While the importance of professional support following very preterm delivery (VP) is established, the parental experience of support still warrants deeper understanding. Evaluation of a Dutch one-year post-discharge responsive parenting intervention following VP suggested that parents with lower educational levels benefitted less from the program. This idiographic phenomenological study investigated the lived experiences of two mothers with differing educational backgrounds receiving professional support during hospitalization and post-discharge. In-depth interviews with the mothers were analyzed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. We formulate three impressions: (1) How the mothers made sense of their experiences resonated with the findings of research on class differences in parenting. (2) The mothers valued professionals who struck a personalized balance between supporting their maternal agency and attending to their vulnerability and needs for help and perspective. (3) The mothers experienced greater trust in professionals who could suspend pre- conceived assumptions and take their personal characteristics into consideration. Practice suggestions are extrapolated for social work professionals. The study has relevance to educational diversity and recommends an overarching sensitivity to positionality in professional work with parents.
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This study tries to understand the power of knowledge within collaborative care networks to provide insights for designing successful collaboration within care networks by combining intersectionality and epistemic (in)justice. Becoming an informal carer for someone with an acquired brain injury (ABI) causes a dramatic disruption of daily life. Collaboration between professionals and carers with a migration background may result in unjust and unfair situations within care networks. Carer experiences are shaped by aspects of diversity which are subject to power structures and processes of social (in)justice in care networks. In this study, intersectionality was used to both generate complex in-depth insights into the different active layers of carer experiences and focus on within-group differences. Intersectionality was combined with the theoretical concept of epistemic (in)justice to unravel underlying dynamics in collaborative care networks contributing to the understanding that carers with a migration background are often not seen as ‘knowers of reality.’ This qualitative study conducted in the Netherlands between 2019 and 2022 incorporated three informal group conversations (N = 32), semi-structured interviews (N = 21), and three dialogue sessions (N = 7) with carers caring for someone with an ABI. A critical friend and a community of practice, with carers, professionals, and care recipients (N = 8), contributed to the analysis. Three interrelated themes were identified as constituting different layers of the carer experience: (a) I need to keep going, focusing on carers' personal experiences and how experiences were related to carers social positioning; (b) the struggle of caring together, showing how expectations of family members towards carers added to carer burden; and (c) trust is a balancing act, centering on how support from professionals shaped carers' experiences, in which trusting professionals' support proved challenging for carers, and how this trust was influenced by contextual factors at organizational and policy levels. Overall, the need for diversity-responsive policies within care organizations is apparent. Carers with a migration background need to feel heard so they can meaningfully tailor care to meet recipients' needs.
Climate change adaptation has influenced river management through an anticipatory governance paradigm. As such, futures and the power of knowing the future has become increasingly influential in water management. Yet, multiple future imaginaries co-exist, where some are more dominant that others. In this PhD research, I focus on deconstructing the future making process in climate change adaptation by asking ‘What river imaginaries exist and what future imaginaries dominate climate change adaptation in riverine infrastructure projects of the Meuse and Magdalena river?’. I firstly explore existing river imaginaries in a case study of the river Meuse. Secondly, I explore imaginaries as materialised in numerical models for the Meuse and Magdalena river. Thirdly, I explore the integration and negotiation of imaginaries in participatory modelling practices in the Magdalena river. Fourthly, I explore contesting and alternative imaginaries and look at how these are mobilised in climate change adaptation for the Magdalena and Meuse river. Multiple concepts stemming from Science and Technology Studies and Political Ecology will guide me to theorise the case study findings. Finally, I reflect on my own positionality in action-research which will be an iterative process of learning and unlearning while navigating between the natural and social sciences.
