Brinkmann
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 6063 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Brinkmann |
| SOBRENOME | Brinkmann |
| ASSINATURA | BRINKMANN |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Aalborg University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7579-1212 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 82 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 334 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 82 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2004 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Ways of Knowing
The purpose of this article is to explore the various ways mental health professionals produce knowledge about patients’ condition in practice. The study is based on empirical material from four months of participant observation and interviews with mental health professionals in both inpatient and outpatient clinics located in Denmark. In the article, we demonstrate how mental health practitioners’ ways of knowing in everyday practice is made up …
Fathers' transformative caring experiences of engaging in music and singing with their children
This study explores the role of music and singing in fostering transformative caring relationships between fathers and their children. It aims to understand how these interactions contribute to fatherhood identity and relational dynamics, filling a significant gap in research on musical fatherhood. Employing a phenomenological‐hermeneutic approach, the study conducted open‐ended interviews with eight fathers, analysing data through the lens of Pa…
Situated Psychopathology
This article seeks to formulate a situated approach to mental disorder that overcomes some of the problems of contemporary diagnostic psychiatry. A framework is needed that aims to integrate neuroscientific knowledge about the brain and other aspects of the person with knowledge about the environment. Inspired by the work of researchers such as Thomas Fuchs, Jerome Wakefield, and Dorte Gannik, I articulate four basic principles for a theory of ps…
Special Issue
Lili’s Life
The power to promise and forgive
As human beings, we do not live in a world devoid of value, but rather in what could be called a moral ecology that gives us reasons for action. Theorists of social practice such as Alasdair MacIntyre have analyzed the moral ecology as practices with inherent values and goods, but they have given less attention to the moral agents living in the moral ecology. In this article, I build on Hannah Arendt’s analysis of promising and forgiving and argu…
Persons in a posthuman world
Are we becoming ‘posthuman’, and, if so, what does that mean for our understanding of ourselves as persons? In this paper, I argue that we have good reasons to retain a notion of personhood despite posthuman claims, but that the science of psychology, which ought to be well-equipped to study and defend human personhood, has–with some notable exceptions–failed to develop illuminating ideas of what persons are and how they come into the world phylo…
What are Mental Disorders? Exploring the Role of Culture in the Harmful Dysfunction Approach
A shared problem in psychology, psychiatry, and philosophy is how to define mental disorders. Various theories have been proposed, ranging from naturalism to social constructionism. In this article, I first briefly introduce the current landscape of such theories, before concentrating on one of the most influential approaches today: The harmful dysfunction theory developed by Jerome Wakefield. It claims that mental disorders are hybrid phenomena …
What is Psychological Research
This interview is a slightly modified transcript from the first PSYCHE Talk, hosted at the Department of Communication and Psychology at Aalborg University, October 6, 2023. PSYCHE – Psychology of Culture, Humanity and Education, is a newly established research section that gathers three different research groups: Qualitative Studies, Situated Psychology and Cultural Psychology. PSYCHE Talks are hosted as biannual events, where prominent psycholo…
Why does the pathologization of grief cause such a stir? A comment on Bergsmark and Ramsing
After years of debate, a new diagnosis called prolonged grief disorder (PGD) was finally included in the 11th edition of the International Classification of Diseases ( ICD-11; World Health Organization). The pathologization of grief has been controversial and caused quite a stir among researchers, practitioners, and the general public. Recently, Bergsmark and Ramsing (2023) have addressed some considerations that they believe are lost in the ensu…
Is Another kind of Biologization Possible? On Biology and the psy Sciences
The relationship between biology and the psy disciplines (psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy) is a complex one. Many scholars have criticized how these disciplines have been biologized in the 20th century, especially since the emergence of psychopharmacology, neuroscience, and genetic research. However, biology is not just a laboratory-based science of chemical compounds, scanners, and DNA sequencing, but also a field science based on obse…
Qualitative Interviewing
