And I shall dance at last: Journaling in the time of AIDS.

摘要

Much of world history has been chronicled in personal journals by men and women living through periods of historical significance and times of plagues. People have poured the events of the day into their journals since the beginning of time. Over the past fifteen years, with the onset of the AIDS virus clearly established as one of the most fatal diseases, there has appeared evidence of a plethora of writing by people with AIDS (PWA). While the more publicized of this writing has been in the media and has been popularized, there is more private writing being written by PWA which goes unpublished. The purpose of this research was to analyze and share this body of writing by PWA. The benefits derived from the actual process and the results derived from the process and the sharing have not been disseminated within the educational community, a community which counts the writing process and writing as a tool for learning high on its list of priorities.;This study was exploratory, qualitative research based primarily upon a participatory observant interaction with the community of PWA writers and case study presentation for the purposes of identifying who was writing, what they were writing and what potential effect this writing was having on them and others. Using a feminist paradigm approach to ethnography, four respondents were identified and their body of work was collected as the data for the study. All data was transcribed, coded and analyzed. The analysis included cross-referencing data, i.e., texts, according to the respondent's position on a continuum of stages of their perceptions of the process of death and dying against a hierarchy of levels of discourse from the very concrete to the very abstract.;On the basis of identified levels of abstraction at various stages of the death and dying continuum, patterns, trends and occurrences were identified and interactions between writer and audience were articulated. The investigator hopes that the practical information yielded in this report can be presented to a public trying to cope with and understand this health crisis. It is further hoped that this information and methodology can be incorporated into academic writing situations as a tool for learning.