School of Psychology

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Start date: 2011Subject: search.filters.subject.Identity

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    Living with Self-Injury: A New Direction in Non-Suicidal Self-Injury Research
    (School of Psychology, Massey University, 2012) Hastelow, Katherine
    Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) has become an increasing area of research over the last two decades, however this has been limited to capturing prevalence rates and discovering intents and purposes. Recent research found that nearly 50% of New Zealand teenagers will try it at least once, and in the western world around 15% of teenagers and young adults will do it repeatedly. Most of the research in this area has been focused on the injury or harm part of NSSI, with little focus on the effects of NSSI on identity or life experiences. NSSI itself can induce guilt and shame, increasing likelihood of repetition, giving it a cyclic nature. Both the physical scars and identity as a “self-injurer” are surrounded by secrecy and stigma and tend to be managed or hidden, with implications for social relations.The current paper briefly reviews past research on NSSI, before discussing possibilities for future research seeking to address the current imbalance. The proposed research focuses not on the NSSI itself, but on its wider effects and how living with NSSI is experienced, both for the individual self-injuring and for the people around them.
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    Wade in the Water: Awash in the Sense of Adoption
    (School of Psychology, Massey University, 2012) Blake, Denise; Morgan, Mandy; Coombes, Leigh
    A discursive approach to knowledge contends that language is the constitutive force of experience and lived reality. Meaning is created through language use within relationships, while discourses function as the statements that produce knowledge, power and truth claims. We cannot step outside of the discourses through which our knowledge of experience is produced, though their complexity always allows us to resist particular identities that are discursively available to us. Based on interviews with 12 adoptees constituted within the ‘closed’ adoption period between 1955 and 1985, this narrative analysis represents the way in which the adoptive body matters to participants’ experiences of adoption and their resistances to the discourses that produce knowledge of adoption: Embodiment needed to be incorporated into this discursive work. Knowing, accessing and beingin- the-world are achieved through our senses in everyday life. We engage and shape cultural norms that enable and constrain corporeality. The adoptive experience is lived and felt through bodies that struggle to articulate their corporeality through discourse. Without discourses fit for purpose, speaking embodiment in and through adoption is precarious and adoptees attempt to articulate subjectivities beyond those allowed. This paper discusses the strategies used to materialise body matters in researching adoption.
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    ‘Wade in the Water …': Rethinking adoptees' stories of reunion
    (Massey University, 2011) Blake, Denise; Coombes, Leigh; Morgan, Mandy
    In 1955, the Aotearoa/New Zealand government legislated the closed stranger adoption period. Approximately 80,000 children were constructed as a legal fiction when deemed as if born to a legally married couple. Birth family information was permanently sealed. Yet being raised in a fictional subject position and being denied access to any family of origin has consequences for all involved. After ten years of lobbying, the Adult Adoption Information Act (1985) came into effect. The power of that legislation was to overturn the strategies that suppressed adoptees’ rights to know details of their birth. Adult adoptees over the age of 20 years could access their original birth certificates, which provided a birth mother’s name. With this identifying information, reunions became possible. Birth family reunions involve a diverse range of experiences, reflecting the ways in which adoptees are contextually and historically produced. This paper reconsiders the identity implications of reunion stories using the theoretical concept of hybrid identity. The complexities of reunions are multiple, and adoptees negotiate their identities through being both born to and born as if and yet neither identity is safe. In the production of this hybrid story, it was possible to see the political and moral trajectories that enable and constrain a sense of self through the complexities of a legal context that produces binary subject positions.