Cultural and psychotherapeutic rituals are designed to aid the bereaved in grief resolution. This paper examines the function of funeral and bereavement rituals in contemporary Western society and considers the relationship between rituals and complicated and disenfranchised grief. A new model for the use of rituals in psychotherapy with the bereaved that emphasizes intrapsychic and psychosocial processes is described. Rituals are presented as vehicles for transformation and connection as well as the more commonly recognized transition.
Stories about community work in New Zealand and Scotland are presented to describe and reflect on issues central to feminist community psychology. Organizing a lesbian festival, Ingrid Huygens describes feminist processes used to equalize resources across Maori (indigenous) and Pakeha (white) groups. Heather Hamerton presents her experiences as a researcher using collective memory work to reflect on adolescent experiences related to gender, ethnicity, and class. Sharon Cahill chronicles dilemmas and insights from focus groups about anger with women living in public housing in Scotland. Each story chronicles experiences related to oppression and privilege, and describes the author's emotions and reflections. Individually and collectively, the stories illustrate the potential offered by narrative methods and participatory processes for challenging inequalities and encouraging social justice.
This is the second of two special issues of AJCP on feminism and community psychology, which were developed as an initiative of the Women's Committee of the Society for Community Research and Action. The purpose of these special issues is to illustrate the commonalties shared by feminist and community approaches, ways in which each field can be used to inform the other, and the challenges and successes each field has faced in living up to its values. In Part I we presented articles that dealt with specific topics that can be usefully understood and addressed through feminist approaches. In Part II (this issue) we chose articles that investigate the role of methods in a feminist community psychology.As Mary Crawford and Ellen Kimmel write, ''we cannot unlink what we know from how we know it' ' (1999, p. 3). It is this relationship that we wish to examine in this special issue: the relationship between how we gain knowledge and the kinds of realities that knowledge is used to construct.While working to conceptualize the issues involved in a feminist community psychology, we identified seven themes that we think represent 1
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