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Writing, much like composing a life (Bateson, 1989), is not a straightforward, linear process. Indeed, storying and restorying lives is, as highlighted in the writing of Marmon Silko (1996), a winding, crisscrossing process:For those of you accustomed to being taken from point A to point B to point C, this presentation may be somewhat difficult to follow. Pueblo expression resembles something like a spider's web – with many little threads radiating from the centre, crisscrossing one another. As with the web, the structure emerges as it is made, and you must simply listen and trust, as the Pueblo people do, that meaning will be made. (pp. 48–49)As we shared and inquired into our storied lives in narrative inquiry circles in Manitoba and Nova Scotia, and then again in yearly whole group narrative inquiry circles, we grew in our knowing of one another, of one another's lives, of where we are each from, of one another's stories to live by. In Chapter 1, we gave a sense of some of the places from which Mary and Janice are from and of ways in which their experiences in these places drew them toward ideas which they began to thread together as a way to shape a frame for our relational narrative inquiry. In this chapter we invite readers to gain a sense of the multiplicity of people, and the multiplicity of lives which shaped our relational narrative inquiry.

While holistic studies devoted to the information behavior of humanist scholars have begun to appear more frequently in the literature, there has been, until quite recently, a persistent tendency to consolidate humanists rather than attend to the variant gestalts, material working conditions, and values that might distinguish one from another. This chapter is a response to recent calls for more finely granulated descriptions of specific humanist disciplinary practices. It offers a close examination of the information behavior of theatre researchers, both academics and practitioners. For reasons that the chapter explores, theatre researchers constitute a user group that has been profoundly neglected. Using both quantitative and qualitative data obtained through a survey of listserv members of the American Society for Theatrical Research and the Theatre Library Association, the chapter examines the impact of theatre culture on theatre research practices. Moreover, inspired by Brenda Dervin's “Sense-Making Methodology,” this chapter offers the embedded perspective of a researcher who is herself a theatre scholar as well as a practicing librarian. The chapter ranges widely, illustrating its findings with, for example, published rehearsal memoirs, statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor, white papers produced by the National Endowment of the Arts, performance theory texts. Topics covered include the history of theatre studies as an academic discipline, the multiple job-holding/unemployment culture of practitioners such as actors and directors, the differences in focus and methodology that distinguish practitioners from scholars, the marginalized status of dramatic literature in university English departments. Several themes that emerged through analysis of qualitative data are discussed: the contrast between scholarly rigor and the tendency of the practitioner to “satisfice,” the conflicting claims of text and artifact, the impact of geography and teaching-intensive institutional affiliation on researchers’ access to resources. The author concludes that it is not only inadvisable and inaccurate to generalize behaviors across humanistic disciplines; it is equally inaccurate to assume that all researchers within the same discipline will manifest the same characteristics, or even that the same researcher will apply the same strategies to all projects. The only generalization about the information behavior of the theatre researcher that can be made is that it is highly task and context dependent.

Sociologists have documented how women in male-dominated occupations experience subtle and overt forms of discrimination based on gender stereotypes. This study examines women professional chefs to understand how they perceive and respond to stereotypes claiming women are not good leaders, are too emotional, and are not “cut out” for male-dominated work. Many of our participants resist these stereotypes and believe that their gender has benefited them in their jobs. Using in-depth interviews with women chefs, we show that they utilize essentialist gendered rhetoric to describe how women chefs are better than their male counterparts. While such rhetoric appears to support stereotypes emphasizing “natural” differences between men and women in the workplace, we suggest that women are reframing these discourses into a rhetoric of “feminine strength” wherein women draw from gender differences in ways that benefit them in their workplaces and their careers. Our conclusion discusses the implications of our findings for gender inequality at work.

Teacher education programs have begun to address the dilemma of preparing a predominantly white and female teaching force to work with diverse populations whose experiences have no connection to the students they will teach (Darling-Hammond, 2006). Those who teach courses that address cultural diversity are challenged to engage students in meaningful dialogue about all things multicultural, as well as provoke thought about understanding the importance of cultural competence and its impact on teaching practice. The university classroom is where meaningful and transformative conversations must occur and they begin with acceptance of ourselves – all of us – as cultural beings.

Children experience toxic stress if there is pronounced activation of their stress-response systems, in situations in which they do not have stable caregiving. Due to their exposure to multiple poverty-related risks, African American children may be more susceptible to exposure to toxic stress. Toxic stress affects young children’s brain and neurophysiologic functioning, which leads to a wide range of deleterious health, developmental, and mental health outcomes. Given the benefits of early care and education (ECE) for African American young children, ECE may represent a compensating experience for this group of children, and promote their positive development.

This paper explores four works of contemporary fiction to illuminate formal and informal regulation of sex. The paper’s co-authors frame analysis with the story of their creation of a transdisciplinary course, entitled “Regulating Sex: Historical and Cultural Encounters,” in which students mined literature for social critique, became immersed in the study of law and its limits, and developed increased sensitivity to power, its uses, and abuses. The paper demonstrates the value theoretically and pedagogically of third-wave feminisms, wild zones, and contact zones as analytic constructs and contends that including sex and sexualities in conversations transforms personal experience, education, society, and culture, including law.