The number of children living in shelters in the United States dramatically increased during the 1980s. Despite this increase in number, little is known about their experiences. The purpose of this ...research using Parse's method was to generate a structure of the lived experience of feeling uncomfortable for children in shelters. The investigator sought to expand nursing's knowledge base about feeling uncomfortable and to provide a better understanding of the experiences of children in families with no place of their own. The findings suggest that the lived experience of feeling uncomfortable for the participants is a disturbing uneasiness with the unsureness of aloneness with togetherness amidst longing for personal joyful moments. These findings, considered from Parse's human becoming theory, create a theoretical structure of feeling uncomfortable. Similarities and differences with related literature are discussed. Implications for practice and further research are offered.
Parse's research method was used to study the meaning of grieving for families living with AIDS. In videotaped dialogues, diverse families living with AIDS described their experiences of grieving in ...relation to death and other losses. Narratives of the grieving experiences of each family were constructed. Through the process of extraction-synthesis, the structure of grieving was generated. The four concepts within the structure are explicated in this article as essential in family grieving. Further interpretation led to a theoretical structure of grieving within the human becoming belief system. This view of grieving, as a multidimensional rhythmical process of intersubjective becoming, expands and specifies nursing's theory base. The study also confirms that Parse's methodology is valuable for family-centered nursing research.
Smoking cessation has been identified as an important factor for health and quality of life in Korean society. This article explicates Korean adolescents' experiences of smoking cessation from the ...perspective of Parse's human becoming theory, as a prelude to conducting research. A nurse was truly present with individual students as they shared their experiences of trying to stop smoking. Interpreted through the principles and concepts of Parse's theory, the experience of quitting smoking is elucidated as a struggle of choosing one's value priorities amid the opportunities and limitations inherent in this decision, while moving with unique patterns of relating. Staying with the commitment to stop smoking is changing one's health and quality of life. The authors briefly discuss the implications of this perspective for nursing practice, and identify struggling to change as a phenomenon for future research.
This article demonstrates the use of Parse's theory of human becoming in the care of hospitalized adolescents and their families. The practice dimensions of the theory are described and scenarios ...from nursing practice serve to illustrate the usefulness of the theory with the adolescent population. Strengths and limitations of the theory are discussed within the context of nursing practice.
The purpose of the research reported here was to explore with mothers and children the experience of having no place of their own. The researcher used Parse's theory of human becoming as a framework ...in this exploratory descriptive study. For the participants in this study the experience of living without a place of their own is: a sense of gratitude for protection, mingling with the discomfort of restriction and exposure, giving rise to fears and reassurances as detachment from cherished others surfaces discordance with unfamiliar patterns, while novel engagements bring pleasure as insights and struggles surface new possibles as well as disillusionment. Suggestions for theory expansion and further research are discussed.
Metaphorical expression is viewed as a fundamental way of symbolizing used to develop nursing theory. The Sea of Life poem depicts a metaphor for explicating a theoretical structure derived from ...principles of the human becoming theory: Transforming occurs in the revealing-concealing of valuing. The Sea of Life, an original poem, sets forth the idea that unique meanings are co-created through human-environment relationships. The concepts of valuing, revealing-concealing, and transforming are linked through the poem to lived experiences. The easily recognizable concrete lived experiences which flow from the poem are re-conceptualized to formulate research questions.
Human monsters are embryos that were retarded at a certain degree of development, the human in them is only a straitjacket for inhuman forms and substances.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand ...PlateausThis is the space-age, and we are here to go.William Burroughs, Dead City RadioThe main thing about them is not that they wish to go ‘back,’ but that they wish to get – away. A little more strength, flight, courage, and artistic power, and they would want to rise – not return.Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and EvilIn 1960 Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline coined the term cyborg to refer to (nothing less than) an ‘exogenously extended organisational complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic system unconsciously’ (Clynes and Kline 1995 1960: 30–1). In so doing, they simultaneously heralded at least four decades of speculation on the post-human, and sought to close down this potentiality to effectuate a homeostaticrepetition of Homo sapiens. The exogenous extension of which Clynes and Kline spoke was the technological extension of a biological organism to enable its continued survival in the hostile environ of space. Whilst their first experiments involved the ubiquitous lab-rat, Clynes and Kline's ultimate goal was the merging of high technology and a human body to produce the ultimate astronaut. Whilst apparently radical, insofar as it broached the boundaries of the human body and took technics out of humans’ conscious control, at its core Clynes and Kline's work was conservative.