Qualitative interviewing has today become one of the most common research methods across the human and social sciences, if not the most prevalent approach, but it is an approach that comes in a huge amount of different guises. Qualitative Interviewing will help its readers conduct, write, represent, understand, and critique qualitative interview research in its many forms as currently practiced. This book does not simply tell its reader how to em…
Conclusion
In this conclusion to the special issue on The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt, we, the authors, reflect back on our dialogue with the philosopher’s text. Our reflexion has two main parts. First, we emphasise transversal themes – themes that most triggered our interrogations and that we as psychologists, all addressed in our separate papers: thinking, of course, but also Arendt’s views on dialogue, her conception of time and temporality, and mo…
Thinking and the Moral Landscape
Hannah Arendt’s unfinished masterpiece The Life of the Mind contains an analysis and spirited defense of thinking, which is more relevant than ever. Thinking, for Arendt, is not simply a cognitive process of problem solving, but is an existential process of meaning making. Unlike cognitions, which are instrumental, Arendt argues that thinking is an activity that is performed for its own sake. In this paper, I follow both Arendt and her teacher, M…
Hvad handler kvalitativ psykologi om
I artiklen spørger jeg, hvad kvalitativ psykologi handler om. Jeg tager udgangspunkt i en tese om, at en psykologisk videnskab må have et normativt udgangspunkt, idet dens genstand er normativt bestemt. Psykologien studerer nemlig ikke blot, hvad der sker i verden, men hvordan levende mennesker agerer og retter sig intentionelt mod verden gennem deres tanker, handlinger og følelser, hvilket kun kan forstås, hvis man erkender, at disse fænomener e…
“Humbled by Life”
In this article, we support the use of poetic representations to study experiential and existential meaning-making. We do so by presenting five spoken-word poems, which we created out of the transcriptions of 14 in-depth interviews with Norwegian older adults, prior to their enrollment in a biographical writing course. The poetic representations which have been named by themes from the transcript are (a) Where love takes us, (b) Relax during cata…
Resources and resonance
Sociocultural psychology is now a firmly established approach to human meaning making ( Bruner, 1990 ) and meaning construction ( Valsiner, 2014 ). Its proponents rightly see culture not as a causal power but as a set of resources used by human agents ( Gillespie & Zittoun, 2010 ). However, I argue in this article that this approach needs to be balanced by the phenomenological insight from Heidegger and others that meaning is not always “made” bu…
Unstructured and Semistructured Interviewing
This chapter gives an introduction to qualitative interviewing in its unstructured and semistructured forms. Initially, the human world is depicted as a conversational reality in which interviewing takes a central position as a research method. Interviewing is presented as a social practice that has a cultural history and that appears in a variety of formats in the 21st century. A number of distinctions are introduced, which are relevant when map…
Historical Overview of Qualitative Research in the Social Sciences
Qualitative research does not represent a monolithic, agreed-on approach to research but is a vibrant and contested field with many contradictions and different perspectives. To respect the multivoicedness of qualitative research, this chapter will approach its history in the plural—as a variety of histories. The chapter will work polyvocally and focus on six histories of qualitative research, which are sometimes overlapping, sometimes in conflic…
Psychology as a science of life
William James famously defined psychology as the science of mental life. Much ink has since been spilled over the concept of the mental, but less so over the notion of life. In this article, I argue that psychologists should address life as an equally important concept. First, I briefly articulate Aristotle’s idea of the soul (or mind) as a life principle. Second, I argue with reference to Wittgenstein that the division between the living and non…
Revisiting “The Art of Being Fragile”
Writers devote their lives to find words that faithfully resemble what is at the core of human experience and existence. Thus, psychologists interested in understanding human development in everyday life could turn toward writers and poets with humble curiosity. In this article, we illustrate how a narrative analysis of a work of art can be done, taking “ The Art of Being Fragile. How Leopardi can Save your Life” by the Italian writer and teacher…
Moving On Our Feet
Conversational Knowledge and Gifts of Chance
For more than 15 years, I have been an active qualitative researcher, working in particular with semistructured qualitative interviews, both in empirical research projects and as an author of textbooks on interviewing. In this state of the method article, I first articulate an approach to qualitative inquiry based on the fundamental idea of the conversation on ontological, epistemological, and methodological grounds. I then diverge a bit from sta…
From Doxastic to Epistemic
