Whose Life is it Anyway? Exploring the Social Relations of High-Conflict Divorce Cases in Southern Norway

AbstractThe paper reports on findings from an empirical study based on qualitative interviews with Norwegian parents identified as part of a high-conflict divorce situation and interviews with caseworkers from a child welfare service. The site of study is an institutional circuit of concern, assessment, and referral involving the court, child welfare services, and a public family therapy service. The paper draws on the social ontology and analytic concepts of institutional ethnography and adopts parents’ standpoint to explore how their knowledge and experience are shaped through encounters with professionals in the process of being identified and assessed as a high-conflict divorce case. Th…

"Stop Making sense" a randomised text design study

The current epistemological scaffolding of psychotherapy and mental health care ruthlessly privileges what is already understood and given shape, to the extent that what is currently meaningless and chaotic is strained out. The present work is an experimental attempt at contesting this way of going about the business of mental (health) care. To achieve this, we attempt to systematically destroy meaning in a text that we ourselves have produced. Through the innovation “randomised text design”, we seek to provide space for non-meaning and ignorance within the mental health discourse. What the process of randomised text design allows us to do, is bend away from ideas that hold psychotherap…

Staying with the conflict – parenting work and the social organization of post-divorce conflict

Author's accepted manuscript. Available from 06/07/2022. This is an Accepted Manuscript version of the following article, accepted for publication in Journal of Family Studies. Bertelsen, B. (2021). Staying with the conflict – parenting work and the social organization of post-divorce conflict. Journal of Family Studies. It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

A qualitative fallacy: Life trapped in interpretations and stories

This paper points out some problematic aspects of qualitative research based on interviews and uses examples from mental health. The narrative approach is explored while inquiring if the reality of life here is forced into the formula of a chronological story. The hermeneutic approach, in general, is also examined, and we ask if the reality of life in this scenario becomes caught up in a web of interpretations. Inspired by ideas from Bakhtin and phenomenology, we argue for interview-based research that stays with unresolvedness and constantly question the web of interpretations and narratives that determine our experiences. This also chimes with certain dialogical practices in mental healt…

Parent Education Beyond Learning: An Ethnographic Exploration of a Multi-family Program for Families in Post-divorce Conflict

‘He is Quirky; He is the World's Greatest Psychologist’: On the Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common

In this article, we challenge the concept of the therapeutic relationship as an operationalisable entity. In contrast to this idea, we introduce Alphonso Lingis’ concept of community, and his distinction between the rational community and the community of those who have nothing in common. This is done through speculative analysis of a transcribed sequence from a research interview with a boy who speaks about his experiences of receiving mental health care. This boy and his family were helped through a network-oriented, dialogical approach. In the sequence highlighted here, the boy speaks of the significance of a particular mental health practitioner. The boy expresses appreciation for the h…