Feminism, Community, and Communication

. . . from the minds of therapists on the cutting edge!This informative, innovative collection brings together the work of a group of "scholar-therapists," all women, who have met regularly for ten years to discuss family therapy, gender, and postmodern ideas. The major themes--feminism, community, and communication--are taken in new directions. Feminism, Community, and Communication rethinks therapy, research, teaching, and community work with a renewed emphasis on collaboration, intersubjectivity, and the process of communication as a world-making and identity-making activity. The issues of gender, culture, religion, race, and class figure prominently in this book.In Feminism, Community, and Communication you'll find descriptions of: - communal perspectives for therapists that stress listening and understanding over interpreting and knowing - the power of love and spirituality in relation to organizational consultation to an agency beset by racial division - research on anorexia and what it means - a mentoring project for rural girls - the Bar/Bat Mitzva as therapy - an ethnographic study of Lebanese womenFeminism, Community, and Communication takes an exciting, fresh look at these three intertwined concepts, representing a way of thinking and doing therapy, research, community work, and training that highlights the ethical dimension of each. The book takes the position that human beings are meaning-makers in a common world, and not simply objects to be scrutinized or assessed by "experts."

Betty Mackune-Karrer

Contents - Introduction: A Patchwork Quilt - A Communal Perspective for Relational Therapies - In Search of Subjugated Knowledge - Listening to the Voices of Anorexia: The Researcher as an Outsider-Witness - Nobody Tells You Who You Are: First Notes on a Community Project for Girls and Women in Rural Massachusetts - Can You Love Them Enough? Organizational Consulting as a Spiritual Quest - The Talking Oppression Blues: Including the Experience of Power/Powerlessness in the Teaching of Cultural Sensitivity - Theorizing Culture: Narrative Ideas and Practice Principles - Ritual as Therapy, Therapy as Ritual - Feminism in the Middle East: Reflections on Ethnographic Research in Lebanon - Interviews - An Interview with Janine Roberts - Index - Reference Notes Included