The Spiritual Polishing of a Battle Fatigued Paratrooper: Collaborative Writing and Noetics in Fieldwork

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Veteran community engagement is an evolving discipline informed by traditional community-based participatory research, veteran studies, and veterans themselves. This Special Issue suggests that research collaborations including military veterans, soldiers, and their families as co-researchers is a critical next step toward a designing thinking perspective in social and healthcare systems for this population. This Special Issue was conceptualized through a veteran community-academic partnership formed over a decade ago. We briefly describe the activities of this partnership from 2008 to present in order to frame the praxis considerations within this issue. The partnership hosted several Warrior Summit conferences from 2013 to present, with the last of this series calling for academic contributions. The resulting papers drawn from the conference and other authors form this issue, and include a wide range of topics: Arts- and theater-based interventions for PTSD; engaging veteran college students in higher education; combining strengths of the chaplaincy and psychology to address changes in veteran identity after moral injury; multi-sector community coalitions for veteran reintegration in the US and Canada; veteran volunteering as a reintegration strategy; examining experiences of US military nurses; veteran collaboratively designed mindfulness groups in a VA healthcare system; engaging veterans on Community Advisory Boards; using photovoice to highlight veterans issues; collaborative research on veteran homelessness; veteran self-medication with psychedelics; community engaged addictions research; and collaboratively designing veteran peer support curricula. These projects represent an emerging movement and offer a multidisciplinary roadmap toward assisting and honoring veterans in their transition back into the civilian world.

Section: Veterans and The Humanitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Call For Special Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

Veterans Health and Well-Being—Collaborative Research Approaches: Toward Veteran Community Engagement

Franco

Hooyer

Ruffalo

et al. 2020

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“…Uptake of CEnR approaches within VA-funded research has been somewhat slower compared with other federal agencies such as the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (Sheridan, Schrandt, Forsythe, Hilliard, & Paez, 2017). Over the past 10 years, however, several academic–community research teams around the country, including our own, have collaborated on research focused on diverse health topics such as increasing access to postdeployment mental health services (Franco, Hooyer, et al, 2016; Franco, Logan, et al, 2016; Kirchner, Farmer, Shue, Blevins, & Sullivan, 2011; Rizia et al, 2014; True, Rigg, & Butler, 2015); using narrative methods to explore impacts of trauma (Hooyer, 2017; Hooyer & Kasza, 2018); and improving engagement in care for women Veterans (Hamilton et al, 2017). More recently, HSR&D—the branch of VA research focusing on translating research findings into clinical practice and health care policy—has increased its investment in engagement activities involving Veterans and their family members (whom we refer to as caregivers) as consultants or partners in the research process.…”

Section: Context: Our Lane Along the Community Engagement Highwaymentioning

confidence: 99%

“Institutions Don’t Hug People:” A Roadmap for Building Trust, Connectedness, and Purpose Through Photovoice Collaboration

True

Davidson²,

Facundo

et al. 2019

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has recently increased support for inclusion of Veterans and family caregivers as collaborators on the research that affects them. In this article, the authors—two VA investigators, two Veterans, and two caregivers—draw from nearly a decade of participatory action research to highlight the methods we have employed to build and sustain collaboration. These methods include the following: using ethnographic approaches to engender trust, treating informed consent as an ongoing process, and sustaining engagement through shared dissemination of findings. We also consider impacts of engaged research that lie outside the parameters of what traditionally “count” as outcomes and that have helped us maintain our collaborative relationships even during periods between funding. We provide examples of how community engagement has bridged Veteran communities and VA, and how the use of visual and narrative methods of dissemination has led to social connectedness and repurposing of Veterans’ and caregivers’ mission as advocates. Our goal is to inform those who wish to conduct this type of research, to further pull research efforts in this direction, and to demonstrate the value of collaborative research from the point of view of those who have been engaged in it.

“…Humanistic concerns in veteran well-being are present throughout psychological services and allied health fields, most commonly in Veterans Affairs Healthcare system settings (Baures, 1996; Eisenhart, 1977; White, 2015), but also in other clinical and social service contexts (Greenleaf & Roessger, 2017). Over the past 15 years, we have sought to engage with veterans increasingly in the context of community —that is to say largely outside of hospitals—working with veterans not as patients, but rather as colleagues and co-thinkers in the places where they live, work, and play in civilian life (Franco et al, 2015; Hooyer & Kasza, 2018; Yan et al, 2022). Humanistic psychology as a discipline suggests a client-centered view and also emphasizes the importance of strengths in maximizing human potential (Starcher & Allen, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Foreword to the Second Volume of the Special Issue on Veteran Community Engagement

Franco,

Hooyer,

Ruffalo

et al. 2023

Self Cite

Veteran community engagement is an evolving discipline informed by traditional community-based participatory research, veteran studies, and veterans themselves. This Special Issue suggests that research collaborations including military veterans, soldiers, and their families as co-researchers is a critical next step toward a design thinking perspective in social and healthcare systems for this population. This Special Issue was conceptualized through a veteran community-academic partnership formed over a decade ago. This partnership hosted several Warrior Summit conferences from 2013 to present, with the last of this series calling for academic contributions. The resulting papers drawn from the conference and other authors form this issue, and include a wide range of topics: veteran microdosing and psychedelic self-medication; a historical view of the impact of education exchange between U.S. and South Korean military nurses; strategies for engaging veterans in research of a theater-based intervention for PTSD; interprofessional approaches to addressing veteran identity considerations through collaborations between chaplain service and psychologists in the VA Healthcare System; an international perspective exploring a community collaborative with veterans in Montréal, Canada; efforts to build long-term and sustainable models for veteran engagement in health services research; community-engaged strategies to address veteran homelessness within broader housing stability efforts; and examining the role of veteran peer mentorship programs in alcohol recovery. These projects represent an emerging movement and offer a multidisciplinary roadmap toward honoring veterans voices in research, clinical services, and program development.