Silence and Memories of War: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Family Secrecy

A personal journey and a scientific challenge, this is an autoethnographic study about my own family's secrecy. I knew my grandfather had been a German prisoner of war during World War II. We all knew. But nobody talked about it. Then one day I decided I wanted to do systematic research on the issue of family secrecy around my grandfather's war experiences. Researching one's own family can be called autoethnography. It could be said that autoethnography is an approach to research that aims to describe and systemically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) to understand social and cultural phenomena (ethno). This scientific approach is quite new in the field of family therapy. This study has been an important personal quest, but it also led to important reflections on silences in families, on my own professional development, and on methodological issues concerning autoethnographical research. For one thing, it highlights some of the positive aspects of family secrecy and silences, and invites us—when confronted with family secrecy in clinical practice—to carefully consider the potential destructive and life‐giving aspects of the silence.     

Engaging with Women's Words and their Silences

In studying the 1984 pogrom and its aftermath, I have attempted to capture the voices of women of succeeding generations of the victim families and to gauge some sense of the arduous path which these women have had to tread on. In the present paper, I have examined and assessed the ways and means which women survivors of the 1984 pogrom have relied on to cope with their sense of trauma and hurt, and to negotiate everyday existence. In accounts seeking to document and map the experiences of trauma survivors, the themes which they raise and the issues that they speak of are taken into cognisance, while the gaps in their speech often remain unnoticed and unexplained. But these silences and gaps need to be recognised and highlighted as much as the speech of the survivors. Women survivors of 1984 also do not speak of their own agency, leaving it mostly unarticulated in words. Gauging a sense of this requires going beyond the words that are spoken and attempting, even if tentatively, to unravel and interpret the silences.     

Clients' Experiences of Obstructive Silence: Integrating Conscious Reports and Analytic Theories

The psychodynamic literature has associated clients' silences in psychotherapy sessions with a variety of processes. These processes include wishes to merge with the therapist, to gain control in session, to communicate the unsayable, to express helplessness and, most frequently, the intertwined processes of resistance and regression. Experiences of obstructive silence—that is, moments in which clients detached from the process of therapeutic inquiry—were examined in this study. A grounded theory analysis was used to explore clients' experiences of silences in psychotherapy across psychotherapeutic modalities. Two types of obstructive pausing processes, Disengaged pauses and Interactional pauses, were identified. The implications of delineating conscious aspects of these complex experiences are stressed and techniques are suggested for therapeutic intervention in moments of experienced threat.     

On Pornography: MacKinnon,Speech Acts,and “False” Construction

Although others have focused on Catharine MacKinnon's claim that pornography subordinates and silences women, I here focus on her claim that pornography constructs women's nature and that this construction is, in some sense, false. Since it is unclear how pornography, as speech, can construct facts and how constructed facts can nevertheless be false, MacKinnon's claim requires elucidation. Appealing to speech act theory, I introduce an analysis of the erroneous verdictive and use it to make sense of MacKinnon's constructionist claims. I also show that the erroneous verdictive is of more general interest.     

A tale of two simples

A material simple is a material object that has no proper parts. Some philosophers have argued for the possibility of extended simples. Some have even argued for the possibility of heterogeneous simples or simples that have intrinsic variations across their surfaces. There is a puzzle, though, that is meant to show that extended, heterogeneous simples are impossible. Although several plausible responses have been given to this puzzle, I wish to reopen the case against extended, heterogeneous simples. In this paper, I briefly canvass responses to this puzzle which may be made in defense of extended, heterogeneous simples. I then present a new version of this puzzle which targets simples that occupy atomic yet extended regions of space. It seems that none of the traditional responses can be used to successfully save this particular kind of extended simple from the new puzzle. I also consider some non-traditional defenses of heterogeneous extended simples and argue that they too are unsuccessful. Finally, I will argue that a substantial case can be made against the possibility of extended heterogeneous simples of any kind.     

The Amplification and Integration of Near-Death and Other Exceptional Human Experiences by the Larger Cultural Context: An Autobiographical Case

Although I became a parapsychologist in part to help me understand the near-death experience (NDE) I had in 1952 as an undergraduate, it was not until 1990 that I began to integrate my NDE into my life. Doing so alerted me to the role the larger cultural context plays in regard to NDEs and other exceptional human experiences (EHEs). I propose not only that we need to draw on cultural resources to amplify the meaning of our exceptional human experiences, but that EHEs themselves carry the seeds of cultural change.     