Qualitative interview styles have been guided by precedent within academic disciplines. The nature of information sought, and the role of interviewer and interviewee are key determinants across styles, which range from doxastic (focused on understanding interviewees' experiences or behaviors) to epistemic (focused on co-constructing knowledge). In this article, we position common interview styles along a doxastic-epistemic continuum, and accordin…
QMiP Conference 2019Archives, experiments and rhetoric
Jenny Mercer, one of the conference chairs, takes a look ahead to our forthcoming conference
Doing Without Data
Coding and data are conceptual twins. This article focuses on the latter concept in particular and opens with a dilemma: We can either follow the root meaning of "data" and say that they are the "givens" that we "collect" and code. In this case, however, data turn out to be mythological, for they are always produced, constructed, or "taken" as the pragmatists said. Or we can say, like some qualitative researchers, that "everything is data," which…
Could Interviews Be Epistemic
The author explores using qualitative research interviews to gain knowledge rather than mere opinions about a given topic. Current interviews typically aim to probe the respondents' experiences and opinions- doxa in Greek. An implicit model for much doxastic interviewing is client-centered therapy, in which the respondent-client is the only authority concerning his or her experiences and opinions. The author argues that doxastic interviews do not…
Literature as Qualitative Inquiry
In recent years, there has been a literary turn in parts of the social sciences. Attention has been given to social science writings as literature. In this article, the author approaches the issue from the opposite direction by engaging with literature as qualitative social inquiry. He does so through a reading of the French novelist Michel Houellebecq. Houellebecq's style represents a form of "lyrical sociology," depicting human experience in a …
Towards an Expansive Hybrid Psychology
From Doxastic to Epistemic
Qualitative interview styles have been guided by precedent within academic disciplines. The nature of information sought, and the role of interviewer and interviewee are key determinants across styles, which range from doxastic (focused on understanding interviewees' experiences or behaviors) to epistemic (focused on co-constructing knowledge). In this article, we position common interview styles along a doxastic-epistemic continuum, and accordin…
Perils and Potentials in Qualitative Psychology
Humanism after posthumanism
Almost 25 years ago, psychologist and qualitative methodologist Steinar Kvale conjectured that psychology might become obsolete or redundant in a postmodern age due to the modernist legacies of this science. This, of course, has not materialized, but the question of redundancy reemerges today in new philosophical guises related to the rise of posthumanist philosophy and what has come to be known as postqualitative research. In this article, I aim…
The Good Qualitative Researcher
This article discusses what it means to be a good qualitative researcher. The aim is to deliberately blur the distinction between epistemic and ethical goodness by arguing that there is a close connection between being a good qualitative researcher in the epistemic and the ethical senses. First, the relation between researcher and researched is articulated as a power relation giving rise to certain ethical demands. Second, some similarities betwe…
Gofqi and the Phoenix of Qualitative Inquiry
Mental Life in the Space of Reasons
This paper argues the Wittgensteinian point that we can undo the psychologizing of psychology by conceiving of mental life as lived in the space of reasons. It is argued that mental life - human action, feeling and thinking - is constituted by normative connections and necessities rather than causal ones. The consequence is that mental life is irreducibly moral, and if the sciences of mental life are to become adequate to deal with their subject …
An Interviewer's Guide to Autobiographical Memory
Methodological recommendationsfor qualitative interviewing, that is, using semistructured conversations for research purposes, often suggest that interviewers ask respondents to describe concrete experiences. Concreteexperiences from the past, however, are autobiographical memories (specific memories), and as such the interviewer may benefit from having knowledge of research on specific memories. While descriptions of specific memories potentiall…
General Psychological Implications of the Human Capacity for Grief
Moving On Our Feet
Changing psychologies in the transition from industrial society to consumer society
Psychologists have traditionally been reluctant to investigate not just the historical nature of their subject matter — humans as acting, thinking and feeling beings — but even more so the historical nature of their discipline, its theories and practices. In this article, I will try to take seriously the historical transformation in the West from industrial society to consumer society. After having introduced these socio-economic designations, I …
Is Another kind of Biologization Possible? On Biology and the psy Sciences
