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Articles 1 - 8 of 8
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Older Women’S Stories Of Covid-19 Loss: Communicated Narrative Sense-Making Through Photography, Anne Walker
Older Women’S Stories Of Covid-19 Loss: Communicated Narrative Sense-Making Through Photography, Anne Walker
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The diverse array of challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic make it difficult to assess the full impact of this global health crisis. More than 300,000 older Americans died, leaving a nation of grieving survivors in their absence. This profound loss of life will undoubtedly inform the field’s understanding of grief and grieving for many years to come. Pre-pandemic, older women in the United States understood grief to be part of their life stage; COVID-19 amplified the grief experience through both cumulative losses and the isolation particular to the novel coronavirus response. However, few qualitative studies explore older women’s grief, …
“It's Like A Phantom Limb. It Feels Like It’S There. It's Supposed To Be There, But It's Not.”: Birthmothers’ Metaphors Of Ambiguous Loss, Melodee Lynn Sova
“It's Like A Phantom Limb. It Feels Like It’S There. It's Supposed To Be There, But It's Not.”: Birthmothers’ Metaphors Of Ambiguous Loss, Melodee Lynn Sova
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Birthmothers are a population with unique experiences and challenges. Among those challenges is the difficulty understanding and managing a loss for which they do not have a readily available coping strategy. As a birthmother, the author of this dissertation was uniquely situated to connecting with, and understanding the ways in which, birthmothers expressed their narratives. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the ways in which birthmothers make sense of their experiences with ambiguous loss by examining the metaphors they employ when narrating their adoption story. The use of metaphor in the birthmother narrative was especially important because metaphor …
Rethinking Reintegration And Veteran Identity: A New Consciousness, Jeni Hunniecutt
Rethinking Reintegration And Veteran Identity: A New Consciousness, Jeni Hunniecutt
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation explores how Veteran reintegration is a process of identity transformation. Written as a first-person narrative and weaving my own story of Veteran reintegration and identity into the chapters, this purpose of this project is to address two questions: RQ1: Examining my own experiences of separating from the U.S. Military institution, what are some possible Veteran identity tensions that exist in the liminal space of reintegration? And, RQ2: How might the experiences of U.S. Military Veteran reintegration be shaped by an individual's sacred liminal experience of military initial entry training as well as their institutionalized liminal experience of belonging …
Performing The Personal Within The Organizational: Communicating Professional Identities Through Taiwanese Commercial Airline Pilots' Personal Narratives, Kai-Chun Chuang
Performing The Personal Within The Organizational: Communicating Professional Identities Through Taiwanese Commercial Airline Pilots' Personal Narratives, Kai-Chun Chuang
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation project explored professionalism and the performance of identities by examining Taiwanese commercial airline pilots' discursive practices in everyday life. The intentions for this project were to not only expand current knowledge of organizational communication from a critical rhetorical perspective, but to further explore the under-appreciated concept of professionalism of organizational members. Theoretically, I traced theoretical analysis in the sociology of professions and further investigated scholarship from identity research in organizational communication studies. This research agenda helped to advance communication-based understandings of the meanings and practices of professional identity as a complement to the sociological conception. I further merged …
Digital Storytelling And Study Abroad: The Impact Of A Narrative-Based, Reflective Practice Upon Identity Construction, Nicole Hubbell
Digital Storytelling And Study Abroad: The Impact Of A Narrative-Based, Reflective Practice Upon Identity Construction, Nicole Hubbell
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Digital storytelling is a multimedia genre that has been steadily gaining recognition since its inception in the early 1990s. Study abroad is also on the rise among U.S. undergraduates. Study abroad returnees often lack opportunities for structured reflection upon their experiences abroad. Digital storytelling is one reflective tool that may be useful for stimulating reflection as part of a narrative process, which connects past events with current life choices and solidifies identity. Five undergraduates and three graduate students attended digital storytelling workshops, created digital stories, and were interviewed. Analysis of these case studies found that while graduate students were more …
Through My Mother's Eyes: The Lifelong Journey Of Raising Children With And Without Disabilities, Lucie P. Lawrence
Through My Mother's Eyes: The Lifelong Journey Of Raising Children With And Without Disabilities, Lucie P. Lawrence
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Through the use of narrative, this study sought to document the life-altering journey of 32 mothers raising children at various stages of development and with a variety of disabilities. The main questions guiding this research study consider the lived experiences of mothers raising children with and without disabilities; what these mothers reveal about the journey with their children; how these mothers define motherhood; and how their definition of motherhood differs for each of their children. To address the research questions and capture the narratives of participants, a two-pronged qualitative methodology was applied, using diaries compiled by participants and in-depth interviews …
Vignetwork: An Exquisite Corpse Network Of Short Films, David Scott Calhoun
Vignetwork: An Exquisite Corpse Network Of Short Films, David Scott Calhoun
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Vignetwork (www.Vignetwork.com) is the name for an online system of interconnected short films that comes from the combination of the terms vignette and network. By developing Vignetwork as an experiment in narrative structure, it is possible to analyze what a hypertext is and what it means as a tool, environment, and model for understanding the world. By comparing it to various other films, projects, and ideas, Vignetwork emerges as a parable for how individuals define themselves in a shared, crowded world.
Struggling, Coping, And Thriving: Sense-Making In Stepfamily Couples' Narratives About Coparenting, Andrea L. Smtih Sisk
Struggling, Coping, And Thriving: Sense-Making In Stepfamily Couples' Narratives About Coparenting, Andrea L. Smtih Sisk
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The term coparenting implies a bioparental dyad that often excludes the stepparent's role in sharing parenting across joint-custody households. Focusing solely on this dyad also precludes gaining an understanding of how stepfamily couples manage together the communication and sharing of parental responsibilities with the parent(s) in the shared children's other home. In a departure from this bioparental dyad-focused approach, this study locates the stepfamily couple at the center of an inquiry into managing coparenting across households. This mixed methods design study included in-depth interviews of 32 stepfamily couples whose narratives about coparenting were analyzed using grounded theory methods. Forty-one percent …