linkspame: stolen liberally from my tumblr dash

[nerdflighter]

Why is Aziraphale so gay? [good omens meta]

A brief note on social constructs
a while back my friend made this post and it spawned a long, ugly back and forth between two other users, and it was...bad. it was terribly bad. on one hand you had this white trans woman with little idea what a social construct is or what it means and on the other side a trans person of colour and the argument got pretty vicious and everyone blocked everyone else. anyway, discourse circles being what they are, this post was pretty much written directly @ this conversation.

Zombie Linguistics: Experts, Endangered Languages and the Curse of Undead Voices, Bernard C. Perley

I know what you think of me, the article that originated this quote:

Years ago a friend of mine had a dream about a strange invention; a staircase you could descend deep underground, in which you heard recordings of all the things anyone had ever said about you, both good and bad. The catch was, you had to pass through all the worst things people had said before you could get to the highest compliments at the very bottom. There is no way I would ever make it more than two and a half steps down such a staircase, but I understand its terrible logic: if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.

I'm thinking about this article on abortion again.

should therapists write about their patients?". full disclosure: i haven't read this yet.

Comments

[staranise]

I've read the final article, but I've got to say, the article blows the question totally out of proportion. "When I wrote about a client without their permission and just changed their details, they recognized themselves in me and blew up at me. Maybe therapists just shouldn't write about their clients ever!

Hmmm... I wonder if... there's some kind of... alternate solution... out there...

[nerdflighter]

I'll admit I'm having a hard time thinking of alternate solutions. I believe they exist, but I can't think of what they are.

[staranise]

Asking for permission before putting someone in a professionally published book; letting them read what you've written before it goes to press; warning your clients you're a writer and giving them the option to opt in to being written about.

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

I'm pretty sure I either read the zombie linguistics paper for a linguistics class once or I read something with a very similar premise, and yes. The words which tend to be used with regards to language "preservation" have some insidious and imperialist savior-y implications.

[nerdflighter]

I have a deep and abiding suspicion-edging-into-hatred for the practice of conservation in any context at all ever since I was forced to study Sanskrit for three years against my will and to the detriment of my grade. I'm sure there are good ways of doing conservation, if efforts are led by the people of that language and culture, but I still don't have to like it

[rohaja]

The last one is quite good.

From an academic point of view I get the use and the necessity of case studies, but on the other hand, the author's experience with their patient shows pretty clearly that when it comes to the field of actual applied psychotherapy the "objects of study" they're dealing with are human beings at their most vulnerable and the ethical problems associated with that.

I would hope that - as the commenter above said - there are alternatives. And there probably are, because this therapist can't be the first to be faced by that dilemma. But the article has made me think about whether the academic gain of the practice as described there is worth the harm it might cause to people entrusted to someone's care. Not something that comes up for me normally, as the people I write about are no longer alive. But it does make me think about how maybe academia sometimes gets too centered on itself.

I do wonder, however, how it can be that on the one hand the author says they got consent from all the patients they could reach and then a patient who is apparently still in therapy with them doesn't know they were written about? That makes no sense. Either the patient forgot what they agreed to or the author didn't really ask the consent of everyone they could reach. It also seems a step too far to use the case of a patient still in therapy and therefore likely not completely stable yet, in such a way.

Another question that I ask myself is how useful these altered examples can actually be as case studies or examples, seeing that they're a) composites and b) the things that the author alters to make them unrecognizable might well be facets of their experience that could be important or central to their specific problem. So the alteration to make a patient unrecognizable can cause a kind of distortion that would make whatever point the author is trying to make at the very least easy to criticize or call into question. I'm not in that field, though, so the concerns and parameters may be different there.

Sorry for the wall of text.