Description
This project aims to investigate how women in social service and justice fields cope with the daily toll of engaging with the pervasive challenges inherent to such work. More specifically, this research was crafted to address the research gap between the work of affecting social change, and said work’s effect on the individuals engaged in the proverbial trenches of helping, caring, and activist professions. Looking for possibilities beyond coping, I also sought to better understand: (1) how self-care practices impact subjects’ overall sense of well-being, life/work balance, and perception of their ability to remain engaged with their work; (2) the efficacy of different self-care strategies or themes in relation to their intended purpose; (3) the ways these individual changemakers conceptualize self-care and its role in their lives; (4) and finally, what subjects observe and believe about how their implementation of self-care practices and remaking of its broader meaning impacts the professional and social webs in which they are enmeshed. Seeking out new narratives, I grounded my research in interdisciplinary notions of Subjectivity, which emphasize how lived experience enables individuals to recapitulate their worlds from the inside out. In keeping with feminist research traditions, I centered women’s voices in this project, not because of a false belief in a gendered universal experience, but for the purpose of recognizing that women/femmes/nonbinary people (‘womxn’) are still underrepresented in research, and their embodied wisdom is important. To triangulate data, I conducted interviews, surveys, and an analysis of social media including blogs, online articles, and Instagram posts. Extending from my abiding passion for and experiences with social justice activism and feminist work, I maintain a constellation of personal contacts who constituted a prime group for this study. They served as research participants and springboards for snowball sampling, and their insight was invaluable to the conception and realization of this project. This research was designed to expand the dearth of literature on the Anthropology of Self-Care, and dialogue with the growing bodies of work on sustainable activism, self-care for social workers, and self-care as vital resistance to oppression.
