SEMINAR: 'Drawing together: using visual images to manage expectations about being a child of a mentally ill parent'

When?

Wednesday 21 November 2012, 16.00 to 17.00

Where?

08 AC 03

Open to:

Staff, Students, Public

Speaker:

Brenda Gladstone

Introduction:  In this paper I reflect in a new way on an ethnographic analysis of a psychoeducation and peer support program for children of mentally ill parents.  Program effectiveness is frequently measured by demonstrating children’s ability to meet program goals according to pre-defined categories determined by adults.  Little is known about how children respond to these goals, whether they share them, and how, or if, their needs are met.  

Background:  In the primary study I used critical dramaturgy (Paolucci & Richardson, 2006)—rooted in Goffman’s (1959) analyses of the reciprocal influence individuals have on one another in face-to-face encounters—to conceptualize the group as a type of performance.  Meaning arose out of participants’ interactions such that the performance was handled in and modified through a joint interpretive process (Blumer, 1969)  From a critical perspective I was interested in the micro-enactment of power as participants strategized to influence, manage, and control information and prevent embarrassment and disruptions to the “show” they put on for one another (Goffman, 1959).  I was also interested in the behavioural expectations of the setting, itself framed by broader arenas of interaction in which shared institutionalized meanings could be said to govern (often idealized) presentations of self.  Discourse, as an object of analysis, was one way of thinking about how issues were framed and how they functioned to organize children’s experience and guide their behaviours.  In the primary analysis I examined how specific discourses framed the content of the program manual designed to educate and support children and I observed and talked informally with children as they responded to program activities.  Being identified as “as all in the same boat” was meaningful and consequential for children who were expected to learn mental health/illness information because, “knowledge is power”, and to express difficult feelings about being a child of a mentally ill parent.   

Seminar presentation:  In this paper, I integrate visual- and word-based data analysis because this is posited to offer greater potential for studying complex human experience (Guillemin, 2004).  Drawing on the work of Guillemin (2004) this analysis is differentiated from that of the original study to ask how children used visual images to manage expectations about being a child of mentally ill parent, and talk about mental health/illness that was risky,—to consider how the act of drawing and the images produced during group interactions tell us something more about children’s responses, but in ways that visual sociologists claim are impossible to do with words alone.