In search of the good old life: Ontological breakdown and responsive hope at the margins of life.

What might the good life amount to at the margins of life? Taking our point of departure in Jonathan Lear's notions of ontological breakdown and radical hope as well as the phenomenology of lived time, we explore hope within the institutional aging process in Denmark. Drawing on two ethnographic cases, Vagn and Thea, we propose a phenomenological and responsive hope emerging within complex temporalities. This is a relational hope to be included among the living, to be a human being among others. Importantly, it is neither optimistic nor naive but rather hope practiced in the face of devastating life circumstances.

A qualitative study on the ethics of transforming care: examining the development and implementation of Canada's first mental health strategy.

BACKGROUND: The Mental Health Commission of Canada worked collaboratively with stakeholders to create a new framework for a federal mental health strategy, which is now mandated for implementation by 2017. The proposed strategies have been written into provincial health plans, hospital accreditation standards, and the annual objectives of psychiatric departments and community organizations. This project will explore the decision-making process among those who contributed to Canada's first federal mental health policy and those implementing this policy in the clinical setting. Despite the centrality of ethical reasoning to the successful uptake of the recent national guidelines for recovery-oriented care, to date, there are no studies focused exclusively on the ethical tensions that emerged and continue to emerge during the creation and implementation of the new standards for recovery-oriented practice. METHODS/DESIGN: This two-year Canadian Institute of Health Research Catalyst Grant in Ethics (2015-2017) consists of three components. C-I, a retrospective, qualitative study consisting of document analysis and interviews with key policy-makers of the ethical tensions that arose during the development of Canada's Mental Health Strategy will be conducted in parallel to C-II, a theory-based, focused ethnography of how mental health practitioners in a psychiatric setting reason about and act upon new standards in everyday practice. Case-based scenarios of ethical tensions will be developed from C-I/II and fed-forward to C-III: participatory forums with policy-makers, mental health practitioners, and other stakeholders in recovery-oriented services to collectively identify and prioritize key ethical concerns and generate action steps to close the gap between the policy-making process and its implementation at the local level. DISCUSSION: Policy-makers and clinicians make important everyday decisions that effect the creation and implementation of new practice standards. Particularly, there is a need to understand how ethical dilemmas that arise during this decision-making process and the reasoning and resources they use to resolve these tensions impact on the implementation process. This catalyst grant in ethics will (1) introduce a novel line of inquiry focusing on the ethical tensions that arose in the development of Canada's first mental health strategy, while (2) intensifying our focus on the ethical aspects of moving policy into action.

Chronic homework in emerging borderlands of healthcare.

The task of caring for those with chronic illnesses has gained a new centrality in health care at a global level. We introduce the concept of "chronic homework" to offer a critical reflection on the treatment of chronic illnesses in three quite different national and local contexts: Uganda, Denmark, and the United States. A major challenge for clinicians, patients, and family caregivers is how to navigate the task of moving health care from clinic to home. By "chronic homework," we refer to the work patients and families are expected to carry out in their home contexts as part of the treatment of chronic conditions. Families and patients spend time receiving training by clinical experts in the various tasks they are to do at home. While this "colonization" of the popular domain could easily be understood from a Foucauldian perspective as yet another emerging mode of governmentality, this a conceptualization can oversimplify the way specific practices of homework are re-imagined and redirected by patients and significant others in their home surroundings. In light of this re-invention of homework in local home contexts, we foreground another conceptual trope, describing chronic homework as a borderland practice.

I/We narratives among African American families raising children with special needs.

This paper examines a statistics debate among African American caregivers raising children with disabilities for insights into the work of "African American mothering." Using ethnographic, narrative and discourse analyses, we delineate the work that African American mothers do--in and beyond this conversation--to cross ideological and epistemological boundaries around race and disability. Their work entails choosing to be an "I" and, in some cases, actively resisting being seen as a "they" and/or part of a collective "we" in order to chart alternative futures for themselves and their children.

