Grief is an odd thing. There is the public performance of grief, expected in contexts like funerals and wakes but possibly viewed as a weakness or oddity if expressed too much or too loudly anywhere else. There are nice, neat steps of grief one is suppose to go through in order to end up on the other side. But what is the other side? And in this journey, you may find more questions than answers: What is home? What is family? What is grief? Where do our personal definitions contrast/compare with the popular, political and social science dicsource (Bettie, p. 193)? How are our constructions of home and family affected by changes in epistemology/identity? How may these ideas be explored and evinced through text artifacts, or “psychological tools” (Holland et al. 60)? What figured world would they construct?
Through these textual artifacts, I aim to evince the concepts of and connections between home, family, and grief in order to “open up” a figured world. By examining certain activities and communities of practice, I hope to explore my own identities - family member, griever, ball of anxiety, child, adult, and hopeful person. Using Schwartz and Merten’s (1986) ideas of Identity as “self-understanding construed relative to a figured world of social life” (Holland et al. p. 68) I use storytelling as social, cognitive, affective personal processes as vehicles for identity formation (71).
I also hope these stories are a beginning of the consideration of the multiple factors - like cultural, geographic, gender, and class – that may affect grief and one’s performances of grief in various contexts. In addition to these factors, I hope that concepts like Gee’ Building Tasks and Activity Theory can provide a heuristic or frame for discussing the activities and the constructs of home, family, grief, and identity. But, already, the more I think about the sediments of history and present day that contribute to my ideas of home, family, grief, and identity, the less satisfied I am with the limits and boundaries they set.
For a Thinglink exploration of artifacts, click here.
Artifact list:
Through these textual artifacts, I aim to evince the concepts of and connections between home, family, and grief in order to “open up” a figured world. By examining certain activities and communities of practice, I hope to explore my own identities - family member, griever, ball of anxiety, child, adult, and hopeful person. Using Schwartz and Merten’s (1986) ideas of Identity as “self-understanding construed relative to a figured world of social life” (Holland et al. p. 68) I use storytelling as social, cognitive, affective personal processes as vehicles for identity formation (71).
I also hope these stories are a beginning of the consideration of the multiple factors - like cultural, geographic, gender, and class – that may affect grief and one’s performances of grief in various contexts. In addition to these factors, I hope that concepts like Gee’ Building Tasks and Activity Theory can provide a heuristic or frame for discussing the activities and the constructs of home, family, grief, and identity. But, already, the more I think about the sediments of history and present day that contribute to my ideas of home, family, grief, and identity, the less satisfied I am with the limits and boundaries they set.
For a Thinglink exploration of artifacts, click here.
Artifact list:
- Critical Narrative Pinterest
- Hometown
- Bookmark
- Walkie Talkie
- Night Swimming
- Bogue Inlet pt. 1
- Bogue Inlet pt. 2
- Little League