Diaspora in dialogue: Zimbabwean artists in South Africa

In the last two decades, a continuous migration of people into South Africa from Zimbabwe has increasingly foregrounded intractable philosophical questions concerning the complexities of “displacement”, and “place”, inherent to which are notions of “national identity” (the autochthonous and different peoples) and “home”. Neatly distanced academic reflections often reduce the Zimbabwean migration story to measurable motivations and statistics, and disturbingly, do little to check violently xenophobic associations between émigrés and malignant tropes of societal decay. In this paper, I propose an alternative view, based on the belief that personal narrative and self-reflexive dialogue regarding art-making and its exigencies hold the potential to produce a deeper philosophical insight into the increasingly diasporic human condition, which is needed both to undo malicious stereotyping and to validate the contributions made by migrant identities to the decolonial project. The article engages with three Zimbabwean artists living and working in post-apartheid South Africa, Ronald Muchatuta, Gerald Machona and Vulindlela Nyoni. Just as our artworks act as invitations to enter into difficult, heterotopic spaces, I invite you into a self-reflective textual space that enacts the ambivalence and uncertainty at the beginning of an investigation in which questions are generated. My aim is not to offer neatly packaged answers, but to open the reader, through the text as artwork, to an experience of the dialogical fissures, gaps, silences and contradictions that (in a way foreclosed to any coherent account) reveal the traumatic ambivalence of diaspora experiences in the moment of “being unspoken”.     

A tale of two methods

Simulations (both digital and analog) and experiments share many features. But what essential features distinguish them? I discuss two proposals in the literature. On one proposal, experiments investigate nature directly, while simulations merely investigate models. On another proposal, simulations differ from experiments in that simulationists manipulate objects that bear only a formal (rather than material) similarity to the targets of their investigations. Both of these proposals are rejected. I argue that simulations fundamentally differ from experiments with regard to the background knowledge that is invoked to argue for the “external validity” of the investigation.     

The ontomystical argument revisited

I argue that Alexander Pruss’s ontomystical arguments should not be endorsed without further argumentative support of their premises. My specific targets are his claims that (i) Śamkara’s principle is true and (ii) the high mystics had phenomenal experiences of radical dependence and as of a maximally great being. Against (i), I urge a host of counterexamples. The only ways I can see for Pruss to respond to these counterexamples end up falsifying (ii). The key problem which leads to this conclusion is that Pruss needs a criterion for distinguishing phenomenal experiences from non-phenomenal experiences according to which the experiences of the high mystics were phenomenal experiences while the experiences of those persons I discuss in my counterexamples to Śamkara’s principle are not. There appears to be no such criterion. I suggest that the future of the ontomystical arguments lies in developing them as inductive rather than deductive arguments.     

Investigating neural representations: the tale of place cells

While neuroscientists often characterize brain activity as representational, many philosophers have construed these accounts as just theorists’ glosses on the mechanism. Moreover, philosophical discussions commonly focus on finished accounts of explanation, not research in progress. I adopt a different perspective, considering how characterizations of neural activity as representational contributes to the development of mechanistic accounts, guiding the investigations neuroscientists pursue as they work from an initial proposal to a more detailed understanding of a mechanism. I develop one illustrative example involving research on the information-processing mechanisms mammals employ in navigating their environments. This research was galvanized by the discovery in the 1970s of place cells in the hippocampus. This discovery prompted research in what the activity of these cells represents and how place representations figure in navigation. It also led to the discovery of a host of other types of neurons—grid cells, head-direction cells, boundary cells—that carry other types of spatial information and interact with place cells in the mechanism underlying spatial navigation. As I will try to make clear, the research is explicitly devoted to identifying representations and determining how they are constructed and used in an information processing mechanism. Construals of neural activity as representations are not mere glosses but are characterizations to which neuroscientists are committed in the development of their explanatory accounts.     

benefits of job clubs for executive job seekers: a tale of hares and tortoises

This qualitative research study compares the experiences of 2 groups of executive job seekers—job club members and nonmembers—through thematic analysis of open‐ended interviews. The findings indicated that job club members benefited from group learning, increased accountability, networking opportunities, emotional support, helping other members, and enhanced understanding of the context of their experiences. Job club members also enjoyed lower levels of frustration with the search process, used a wider range of outplacement firm services, and devoted more time on average to job search activities. Suggestions for practical implementation and application of results are discussed.     

