healing. Results of this study show that spiritual experiences opened doorways to self, shifted energy, expanded perspective, revealed truths, connected to the present moment, created possibilities of the positive and were an enduring source of support and strength. Spiritual experiences create inter-connections between aspects of the self that can simultaneously transcend the self and connect to the larger world thereby unifying each into a greater whole. These impacts prevail even when there is dissonance in the interpretation. Occupations facilitated spiritual experiences by acting as a portal to a spiritual dimension, transcending language and mind, facilitating internal communication, connecting to the body through doing and through innate healing qualities. Engaging in respectful dialogue on spiritual experiences requires reflection and awareness in the use of bias-free language. Health professionals are well situated to address spiritual experiences, using evidence-based practice and an understanding of embodied experience. Occupational therapists have a key role in validating spiritual experiences, facilitating the engagement in spiritual occupations, and providing resources to understand and interpret the experiences. / Thesis (Ph.D, Rehabilitation Science) -- Queen's University, 2010-09-24 15:57:19.931

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The steady increase of technology has become particularly ubiquitous in environments of heart surgery. Patients in these environments come into close contact with technology in its many guises. Often, practitioners may be deterred from engaging with patients because technology and the associated routines of care become the focus. As a result, it is important to understand how patients make sense of the technological situations encountered during treatment and recovery with attention to the constitution of identity and emerging moral issues. A narrative methodology was employed to examine patients’ experiential accounts of the technological in open-heart surgery and recovery. Sixteen patients were interviewed 3-4 days after surgery and 4-6 weeks after discharge, in addition participant journals were employed. Study results pointed to the technological as the dominant discourse in heart surgery and recovery, strongly organizing health care practices and patients’ recovery. These discursive influences shaped participants’ stories resulting in two temporal shifts of authorial voice. Authorial voice reflects the dominant discourse and structured how stories unfolded. The first temporal shift exhibited how technology acted as the authorial voice, structuring stories of the preoperative and early postoperative period. Although participants were the narrators of their own stories, they were strongly influenced by the dominant discourse of the technological and its associated dimensions of care. Participants’ stories revealed how patients were at the centre of activity, but passive, universal and undifferentiated. Although technology continued to influence stories of the later postoperative period and recovery at home, there was a shift of authorial voice to participants. Narratives reflected how the technological was incorporated into participants’ daily lives, but their stories included more personal elements rooted in their own particularities. Study implications involve a critical uptake of technology that emphasizes the balance between technologically- and humanistically-focused practices in heart surgery and recovery. A key implication is the critical need to encompass affective and social dimensions of patients within the technologically-driven practices of heart surgery. Of great significance is how practitioners, particularly nurses, can act as supporting characters in helping with transitions of authorial voice from the technological back to the participant.

The steady increase of technology has become particularly ubiquitous in environments of heart surgery. Patients in these environments come into close contact with technology in its many guises. Often, practitioners may be deterred from engaging with patients because technology and the associated routines of care become the focus. As a result, it is important to understand how patients make sense of the technological situations encountered during treatment and recovery with attention to the constitution of identity and emerging moral issues. A narrative methodology was employed to examine patients’ experiential accounts of the technological in open-heart surgery and recovery. Sixteen patients were interviewed 3-4 days after surgery and 4-6 weeks after discharge, in addition participant journals were employed. Study results pointed to the technological as the dominant discourse in heart surgery and recovery, strongly organizing health care practices and patients’ recovery. These discursive influences shaped participants’ stories resulting in two temporal shifts of authorial voice. Authorial voice reflects the dominant discourse and structured how stories unfolded. The first temporal shift exhibited how technology acted as the authorial voice, structuring stories of the preoperative and early postoperative period. Although participants were the narrators of their own stories, they were strongly influenced by the dominant discourse of the technological and its associated dimensions of care. Participants’ stories revealed how patients were at the centre of activity, but passive, universal and undifferentiated. Although technology continued to influence stories of the later postoperative period and recovery at home, there was a shift of authorial voice to participants. Narratives reflected how the technological was incorporated into participants’ daily lives, but their stories included more personal elements rooted in their own particularities. Study implications involve a critical uptake of technology that emphasizes the balance between technologically- and humanistically-focused practices in heart surgery and recovery. A key implication is the critical need to encompass affective and social dimensions of patients within the technologically-driven practices of heart surgery. Of great significance is how practitioners, particularly nurses, can act as supporting characters in helping with transitions of authorial voice from the technological back to the participant.

