Patricia Geist-Martin

Making Sense of Fractured Identities: Male Professors’ Narratives of Sexual Harassment

The university has become a site of increased debate over policy and procedures as the experience of sexual harassment reaches all levels of the academic hierarchy. Although this topic has been researched thoroughly, few studies have explored sexual harassment through the voices of men in academe. In this study, sexual harassment is explored from the perspective of two men who are tenured, full professors at a southwestern university. This research employs narrative analysis to locate patterns of discourse that illuminate fractured identities. Through the examination of these fractures, this analysis exposes the ways gender, identity, and sexual harassment are intertwined within academe.

Accounting for Victimization: Male Professors' Ideological Positioning in Stories of Sexual Harassment

Ideologies constrain and shape the sense that people make of sexual harassment experiences in the workplace. Victims, harassers, and witnesses are all influenced by the discourse that informs the decisions they make in relation to sexual harassment in the workplace. This research examined the implications of ideologies and discourses surrounding sexual harassment through interviews with four male professors from a large, southwestern U.S. university, who describe their experience as victims of sexual harassment.The men’s accounts revealed shifts back and forth between several ideological positions as a way to make sense of their experiences, highlighting the impact of hegemonic masculinity, the complicated process of consent, and the contrast between the experiences of male and female victims.

Challenging integration: clinicians' perspectives of communicating collaboration in a center for integrative medicine.

ABSTRACT A shift has occurred in the provision of health care to include a focus not just on biology and disease but also on the whole person, preventative care, and an array of healing modalities based on systems of beliefs and values not typically included within biomedical practice. This approach to health care, termed integrative medicine (IM), blends biomedicine with a broader understanding of patients and their illnesses, including elements of mind, body, and spirit that may be contributing to an ailment. While the use of integrative medicine has increased and centers for integrative medicine have proliferated within conventional health care organizations, distinct tensions arise from this amalgamation. The tensions between IM and biomedical clinicians often center on their differing training and philosophies, as well as on a larger system of health care that privileges biomedicine. As a result, this research is designed to explore the challenges IM clinicians face in collaborating with conventional practitioners to provide patient care. Analysis of interviews with 14 clinicians at one center for integrative medicine revealed four specific challenges they face in their attempt to co-practice IM with conventional medicine. The four challenges include (a) challenges to collaboration, (b) challenges to legitimacy, (c) challenges to consistency, and (d) challenges to unification. Future research should investigate the ways in which these challenges can be addressed so that collaboration throughout the system is facilitated. The professional training of clinicians, the structuring and institutionalization of integrative medicine, and enhanced systems for communicating patient information all play a significant role in this transformation.

Memory as Insight: Navigating the Complexities of Generational Mother–Daughter Relationships

Our memories very rarely represent factual events, but rather they are tethered to our personal goals and how we see ourselves. Autobiographical memories are a specific type of memory that come at us in an instant with no warning of their arrival or clue as to their purpose. This autoethnographic research offers layered emotional understandings of memories—of what we may have resisted in our moms, what they may have resisted in their moms, and the new meanings of resistances that lead us to see both our mothers and our daughters outside the confines of their singular roles.

Cultivating communities of care: A qualitative investigation of the communication of support among incarcerated women

ABSTRACT In 2014, a female-only detention and re-entry facility was restructured to implement new rehabilitative philosophies rooted in strategies to prepare incarcerated women for successful transition into society. A specialized housing unit called incentive-based housing (IBH) was created within this facility to promote an environment of accountability and responsibility. Here, women are expected to be proactive in seeking and achieving successes through programming, all while offering support to one another. In this study, participant observations and interviews were used to understand how 12 incarcerated women living in IBH communicate support. This qualitative study revealed three forms of support being communicated: (a) accountability, (b) validation, and (c) compassion. This study also revealed forms of communication that complicate support, including (a) drama and (b) rivalry. Communication of support is important to consider as we devise new approaches to rehabilitation within America’s criminal justice system.