Counterfactual structure and learning from experience in negotiations

Reflecting on the past is often a critical ingredient for successful learning. The current research investigated how counterfactual thinking, reflecting on how prior experiences might have been different, motivates effective learning from these previous experiences. Specifically, we explored how the structure of counterfactual reflection - their additive (“If only I had”) versus subtractive (“If only I had not”) nature - influences performance in dyadic-level strategic interactions. Building on the functionalist account of counterfactuals, we found across two experiments that generating additive counterfactuals about a previous negotiation produced an advantage for negotiators over their previous performance compared to subtractive counterfactuals, both in terms of obtaining value for oneself and conceiving creative agreements. Additive counterfactuals enabled negotiators to more effectively extract lessons from past experiences to improve their current negotiation performance.     

Retrospective reflexivity: The residual and subliminal repercussions of researching war

Stories of the war have been a known part of my story as granddaughter of Polish post-war migrants. Yet venturing into these stories as researcher has been troubling; I found their closeness and their raw emotion difficult to process. Significant sections of my interview schedules entailed participants recounting their own, their parents' or their grandparents' stories of war and migration, with traumatic episodes frequently intersecting into their stories. As a researcher, these traumatic narratives have had a residual quality, lasting in my subconscious long after the interviews themselves and doctorate for which they were conducted had finished.In this paper, I focus on experiences of, and reactions to listening to, analysing and writing about these traumatic cultural memories. Collins (1998: 3.35) has observed that ‘the emotions experienced, whether by the interviewer or interviewee, are as real, as important and as interesting as any other product of the interview’; my powerfully felt experiences with traumatic content have validated this sentiment. With a retrospective reflexivity I now realise that these cultural memories were not the only ‘product’ of my research, but that how they were narrated and how I dealt with them were also a significant part of the research process, and indeed stories in themselves. Here I attempt to retell how these stories impacted me as the researcher; how in the case of particularly harrowing stories, I also needed time to absorb the narratives, to comprehend the participant's experiences and their ability to narrate such stories, and to recover from the experience of listening to such accounts.     

‘New Rules for Labour Immigration’: Delving into the 2008 Swedish Reform of Labour Migration and Its Effects on Migrants’ Well-Being

I have investigated the nature of the transformation triggered by the reform of labour mobility entitled ‘New Rules for Labour Immigration’, introduced in Sweden in 2008, and its impact on migrants’ well-being. By applying the methodology of the ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ approach (Bacchi 2009), I show that the problem at which the reform was aimed is represented as a shortage of skills and labour. I argue that such a representation and the silences it invokes are underpinned by the paradigms of managed migration and of neoliberalism, thus marking a discontinuity in the political rhetoric of universalism which had been endorsed by Sweden since the beginning of the 1970s. I contend that such a formulation of the problem assumes and entails a conceptualisation of migrants as factors of production. This formulation stands in sharp opposition to the one advanced by the Human Development and Capability Approach to migration (UNDP 2009) which recognises migrants as human beings, endowed with capabilities, aspirations, and agency. Such reification of migrants implies that the reform regulates the stay of immigrants in Sweden with the purpose of maximising their contribution to Swedish economic growth, thus putting them in a vulnerable position which is likely to reduce their capability for work (Bonvin 2009).     

"If we work hard,we can do it" a tale from an olympic (gold) medallist

The purpose of this study was to gain day-to-day insight into how an elite athlete experiences competing in the Olympic Games with regard to perceived stress, the subsequent coping efforts, and the maintenance of a positive response outcome expectancy. One Norwegian female soccer player wrote a journal throughout the pre-camp and the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. "Tina" employed a range of coping strategies, both problem-focused and emotion focused, when faced with challenges such as feeling a lack of self-confidence and the team losing the first match. However, she kept a strong belief in her team's ability to win and had a strong positive response outcome expectancy throughout the targeted period. The team won the Olympic Gold medal and Tina attributed this achievement to the hard work everybody on the team had exhibited over a long period of time. The results of this qualitative analysis are discussed with respect to contemporary theories of stress, coping, and motivation.     