This thesis comprises an exploration of the practice of Holistic Massage, working across the sociological areas of complementary and alternative medicines (CAM), body work, emotional labour, sociological phenomenology and narrative inquiry. Holistic Massage is one of a plethora of practices encompassed by the field of CAM. While there has been steadily increasing sociological interest in CAM in recent years, much research has treated this diverse group as relatively homogeneous. This thesis looks at one practice in depth, in order to address issues specific to Holistic Massage – including what ‘holism’ adds up in to in practice, and the devaluation of knowledge based on touch(ing) – as well as those concerning CAM more broadly. Hence, whilst drawing on existing research on CAM, this research also addresses a lacuna within it. This thesis employs the conceptual tool of ‘touching work’, which brings together the concepts of ‘emotional labour’ and ‘body work’ in a way that draws out relevant aspects of each around the fulcrum of touch, thus accounting for the latter in both its sensory and emotional meanings. In so doing, it also contributes to the recently burgeoning literature on the senses in sociology, and to an embodied sociology more generally. The thesis also draws on sociological phenomenology, in particular the notion of the intersubjective ‘stock of knowledge’, and the understanding of talk as constitutive of the everyday social world. The overall methodological approach taken brings together phenomenological theory with narrative inquiry, and specifically with the analysis of the form and content of talk. The analysis presented is based around data from loosely-structured interviews with ten women who do Holistic Massage. The interviews were analysed in terms of their overall shape and distinctive features (Chapter Three) and, in subsequent chapters, with respect to both what was said and how it was said. This analysis examines the constitution of a Holistic Massage stock of knowledge (Chapter Four) and how the practice is bounded (Chapter Five), and concludes in Chapter Six by taking a step back from the detail of the data to look at what can be known from it about Holistic Massage and touching work Piecing together the constitution by practitioners of a stock of professional Holistic Massage knowledge makes a significant contribution to the sociology of CAM. Also, by uniting phenomenological sociology and narrative inquiry, it provides a novel perspective on a form of work which is part of a small but significant contemporary occupational field in the UK. In particular, it draws out the multiple aspects of touch which can in fact be known and articulated through talk and challenges ideas about the supposedly ineffable character of touch. In this regard, it points to similarities between how practitioners talk about this and the Foucauldian challenge to the ‘repressive hypothesis’, which sees people as in fact talking readily and in detail about matters where they claim silence prevails.

This narrative inquiry began with queries into the identity-making experiences of two teachers, Anna and Penny, at the beginning of their careers. Through weekly research conversations over 2 years, they told stories of their experiences in school. Over time, it became clear that their personal experiences with their families outside school shaped who they were in their classrooms with children. Their professional identities—their stories to live by—began on personal knowledge landscapes and then were recomposed into professional knowledge landscapes. They experienced tension when their familial stories of what it meant to be a teacher were interrupted or challenged. From the midst of teachers’, children’s, and families’ lives together in schools, Anna and Penny worked to make sense of these tension-filled experiences. Travelling between each others’ worlds was complex. Their personal experiences helped them make sense of difficult situations in their classrooms and contributed to their teacher knowledge. Connelly and Clandinin refer to this form of teacher knowledge as “personal practical knowledge” (1988, p. 25). The research presented in this dissertation attends to the personal practical knowledge, the intellectual work, that Anna and Penny used as beginning teachers. This research contributes to the larger practical and social aspects of beginning teachers. Stories of attrition and retention, struggle and survival, have iii shaped previous research literature as well as the professional practical landscape where beginning teachers work. Attending to ways beginning teachers make sense of these stories around them, and the stories of tension in their first classrooms, opens possibilities for teacher educators, administrators, policy makers, colleagues, families, and students to create spaces for new stories to be told. In any new situation uncertainty will occur. This research acknowledges that tension is inherent in any new situation and emphasizes the possibility of sustaining beginning teachers in their stories of themselves as teachers in the midst of that tension. This inquiry makes openings for conversations about the importance of acknowledging familial and personal stories as part of what sustains a person at the beginning of a teaching career.