The relationship between biology and the psy disciplines (psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy) is a complex one. Many scholars have criticized how these disciplines have been biologized in the 20th century, especially since the emergence of psychopharmacology, neuroscience, and genetic research. However, biology is not just a laboratory-based science of chemical compounds, scanners, and DNA sequencing, but also a field science based on obse…
Conversational Knowledge and Gifts of Chance
For more than 15 years, I have been an active qualitative researcher, working in particular with semistructured qualitative interviews, both in empirical research projects and as an author of textbooks on interviewing. In this state of the method article, I first articulate an approach to qualitative inquiry based on the fundamental idea of the conversation on ontological, epistemological, and methodological grounds. I then diverge a bit from sta…
Introduction to the Special Issue
In this article, we position the special issue and explore some of the common interests and voices that tend to be shared among the field of qualitative psychology and the authors and assays that appear in the following pages. In doing this, we draw the contours of qualitative psychology that, in our view, is characterized mainly by the appreciation of complexity of knowledge, by the strong belief in the relational and collaborative view of the p…
Toward an Epistemology of the Hand
Questioning Constructionism
This article develops an existential-phenomenological critique of the social constructionist movement in psychology, taking its lead from what Kenneth Gergen calls “the most pressing question”: What happens to us when we begin to employ constructionist ideas in our lives? It is suggested that contemporary consumer societies already work according to the logic of social construction and that constructionism already has become many people’s philoso…
Psychology as a Moral Science
The article presents an interpretation of certain aspects of John Dewey’s psychological works. The interpretation aims to show that Dewey’s framework speaks directly to certain problems that the discipline of psychology faces today. In particular the reflexive problem, the fact that psychology as an array of discursive practices has served to constitute forms of human subjectivity in Western cultures. Psychology has served to produce or transform…
The Presence of Grief
The authors involved in the creation of this text collaborate on a research project called The Culture of Grief, which explores the current conditions and implications of grief. The authors mostly employ conventional forms of qualitative inquiry, but the present text represents an attempt to reach a level of understanding not easily obtained through conventional methods. The group of authors participated as members of the audience in an avant-gar…
A society of sorrow
In the sociology of the emotions, it has been common to approach emotions as socially constructed. Researchers have rightly asked how society and social processes shape emotional life, and this approach has generated many valuable insights. In this article, I argue that we should also approach the relation between emotions and society from a complementary perspective and ask how society itself is constituted through specific emotional processes. …
The body in grief
From theatre plays in ancient Greece to modern paintings, grief has been depicted as involving a specific bodily posture, a drooping head and a use of the hands to cover the eyes, mouth and forehead. In this article, I explore what role the body plays in the emotion of grief. It is argued that bereavement both makes an impression on the body, which in turn displays an expression of the emotion of grief. The dynamics of impression–expression are u…
Persons in a posthuman world
Are we becoming ‘posthuman’, and, if so, what does that mean for our understanding of ourselves as persons? In this paper, I argue that we have good reasons to retain a notion of personhood despite posthuman claims, but that the science of psychology, which ought to be well-equipped to study and defend human personhood, has–with some notable exceptions–failed to develop illuminating ideas of what persons are and how they come into the world phylo…
What are Mental Disorders? Exploring the Role of Culture in the Harmful Dysfunction Approach
A shared problem in psychology, psychiatry, and philosophy is how to define mental disorders. Various theories have been proposed, ranging from naturalism to social constructionism. In this article, I first briefly introduce the current landscape of such theories, before concentrating on one of the most influential approaches today: The harmful dysfunction theory developed by Jerome Wakefield. It claims that mental disorders are hybrid phenomena …
The Topography of Moral Ecology
The idea that the human world contains moral properties, that is, moral values and goods, raises a fundamental challenge to the prevailing methodological paradigm in psychology, which is connected to a problematic metaphysical worldview that excludes values from the world. In contrast, this article conceptualizes the human world as a moral ecology; as a meaningful world with moral properties that present human beings with moral reasons for action…