Imposters,Tricksters, and Trustworthiness as an Epistemic Virtue

This paper argues that trustworthiness is an epistemic virtue that promotes objectivity. I show that untrustworthy imposture can be an arrogant act of privilege that silences marginalized voices. But, as epistemologists of ignorance have shown, sometimes trickery and the betrayal of epistemic norms are important resistance strategies. This raises the question: when is betrayal of trust epistemically virtuous? After establishing that trust is central to objectivity, I argue for the following answer: a betrayal is epistemically vicious when it strengthens or promotes oppressive, exclusive networks of trust, and a betrayal is epistemically virtuous when it expands trust networks to involve the oppressed. These criteria correctly account for both the epistemic vice of a recent case of Internet imposture and the epistemic virtue of resistant tricksters.     

History’s Ethical Demand: Memory,Denial, and Responsibility in the Wake of the Holocaust

What does it mean to discover an unspoken Nazi past in one’s own family? In a moment defined by chance and circumstance, I discovered that my German grandfather had joined the Nazi Party. Using my family’s struggle with memory as a site of inquiry, I examine the process of remembering, its transmission, and dissociation, particularly as it relates to past and present perpetrator groups. What lurks in the silences that are passed down between generations? How does our collective response to history’s atrocities shape what we what we know and remember as individuals? How do we define the moral obligations of memory, or understand the power of dissociation more than seven decades after the Holocaust? When does complacency in the face of past or present injustice make us complicit? Any answer to these questions points to the complexity of memory and the ethical demands of history. Connections between collective crimes of the past and social injustices in the present are considered and different forms of historical awareness and personal responsibility are discussed. In the face of overt prejudice and racism, “history’s call” and the work of psychoanalysis are inherently related.     

The tale of a moderate normative skeptic

While Richard Joyce’s moral skepticism might seem to be an extreme metaethical view, it is actually far more moderate than it might first appear. By articulating four challenges facing his approach to moral skepticism, I argue that Joyce’s moderation is, in fact, a theoretical liability. First, the fact that Joyce is not skeptical about normativity in general makes it possible to develop close approximations to morality, lending support to moderate moral revisionism over moral error theory. Second, Joyce relies on strong, contentious conceptual and empirical claims in support of his views. Third, Joyce’s evolutionary debunking argument threatens to backfire, generalizing to all normative judgments. Finally, Joyce fails to offer an adequate account of the normativity of desire. Each of these four challenges can be either sidestepped (the first and second) or embraced (the third and fourth) by radicalizing and defending a global form of normative skepticism. There are thus several ways in which global normative skepticism appears to be in a more robust dialectical position than Joyce’s moral skepticism. Furthermore, I argue, Joyce’s arguments against global normative skepticism are unconvincing. While this discussion is framed in terms of Joyce’s work, its arguments will apply to other moral skeptics who are not also global normative skeptics. The result is an invitation for Joyce and other moral skeptics to leave these problems behind and join the radical camp.     

Antecedents and Consequences of Awkward Silence A Replication Using Revised Lag Sequential Analysis

McLaughlin and Cody's (1982) study of antecedents and consequences of awkward silence is replicated in this study. McLaughlin and Cody concluded that behavioral sequences before silence in dyads with multiple silences were characterized by a pattern of minimal response by one participant. They also concluded that posts/fence sequences were characterized by the presence of question-answer adjacency pairs. Advances made in our understanding of lag sequential analysis (Allison & Liker, 1982; Morley, in press; Sackett, in press) since their study was conducted indicate that statistics other than those employed in their study are more appropriate. A study of the antecedents and consequences of silence for dyads with multiple silences is reported and analyzed using reuised lag sequential analysis. This study found that silences were preceded by minimal responses at lag 1 and followed by questions at lag 1. However, silences were not followed by answers at lag 2. Additionally, the significant dependencies between minimal responses and silence, and silence and questions accounted for only a very small amount of the variance. Thus, although statistically significant, these dependencies are not theoretically meaningful.