Ephrat Huss

A Case Study of Bedouin Women's Art in Social Work. A Model of Social Arts Intervention with ‘Traditional’ Women Negotiating Western Cultures

This paper exemplifies how symbolic self-expression offers the opportunity to express alternative perspectives and hybrid identities that challenge dominant social work paradigms, often in a way that is perceived as less threatening than words by ‘traditional’ women crossing cultural borders due to immigration, or to indigenous cultural transition. This model will be exemplified with a case study of group art work by marginalized Bedouin women in Israel undergoing rapid cultural transition. This will show how symbolic rather than direct forms of expression, mediated through the social–critical prism of third world feminism (namely the static elements of culture and gender, and their interaction with the dynamic elements of hybrid cultural identity and the negotiation of new types of poverty) enabled the social worker to get closer to the pain, dilemmas, conflicts, and solutions that the women constantly negotiate within their hybrid social realities. The aim of using the arts to intensify the interpretive voice of the women is to listen to that voice beyond its ‘entertainment’ element to the level of how it shifts the understanding of people in power and redirects social work policy and intervention.

Researching Creations: Applying Arts-Based Research to Bedouin Women's Drawings Ephrat Huss and Julie Cwikel:

In this article, the author examines the combination of arts-based research and art therapy within Bedouin womens empowerment groups. The art fulfills a double role within the group of both helping to illuminate the womens self-defined concerns and goals, and simultaneously enriching and moving these goals forward. This creates a research tool that adheres to the feminist principles of finding new ways to learn from lower income women from a different culture, together with creating a research context that is of direct potential benefit and enrichment for the women. The author, through examples of the use of art within lower income Bedouin womens groups, examines the theoretical connection between arts-based research and art therapy, two areas that often overlap but whose connection has not been addressed theoretically.

Embodied drawings as expressions of distress among impoverished single Bedouin mothers

This paper demonstrates how marginalized, Bedouin, single mothers define pain through different depictions of their bodies and their embodied experience. Using visual data generated through an empowerment group with single Bedouin women living in the Negev, illustrative pictures were selected. The potential of drawing as an indirect, but deeply communicative symbolic vehicle with which to express the women’s pain and struggle as marginalized and impoverished women is demonstrated through themes that emerged from a content analysis of the women’s art and their verbal comments about what they had drawn. A central theme identified pain due to painful life circumstances, rather than due to inherent sickness or weakness. Other themes identified included the body as a site for cultural transition, power negations with men, intellectual development, and the struggles of motherhood. This shows how the visual depiction of pain on the page offers a socially critical, yet potentially mental health promoting medium that locates women’s distress, not as the result of personal and physical weakness, but as the result of social oppression. The implications for the use of art with socially marginalized women are discussed.

Utilizing an Image to Evaluate Stress and Coping for Social Workers

This paper demonstrates a method by which social workers can evaluate the impact of a high stress situation (on themselves and on others) by utilizing a single drawing. This is used to create an informal and collaborative evaluation of stress reactions and of coping as synergetic parts of one whole. The theoretical implications of this study for social work education are the integration of social work values to initiate a collaborative, empowering, and non-stigmatizing evaluation into the rapid work needed in a crisis situation. The focus of this paper is theoretical and illustrative, focusing on how to educate social workers to self-regulate stress and to focus on coping.

Houses, swimming pools, and thin blonde women : Arts-based research through a critical lens with impoverished bedouin women

This article presents drawings and explanations of marginalized Bedouin women within the welfare system in Israel as a speech act that captures the lacks, pain, struggles, and integrations or solutions that they experience during cultural transition. One focus is the experience of rapid transition to modernity of marginalized women. Another is the theoretical challenge of finding a form of arts-based research in which to capture this. The article shows how the art captures not a dual but a multifaceted reality, conveying the emotional pain of economic and social lacks and a constant wish for and struggle toward physical and emotional spaces. The article presents the outcome of a theoretical model to analyze the art and explanations that relates both to the art as an inherent expression of self (according to humanistic and arts-based paradigms) and to art as a culturally embedded expression of self in context (according to critical theories).

Shifting Spaces and Lack of Spaces: Impoverished Bedouin Women's Experience of Cultural Transition through Arts-Based Research

This articles discusses the pictures by marginalized Bedouin women moving from nomadic villages to townships. The womens experiences of these shifting inside and outside spaces they live within and the lack of spaces, both inside and outside, both sedentary and mobile, are presented and understood in terms of the interacting oppressions they experience. The use of an arts-based methodology gives access to these spatial experiences, and is discussed in terms of its relevance as an indigenous research method that forms a base for “hearing” the womens concerns according to their own categories, so as to adjust policy in the light of these concerns.

Symbolic Spaces: Marginalized Bedouin Women's Art as Self-Expression

The following work was presented at the Imagine Conference in Israel. It aims to show the ways in which the arts can help outsiders (including policy makers) to “imagine” and thus to understand, through the arts, the issues that marginalized Bedouin women face. However, most important, the symbolic depiction of the womens lives, drawn, exhibited, and discussed together among themselves, is shown to enable the women, through “imaging” the problems and oppressions that they face, to “imagine” ways of conceptualizing and solving these problems—understanding them as complex forms of social oppression rather than as manifestations of personal or inherent weaknesses.

Arts as a vehicle for community building and post-disaster development

Use of the arts in international aid is common in an ad hoc form, but it has not been systematically theorised or evaluated. The arts have the potential to be a culturally contextualised and sustainable intervention for adults and children in the aftermath of war or disaster. On the micro level, the arts are a method to enable the retrieval and reprocessing of traumatic memories that are often encoded in images rather than in words. On a macro level, they can help to reconstruct a group narrative of a disaster as well as mobilise people back into control of their lives. This paper researches a long-term project using arts in Sri Lanka following the civil war and tsunami. A central finding is the need to understand arts within their cultural context, and their usefulness in strengthening the voices and problem-solving capacities of the victims of the disaster.

Women's stress in compulsory army service in Israel: A gendered perspective

BACKGROUND A growing number of women are serving in the military in a variety of roles, yet information on their experience of stressors not associated with either combat or sexual harassment is not commonly reported. OBJECTIVE To present phenomenological data on stressors experienced in military service, together with the use of coping strategies as a way to focus on womens mental needs following deployment from service. METHODS Twenty women who had recently completed their compulsory army service in Israel drew a picture expressing stressors they experienced in the army. They analyzed their own pictures on three levels: the content, context, and the composition as expressing stress and the resources they used in coping with stress. RESULTS Six themes were raised: proximity to war situations, coping with accidents in training soldiers under their command, a conflict between political values and military orders, witnessing the injury of another female soldier, responsibility for accidental injury of a civilian, and distress over the army placement. CONCLUSIONS Coping resources were relational, primarily family and friend support, rather than from the army framework. This reliance on relational sources of support was both a resource and a source of vulnerability and is viewed as distinct from mens style of coping.

Using arts-based research to help visualize community intervention in international aid

This article discusses the advantages of arts-based research specifically for high-context, culturally diverse, power-infused, and chaotic or diffuse research settings as often found in international aid. It points to the ability of arts to concretize abstract concepts and to situate them within specific socio-cultural locations, enabling powerless groups to self-define and to adjust resilience-enhancing interventions to their own perceptions. The arts-based method as an indirect form of communication is shown to be effective in changing stands of power holders and experts, enabling a dialogue that creates culturally sustainable aid. The model used in this article is demonstrated and discussed.