Reading Minds and Telling Tales in a Cultural Borderland.

In this article I consider "narrative mind reading," the practical capability of inferring the motives that precipitate and underlie the actions of others. Following Jerome Bruner, I argue that this everyday capacity depends on our ability to place action within unfolding narrative contexts. While Bruner has focused on narrative mind reading as a within-culture affair, I look to border situations that cross race and class lines where there is a strong presumption among participants that they do not, in fact, share a cultural framework. Instead, interactions often reinforce actors' perceptions of mutual misunderstanding and cultural difference. Drawing on a longitudinal study of African American families who have children with severe illnesses, I examine narrative mind reading and misreading in one mother's interactions with the clinicians who treat her child. I further explore how narrative misreadings are supported through chart notes and "familiar stranger" stories. The focus on miscommunication grounds a theory of the reproduction of cultural difference in interactive dynamics and brings Bruner's emphasis on narrative into dialogue with contemporary anthropology of cultural borderlands.

Bruner's Search for Meaning: A Conversation between Psychology and Anthropology.

We introduce a special issue of Ethos devoted to the work of Jerome Bruner and his careerlong attempts to seek innovative ways to foster a dialogue between psychology and anthropology. The articles in this special issue situate Bruner's meaning-centered approach to psychology and his groundbreaking work on narrative in the broader context of the developmental trajectory of both of fields of inquiry. Bruner's work has been enormously influential in the subfields of cultural psychology and psychological anthropology, especially because of his important contributions to our understanding of the intimate relationship between culture and mind. We examine Bruner's past and ongoing engagement with such luminary figures as Lev Vygotsky, Jean Piaget, Alfred Kroeber, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Clifford Geertz to highlight points of convergence and tension between his version of cultural psychology and contemporary theorizing and practice in psychological anthropology. We also review his practical and theoretical contributions to the fields of medicine, law, and education.

Pocahontas Goes to the Clinic: Popular Culture as Lingua Franca in a Cultural Borderland.

Urban hospitals constitute an example of what is arguably the most visible site in anthropology these days-the border zone. Negotiating health care requires trafficking in tricky spaces where patients and their families must pay vigilant attention about when to submit, when to resist, and how to collaborate. Drawing from ethnographic research carried out over the past nine years among African American families who have children with severe illnesses and disabilities, I examine how children's popular culture operates in the fraught borderland that constitutes the urban clinic. Global icons like a Disneyfied Pocahantas can function as a lingua franca, offering a language of publicly available symbols on which families, health professionals, and children can draw to create a shared imaginative space across race and class divides and across the sometimes even more radical divide between sufferer and healer.

Hoping, Willing, and Narrative Re-Envisioning.

At first glance, hoping and willing do not seem to have much to do with one another. They evoke quite disparate turns of mind, in fact. Hope, which Aristotle called a "waking dream," is associated with imagination, daydreams, and wishful thinking. Willing, on the other hand, is aligned with practical effort, discipline, and acting against one's inclinations. Despite their lack of obvious affinity, in some communities-especially in the face of extreme suffering-the two acts may develop a close kinship. Hope as a moral task, even a narrative quest, can demand the arduous cultivation of the will. Hope is not necessarily something people easily acquire-not a matter of mere wishful thinking when life becomes difficult, but a difficult moral obligation that must be assumed as a way to confront pain and despair.

Toward a vulnerable ethics of research practice.

This article considers ethical dilemmas concerning the protection of confidentiality that often arise in carrying out ethnographic research. A number of problematic assumptions are highlighted that generally (implicitly or explicitly) guide the practice of contemporary research ethics review committees: (1) ethical rules are context free; (2) there is always an ethical 'right answer'; (3) there is an objective position from which to judge what one ought ethically to do. Notably, this is a position of emotional detachment from the situation; (4) this objectively identified ethical position can be articulated in explicit and unambiguous public language. The troublesome character of these assumptions is raised in the context of fifteen years of ethnographic research among African American families in clinical settings within the urban United States, with special attention to an ongoing relationship with one research participant the author has known for eight years. Finally the article suggests an alternative ethical framework drawn from recent philosophical work in an Aristotelian-inspired 'virtue ethics'.

