Action Research on Meaning-Making at Residents' Meetings for Local Disability Policy1

This is the third in a series on residents' meetings (RMs) for municipal disability policymaking in Japan; members included people with disabilities (PWDs). I focused on members' meaning-making process for three community organizational goals: task, process, and relationship. Action research was employed in all three studies during my participation in RMs, which began in 2002. The present study is a follow-up on the meetings' development and covers 2013 to 2019. Meetings were divided into three phases: (a) use of the annual symposium to inform a broader audience about disability policies; (b) appreciation that PWDs can play active roles as supporters of others, especially other PWDs; and (c) recognition that contradiction and dilemma are present in attempts to provide “universal” social equipment for social minorities. The three goals were interrelated through uncertainty and vagueness of RMs; however, it enabled the members to interpret their multifaceted disability-related experiences. PWDs realized their power to help others and developed disability identities through intensive discussions, while they realized the difficulty of social acceptance of their power and the limited solidarity among PWDs.     

Use of narratives and collage in the exploration of the self and the meaning of a career

ABSTRACT

A methodological challenge during my doctoral research led me to use collage to reflect upon my own life and career. The insights it allowed me into the relationship between who we are and what we do led me to conclude that such methods can also illuminate these connections for clients of career counselling. In this paper I argue that such constructivist approaches allow the examination of that psycho-social space within which career is shaped and understood, allowing access to both the conscious and unconscious meaning made of a career and life story. I further argue that in times of increasing complexity such methods will be an important tool for career counsellors to meet the holistic needs of clients.     

Dialogical Temporal Chair Technique

ABSTRACT

The Dialogical Temporal Chair Technique (DTCT) is a method based on Hermans’s dialogical self theory combined with Gestalt and cognitive–behavioural therapeutic techniques. The Dialogical Temporal Chair Technique is a method of activating temporal voices. Three chairs symbolising the past, present and future are used to help subjects create a temporal dialogue. Participants are asked to take a specific I-position and to construct a temporal self-dialogue by changing chair (and hence I-position). The DTCT can be used to solve undefined problems or to explore new ways of thinking, but it may also be used to review important life decisions or enable integration of, or detachment from, ambivalent feelings and attitudes.     

TALKING THE WALK AND WALKING THE TALK: Stanley Hauerwas's Contribution to Theological Ethics

Stanley Hauerwas's contribution to the study of Christian ethics is analyzed in the course of offering an overview of his work, including (1) his early reflections on “vision,”“narrative,” and moral agency; (2) his continuing focus on Christian virtues and practices in contrast to the ethos of moral and political liberalism; and (3) his specific attention to the meaning of peaceableness and the rejection of violence. The essay concludes by considering Hauerwas's legacy as a postliberal theologian, a critical participant in American Protestant ethics, and a conversation partner with Roman Catholics.     

Why John married Mary: Understanding stories involving recurring goals

A story understander needs a great deal of knowledge about people's goals. This knowledge is needed to infer explanations for the behavior of the characters in a story. Sometimes a character's behavior cannot be explained in terms of a particular goal, but only in relation to a set of recurring goals that a character anticipates having. The concept of goal subsumption is introduced to deal with these situations. Goal subsumption is a way of planning for many goals at the same time. It occurs in three different types of story situations, each of which has its own rules for recognition and understanding.     

Psychopathology and the self: Human actors,agents, and authors

The articles included within this special issue of the Journal of Personality all conceptualize psychopathology as the result of problems in human selfhood. As such, they implicate a wide assortment of self-related constructs, from self-objectification to self-esteem, in the etiology and maintenance of psychopathology, and they point to interventions designed to alter these self-processes in order to alleviate suffering. In this commentary, I reinterpret and reorganize many of the ideas presented in the articles from the standpoint of a tripartite perspective on the reflexive human self. The self is first and foremost an inherent duality of I and Me. Psychologically speaking, the I/Me dynamic plays out in three different guises—the self as (1) social actor, (2) motivated agent, and (3) autobiographical author. Problems in human selfhood as they pertain to psychopathology may be profitably reconceived in terms of the corresponding performative styles expressed by social actors, the motivational agendas of values and goals that energize human striving and determine self-esteem, and the internalized life stories that human beings, as authors of the self, fashion and narrate to make sense of the reconstructed past and imagined future.