The birth of a child diagnosed with congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH) involves significant intensive care at the beginning of life and the need for surgery. Parents’ experiences during the acute phase of hospitalization for a critically ill infant not born premature is currently limited in the literature; in particular, there is no literature describing parents’ experiences of nursing care for having a infant with CDH in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). Using narrative inquiry this study explores stories of parents’ early experiences of nursing care in the NICU for an infant born with CDH. A thematic analysis revealed a main overarching theme of “not knowing” with three interrelated subthemes related to parents’ need for information and open communication; participation, power and partnership; and nursing presence to transition from not knowing to knowing their infant. The findings from this study suggest that parents want to be recognized as key members within the multidisciplinary team and that the nurse has the ability to facilitate aspects of care to impact parents positively or negatively. Implications for practice focus on supporting parents through evolving empowerment and participation in the care of their infant. / Graduate / 0569

This narrative inquiry explores teacher professional identity and curriculum making (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988) in the experiences of three itinerant band teachers. The narrative experiences of Grace, Cole, and Denise reflect the complexity of teaching in multiple schools and working within a curricular framework that is diverse and multi-faceted. While most classroom teachers work with one group of students in a single school, the travelling nature of itinerancy sets them apart from this standard. Benson (2001) argued that “limited involvement in any one single school site, places her or him in a significantly different position than the regular classroom teacher” (p. 3). Staying in tune with students, parents, and colleagues, while concurrently working in several school settings, can be a challenge for managing relationships, assessment practices, concert obligations, and school events (Roulston, 1998). An itinerant band program is a collection of stories with individual narratives being interwoven into a patchwork of identities, or narratively speaking, as people’s stories to live by (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). Clandinin, Huber, Huber, Murphy, Murray-Orr, Pearce, and Steeves (2006) explained that curriculum making and identity making, acts that shape the stories to live by of teachers and children, are closely aligned. Students are immersed in musicking (Small, 1998) and curriculum making alongside their teacher. As stories are composed in unison, curriculum making represents "teachers' and students' lives together" (Clandinin & Connelly, 1992). Curriculum, viewed as a course of life (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988), involves the composition of identities and stories to live by. It is wrapped up with assessment making and identity making, with school stories intersecting with personal experience (Huber, Murphy, & Clandinin, 2011). Individual identities dance with the collective identity of the group as curriculum-as-lived (Aoki, 2012) is brought to life in the ensemble experience. Beyond the study of notes, rhythms, and technique, there is a web of interaction that pervades curriculum as it is embodied in the lives of students and teachers. It encompasses routine happenings in a rehearsal space, personal exchanges during recess breaks, recollections of events from past experiences, and future plans for the ensemble. It is coloured by the experience of itinerant teachers who weave parallel storylines across a series of learning landscapes. The complex nature of teaching initiates an ingrained inter-connectedness between personal and professional lives (Hargreaves, Meill, & MacDonald, 2002). Plotlines are blurred, making it difficult to distinguish between the two as they are inextricably linked by experience and emotion (Connelly, Clandinin, & He, 1997). Lack of a single, permanent teaching space calls for deeper exploration into implications for curriculum and teacher identity. Narratively inquiring into stories of itinerant band teachers is one approach that studies the contextual nature of identity. Storytelling represents a mode of knowing (Bruner, 1986). Each story is told from “a particular vantage point in the lived world” (Greene, 1995, p. 74), holding a plurality of experience and interpretation. Stories are closely tied to how teachers conceive themselves in the place of school (Connelly & Clandinin, 1999). Working on the periphery of collegial connections and the school community imparts physical and emotional tolls on professional identity. These factors contribute to an overall perception about the nature of itinerant teaching (Roulston, 1998). The shifting framework of itinerancy compounds the variable nature of teacher identity. Gathering artifacts and conversations about the storied existence of three itinerant band teachers, tensions appear over curriculum hierarchy, loss of instructional time and place, and collegial isolation. These are plotlines that exist within these school "borderlands" (Anzaldua, 1987). Contrapuntal lines of temporality, sociality, and place (Clandinin & Connelly, 2006) intersect with one another, some moving in relative harmony, while others create bumping points that influence perceptions of personal practical knowledge. Itinerant band teachers experience temporary shifts in self as they make sense of the fluid and changing world around them.