In past work on Chinese “cosmology”, I have resisted using the term “metaphysics” because of the history of this term in classical Greek philosophy. Angus Graham has warned us of the equivocations ...that arise in eliding the distinction between Greek ontology and classical Chinese cosmology. In this essay, I have been inspired by my dear friend the late Yu Jiyuan’s distinction between classical Greek “metaphysics” and “contemporary metaphysics with ambiguous edges” to adapt the term “metaphysics” for use within the classical Confucian corpus. In the language of Confucian “metaphysics”, the ultimate goal of our philosophical inquiry is quite literally “to know one’s way around things’” (zhidao 知道) in the broadest possible sense of the term “things”. In the application of Confucian metaphysics, “knowing” certainly begins from the cognitive understanding of a situation, but then goes on to include the creative and practical activity of “realizing a world” through ars contextualis—the art of contextualizing things. I apply the insight that “metaphysics” so understood in the Confucian context provides a warrant for establishing a useful contrast between a Greek conception of the “human being” and a Confucian conception of “human becomings”.
In this article, I return to my engagements with people in the field not only to address the specific circumstances and trajectories I encountered there, but to make a case for allowing our ...engagement with Others to determine the course of our thinking about them and to reflect more broadly upon the agonistic and reflexive relations between anthropology and philosophy. I do so in order to suggest that through ethnographic rendering, people's own theorizing of their conditions may leak into, animate, and challenge present-day regimes of veridiction, including philosophical universals and anthropological subjugation to philosophy. I am interested in how ethnographic realities find their way into theoretical work. Using the mutual influence between Pierre Clastres and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as a case study, I argue against reducing ethnography to proto-philosophy. The relationship, in fact, may be more productively seen as one of creative tension and cross-pollination. This sense of ethnography in the way of (instead of to) theory—like art—aims at keeping interielatedness, precariousness, curiosity, and unflnishedness in focus. In resisting synthetic ends and making openings rather than absolute truths, ethnographic practice allows for an emancipatory reflexivity and for a more empowering critique of the rationalities, interventions, and moral issues of our times. I conclude with a literal return to the field and reflect on how the story of lives continues.
This article investigates Chinese urban youth’s mediated ‘slice of life’ and playful encounters as part of their identity construction and performance work on Bilibili, one of China’s most ...influential video-sharing social media sites mediating anime, comics, games and novels. Using a mix-method approach of digital ethnography, participant observation, interviews and data visualisation, this article examines fans’ hermeneutic practices through anime, comic, game and novel prosumption, exemplified by danmaku: ‘bullet screen’, barrage-like comments overlaid on videos. This article argues that Bilibili works as an ‘identity college’ for fans to perform various roles and explore their hybrid identities in a social-hermeneutic engagement process. In particular, the function of anonymous danmaku comments will be closely analysed as it offers a quasi-real-time engagement experience for fans and helps shape fans’ social self. Following a symbolic interactionist tradition, Mead’s ‘generalised other’ and Goffman’s dramaturgical theory are contextualised in the Chinese socio-cultural milieu where fans’ identity performance is regarded as masquerade. Departing from the moral panic rhetoric that Generation Z is ‘amused to death’, becoming ‘infantile and animalised’, or even enslaved by their desires and capable only of ‘cold intimacies’, the findings of this explorative study present a more complex understanding of Chinese youth’s identity work through participatory social media use and networked fandom.
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