In this paper, I look into 'reflexivity' as a valued quality of practice and personhood among counsellors working in a refugee support NGO in Vienna, Austria. My aim is to understand embodied reflexivity not so much as an embodied professional knowledge, but as the affective and moral positioning of professional subjects within the ideological and material, i.e. political-economic, conditions of their work.
In this paper, I look into 'reflexivity' as a valued quality of practice and personhood among counsellors working in a refugee support NGO in Vienna, Austria. Mainly drawing on inscriptions of experiential data (Ellingson & Sotirin 2020) from ethnographic fieldwork in a local branch of the NGO, I use vignettes to portray the way counsellors embody reflexivity in their workplace. In this organisation, being reflective and doing reflexivity is highly valued, both as a moral and professional quality of personhood – being self-critical, self-conscious, controlled etc. – and as specific forms of institutionalised practice – as for instance, discussing one's own work at staff meetings, or controlling one's affects in the counsellor–client relationship. Starting from the notions of semiotic repertoire and body image (Busch 2021), I want to understand how speaking subjects position their bodily selves within the ideological and material conditions of their work. What makes one a 'good' counsellor? Which ideologies of communication underly the notion of 'good' reflexivity? How do subjects evaluate their biographically shaped communicative resources against such communication ideological discourses? And how do they thereby navigate the complex and often conflicting affordances of their job as they grapple with little resources and the precarious situation of their clients? This conceptual approach leads me to understand embodied reflexivity not so much as embodied professional knowledge (Katzmann 2015), but as the affective and moral positioning of professional subjects within a political-economic context which they thereby mobilise and reproduce as "a space of potentialities [...] and constraints" (Busch 2021: 197).
References
Busch, B. (2021). The body image: taking an evaluative stance towards semiotic resources, International Journal of Multilingualism 18(2). 190–205.
Ellingson, L. & P. Sotirin (2020). Making data in qualitative research: engagements, ethics, and entanglements. London: Routledge.
Katzmann, E. (2015). Embodied reflexivity: knowledge and the body in professional practice. In B. Green & N. Hopwood (eds.), The body in professional practice, learning and education, 157–172. Cham: Springer.