Psychology as a Moral Science
The article presents an interpretation of certain aspects of John Dewey’s psychological works. The interpretation aims to show that Dewey’s framework speaks directly to certain problems that the discipline of psychology faces today. In particular the reflexive problem, the fact that psychology as an array of discursive practices has served to constitute forms of human subjectivity in Western cultures. Psychology has served to produce or transform…
Human Kinds and Looping Effects in Psychology
Recent work in the historiography of psychology has suggested that the discipline must be seen as involved in the constitution of its own subject matter. Two questions arise. First, what does this tell us about the subject matter of psychology? Second, how should we understand and investigate the processes through which such ‘making up people’ occurs? This article addresses these questions by arguing, first, that psychological categories refer to…
Confronting the Ethics of Qualitative Research
In this article we question the “ethicism” that often permeates the discourse on qualitative research, that is, the implicit idea that qualitative research is ethically good in itself, or at least ethically superior to the uncaring quantitative approaches. In order to throw light on the ethics of qualitative interviews in contemporary consumer societywhat has also been called “the interview society”we draw on microethics as well as macroethics, t…
Questioning Constructionism
This article develops an existential-phenomenological critique of the social constructionist movement in psychology, taking its lead from what Kenneth Gergen calls “the most pressing question”: What happens to us when we begin to employ constructionist ideas in our lives? It is suggested that contemporary consumer societies already work according to the logic of social construction and that constructionism already has become many people’s philoso…
Damasio on mind and emotions
Damasio’s theory of emotions and feelings has recently become influential in psychology and related disciplines. The theory states that feeling an emotion consists of having mental images that arise from neural patterns that represent changes in body and brain (and these changes make up the emotion). In this article, I first criticize Damasio’s general theory of the mind, before moving on to a critique of his theory of emotions. This critique inv…
Mental Life in the Space of Reasons
This paper argues the Wittgensteinian point that we can undo the psychologizing of psychology by conceiving of mental life as lived in the space of reasons. It is argued that mental life - human action, feeling and thinking - is constituted by normative connections and necessities rather than causal ones. The consequence is that mental life is irreducibly moral, and if the sciences of mental life are to become adequate to deal with their subject …
The Good Qualitative Researcher
This article discusses what it means to be a good qualitative researcher. The aim is to deliberately blur the distinction between epistemic and ethical goodness by arguing that there is a close connection between being a good qualitative researcher in the epistemic and the ethical senses. First, the relation between researcher and researched is articulated as a power relation giving rise to certain ethical demands. Second, some similarities betwe…
Could Interviews Be Epistemic
The author explores using qualitative research interviews to gain knowledge rather than mere opinions about a given topic. Current interviews typically aim to probe the respondents' experiences and opinions- doxa in Greek. An implicit model for much doxastic interviewing is client-centered therapy, in which the respondent-client is the only authority concerning his or her experiences and opinions. The author argues that doxastic interviews do not…
Identity as Self-Interpretation
The hermeneutic tradition in psychology and the social sciences claims that we should understand human identity in terms of self-interpretation. This article is an attempt to spell out what it means to think of identity as self-interpretation. First, two dimensions of identity as self-interpretation are outlined: that we can only have an identity if we are committed to issues of moral worth; and that self-interpretation involves a temporal dimens…
Steinar Kvale in Memoriam
Steinar Kvale, professor in the Department of Psychology, University of Aarhus, Denmark, passed away on the 12th of March, 2008. He was 70 years old. Steinar Kvale was a researcher based in Scandin
Changing psychologies in the transition from industrial society to consumer society
Psychologists have traditionally been reluctant to investigate not just the historical nature of their subject matter — humans as acting, thinking and feeling beings — but even more so the historical nature of their discipline, its theories and practices. In this article, I will try to take seriously the historical transformation in the West from industrial society to consumer society. After having introduced these socio-economic designations, I …
An Interviewer's Guide to Autobiographical Memory