Synthesis of aromatic bisabolene natural products via palladium-catalyzed cross-couplings of organozinc reagents.

Aromatic bisabolene derivatives were prepared by two methods involving cross-coupling of organozinc reagents. The first synthesis of (+/-)-glandulone A (10), as well as syntheses of (+/-)-curcuhydroquinone (8) and (+/-)-curcuquinone (9), were accomplished via coupling of a secondary alkyl zinc reagent (1,5-dimethyl-4-hexenylzinc halide, 18) to protected bromohydroquinones using Pd(dppf)Cl(2) as catalyst. Coupling of arylzinc halides with alkenyl triflate 16 using Pd(PPh(3))(4) catalyst provided a number of bisabolene derivatives and led to syntheses of dehydro-alpha-curcumene (2), (+/-)-curcuphenol (3), and (+/-)-elvirol (13). A high-yield synthesis of the (+/-)-heliannuol D precursor 29 is also reported using this method.

Becoming Buzz Lightyear and Other Clinical Tales: Indigenizing Disney in a World of Disability.

Increasingly, anthropologists are investigating the place of mass media in our lives, for we live, as Ortner (1999) notes, in a 'media-saturated world.' This paper explores the role of (globalized) children's mass media - with particular emphasis on Disney - and its influence on one particular community of consumers. The community consists of African American children who face serious disabilities and chronic illnesses, as well as the families who care for them. Disney films and characters permeate the lives and imaginations of these children and parenting kin. While the compelling power of Disney can legitimately be construed as a form of global domination, an emphasis on domination and on the consumer as unwitting victim easily underestimates the agency of the audience.

Narrating September 11: Race, Gender, and the Play of Cultural Identities.

This article considers the September 11 tragedy as an event that has created a powerful experience-an astonishing and unthinkable "breach" from the expected and routine-that has riveted the American public and provoked personal storytelling. September 11 and its aftermath have provided an occasion for rethinking and reworking cultural identity. We explore how September 11 and subsequent events have been experienced, constructed, and narrated by African American women, primarily from working-class and low-income backgrounds. These stories, and the commentaries and discussions that surround them, provide vehicles for these women to ponder what sort of social contexts they inhabit, within what sort of subject positions they are placed, and how these may be shifting in light of the attacks and America's "War on Terrorism.

The Fragility of Healing.

This article explores a paradox-the simultaneous cultivation and suppression of "healing dramas" by pediatric rehabilitation therapists. Dramatic moments are defined as ones in which the routine exercises and treatment activities of therapeutic practice are transformed into narrative plots. These improvisational plots involve multiple characters, risks, suspense, and above all, a heightened sense that something is at stake. Experience itself becomes the focus of attention for the patient. Based upon ethnographic research in Chicago and Los Angeles, this article offers an anatomy of two such moments, investigating not only how healing dramas are constructed between patients and healers but how and why institutional discourses and practices invite their abandonment.

Learning from Stories: Narrative Interviewing in Cross-cultural Research.

This paper argues for the importance of eliciting stories when trying to understand the point of view and personal experience of one's informants. It also outlines one approach to eliciting and analyzing narrative data as part of a complex and multi-faceted ethnographic study. The paper draws upon ethnographic research among African-American families who have children with serious illnesses or disabilities. However, it is not a report of research findings per se. Rather, it is primarily a conceptual paper that addresses narrative as a research method. Features that distinguish a story from other sorts of discourse are sketched and current discussions in the occupational therapy and social science literature concerning the importance of narrative are examined. The heart of the paper focuses on a single narrative interview and examines what we learn about the client and family caregiver perspective through stories.