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    Published: 2014-12-31
    Vol. 58 (2014)

    THOUGHTS ON WOMEN-RELATED ENGAGED RESEARCH IN WOMEN’S REFUGES. ACTING FOR EMANCIPATION BY ANTHROPOLOGICAL CULTURAL EDUCATION

    Inga B. Kuźma

    Abstract

    This text presents experiences and thoughts related to the educational activities undertaken by the author to support therapeutic measures. The activities in question were held in refuges for women fleeing violence and in shelters for homeless women in Łódź. Such education, proposed and carried out by the author, was based on knowledge about the culture linked with ethnology. This form of volunteering (which was also a condition of conducting research in the institutions concerned) was proposed to the author in the year 2009/2010, when she was beginning her research in one of these facilities. The form of ‘therapeutic education’ has been changing over time – the author has been adapting it to the residents’ and the staff ’s expectations (both the subject and form of meetings were consulted with therapists, as the former could not interfere with the therapeutic process). The content of educational meetings was related to women’s issues. Among other things, the topics were selected and proposed so as to present little-known events (in order to achieve the standard educational aim, i.e. the acquisition of knowledge). These meetings were also aimed at emancipation, thus they ended up with a ‘moral’ on the situation of women which they could reject or accept, but only by discussing it (women who are victims of violence or who experience homelessness are typical representatives of muted groups). The stories were governed by the idea of coping. This interdisciplinary concept combines psychology, the social sciences and the humanities – especially their applied branches which the author is most interested in and strives to cultivate. Education as proposed by the author dovetails with activism and a kind of transformation of reality and the ‘I’, which should result from knowledge. Aiding through educating and the idea of liberation with knowledge (for example, by asking questions like “Must it always be so as in my case?”, “What does it look like elsewhere?”, “How is this possible?”) proved a very developmental concept. Such education goes beyond the academic borders. What the author proposed, also served to undermine the symbolic social old world order (including its gender dimension), which the residents and staff had previously considered obvious. The participants’ relation to the presented content revealed the issue of applicability of academic knowledge and of rendering it into imagination and common knowledge. This situation also exposed the ‘symbolic violence’ in any education. In this type of research of an informal educational nature, the discussions of women living in the facilities in question turned out to have the greatest value. The women talked to one other about the topic of meetings, their shape and organisation, and shared their thoughts on a given issue. They expressed their views in front of other people, took their position, related to their experience and confronted their points of view with opinions of the others. In this way, they became active and they made themselves the subject of self-reflective action. T

    Keywords:

    Engaged anthropology, Cultural education, Emancipation,, women studies, feminist studies, exclusion, Self-reflection

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    Citation rules

    Kuźma, I. B. (2014). THOUGHTS ON WOMEN-RELATED ENGAGED RESEARCH IN WOMEN’S REFUGES. ACTING FOR EMANCIPATION BY ANTHROPOLOGICAL CULTURAL EDUCATION. Etnografia Polska, 58, 25–48. Retrieved from https://journals.iaepan.pl/ep/article/view/81

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