Methodological recommendationsfor qualitative interviewing, that is, using semistructured conversations for research purposes, often suggest that interviewers ask respondents to describe concrete experiences. Concreteexperiences from the past, however, are autobiographical memories (specific memories), and as such the interviewer may benefit from having knowledge of research on specific memories. While descriptions of specific memories potentiall…
Literature as Qualitative Inquiry
In recent years, there has been a literary turn in parts of the social sciences. Attention has been given to social science writings as literature. In this article, the author approaches the issue from the opposite direction by engaging with literature as qualitative social inquiry. He does so through a reading of the French novelist Michel Houellebecq. Houellebecq's style represents a form of "lyrical sociology," depicting human experience in a …
Guilt in a Fluid Culture? A View from Positioning Theory
What is the status of guilt as an emotion in postmodern society? According to Zygmunt Bauman, postmodern consumer society supplies a cultural context in which guilt loses in importance. By definition, guilt is connected to a breach in shared rules, but rules and norms have allegedly become fluid today, thereby rendering clear breaches and ensuing guilt rare events. In this article, I provide an analysis of the emotion of guilt, notably by using t…
Toward an Epistemology of the Hand
Towards a Theory of Rights for Qualitative Researchers
This paper develops a theory of rights that operates on a middle ground between ethnocentric universalism and cultural relativism. It does so by arguing that rights are derived from basic human vulnerabilities, which are situated and contextual. It is argued that advancing human rights is a legitimate goal for the human and social sciences and that all such sciences need a qualitative understanding of situated rights and duties in order to unders…
Dewey’s neglected psychology
Unlike his ideas about education and philosophy, John Dewey’s psychology has been largely neglected. This article begins the rediscovery of his transactional psychology by seeking a synthesizing reading of those of his works that pertain to psychology. The article first outlines his transactional approach and also his metapsychology, which conceived of psychology as involved in the constitution of its own subject matter. Then some central psychol…
The semiosis of family conflict
This is a case study of a blended family undergoing home-based psychotherapy. The study uses sociocultural theory (Vygotsky) and semiotic cultural psychology (Valsiner) in order to understand the appropriation and usage of signs as regulators of behavior. Furthermore, the article draws upon Foucault’s genealogical approach and Rose’s notion of Psydiscourse. It is argued that this approach is fruitful for understanding psychotherapy as a governing…
Psychology as a Moral Science
What does morality have to do with psychology in a value-neutral, postmodern world? According to a provocative new book, everything. Taking exception with current ideas in the mainstream (including cultural, evolutionary, and neuropsychology) as straying from the discipline’s ethical foundations, Psychology as a Moral Science argues that psychological phenomena are inherently moral, and that psychology, as prescriptive and interventive practice, …
Towards an Expansive Hybrid Psychology
Qualitative Inquiry in Everyday Life
This book is a 'survival guide' for students and researchers who would like to conduct a qualitative study with limited resources. Brinkmann shows how everyday life materials such as books, television, the internet, the media and everyday conversations and interactions can help us to understand larger social issues. As living human beings in cultural worlds, we are constantly surrounded by 'data' that call for analysis, and as we cope with the di…
Qualitative research between craftsmanship and McDonaldization. A keynote address from the 17th Qualitative Health Research Conference
Although qualitative research methods remain marginalized in certain disciplines, qualitative inquiry has within the last couple of decades become generally accepted as a legitimate scientific way of working. Today, society at large is making more use of qualitative research than ever, not just in laudable social justice research, for example, but also in relation to market and consumer research and focus groups for different political parties. W…
The Mind as Skills and Dispositions
Lost in Paradise
This article examines the Norwegian and Danish versions of the reality television series Paradise Hotel. The reality show emulates what postmodern consumer society wants us to believe in: a kind of 'second transgression' for the human being, in which she is both free and without anxiety. The guests (predominantly male in line with prevailing gender norms) at Paradise Hotel may qualify as shameless-after spells of physical and psychological revela…
Psychology (64 obras) · Sociology (64 obras) · Epistemology (60 obras) · Philosophy (52 obras) · Social science (31 obras) · Social Psychology (28 obras) · Social Representations and Identity (25 obras) · Psychoanalysis (24 obras) · Qualitative research (24 obras) · Philosophy (23 obras)