Leonie Cox

Everyday resilience: Narratives of single refugee women with children

This article offers a critical exploration of the concept of resilience, which is largely conceptualized in the literature as an extraordinary atypical personal ability to revert or ‘bounce back’ to a point of equilibrium despite significant adversity. While resilience has been explored in a range of contexts, there is little recognition of resilience as a social process arising from mundane practices of everyday life and situated in person-environment interactions. Based on an ethnographic study among single refugee women with children in Brisbane, Australia, the women’s stories on navigating everyday tensions and opportunities revealed how resilience was a process operating inter-subjectively in the social spaces connecting them to their environment. Far beyond the simplistic binaries of resilience versus non-resilient, we concern ourselves here with the everyday processual, person-environment nature of the concept. We argue that more attention should be paid to day-to-day pathways through which resilience outcomes are achieved, and that this has important implications for refugee mental health practice frameworks.

Adding SUGAR : service user and carer collaboration in mental health nursing research

SUGAR (Service User and Carer Group Advising on Research) is an initiative established to develop collaborative working in mental health nursing research between mental health service users, carers, researchers, and practitioners at City University London, United Kingdom. This article will describe the background of SUGAR; how the group operates; some of the achievements to date, including researcher reflections; and case studies of how this collaboration influences our research. Written reflective narratives of service user and carer experiences of SUGAR were analyzed using constant comparative methods by the members. Common themes are presented with illustrative quotes. The article highlights the benefits and possible limitations identified to date by members of SUGAR, outlines future plans, and considers the findings in relation to literature on involvement and empowerment. This article, written by staff and members of SUGAR, is the first venture into collaborative writing of the group and reflects the shared ethos of collaborative working.

Paint on their lips: Paint-sniffers, good citizens and public space in Brisbane

This article describes structured responses to young Indigenous people whose paint-sniffing in Brisbane attracts public attention. It gives an emic account of the sniffers’ responses to these processes and argues that paint-sniffing expresses their alienated and marginalized social status and is part of an encoded revolt against White cultural authority and its imposed norms. Foucault’s view of freedom as the capacity to act and question the taken-forgrantedness of one’s milieu (Dreyfus, 2004), and his notion of the body as the locus of power and control, are used to examine unequal power relations described here. Cohen’s (2002) moral panic and Young’s (1971a, 1971b) deviance amplification frameworks are used to examine the reactions of the police and of ordinary good citizens. We conclude that while dominant responses to paint-sniffing in Queensland rid inner Brisbane of paint-sniffing, they increase the young people’s alienation and marginalization from society, thus reproducing the social conditions that lead to sniffing.

Diversity, Disruption, Continuity: Parenting and Social and Emotional Wellbeing Amongst Aboriginal Peoples and Torres Strait Islanders

This paper reviews the diversity in parenting values and practices amongst Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders. Firstly, issues arising from the historical traumatic disruption of families’ attachments are discussed, Then the contribution Indigenous parenting makes to the development of healthy and vulnerable individuals becomes the central focus. Family therapists can draw from a broad understanding of the diversity of parenting values and practices in the context of a strength-based approach.

The Phenomena of Auditory Hallucination as Described by Indonesian People Living With Schizophrenia

This study was a phenomenological inquiry of the experience of auditory hallucinations as described by 13 Indonesian people diagnosed with schizophrenia. The interviewees included 6 men and 7 women and they were aged between 19 and 56 years. Four themes emerged from this study: feeling more like a robot than a human being; voices of contradiction--a point of confusion; tattered relationships and family disarray; and normalizing the presence of voices as part of everyday life. The findings of this study have the potential to contribute to new understandings of how people live with and manage auditory hallucinations and so enhance client-centered nursing care.

Researching Marginalized Populations: Methodological Challenges In Transgender Research

Little research has been conducted in Australia on the experiences and lives of postoperative trans people. This project grew out of one conducted in 2011 and was conducted from 2012 to 2016. The first author completed an Honors project, supervised by the second author, undertaking a qualitative study using a narrative approach, on the social functioning and daily lives of trans people who had undergone sex reassignment surgery and the influence the surgery had on their lives. That study, entitled Sex reassignment surgery: Panacea, placebo or Pandora’s box?-A narrative inquiry, had methodological significance in that it steered away from a quantitative approach to exploring the lived experience of people undergoing sex reassignment surgery. That research suggested that following sex reassignment surgery, trans people have complex psychosocial issues, not the least of which are feelings of grief and loss associated with the procedure and the development of personal identities. As a result of the complexity of the issues and the first author’s own recollections of the surgical process, a PhD study was undertaken addressing how trans people who have undergone sex reassignment surgery navigate this life-changing event, whether they considered their needs had been met, and how systems could be improved to cater for those needs. Individuals who identify as transgender are often discriminated against and marginalized by society, based on challenges to heteronormativity and/or an assumed psychiatric condition called gender dysphoria. In terms of research, these circumstances place trans people in the “vulnerable population” category. This case study explores how research involving transgender people involves certain methodological challenges, including issues surrounding sampling and recruitment, ethical considerations, and the relationship between the researcher and the researched when the principal researcher is a member of the target population.