Publications by authors named "Holly Feen-Calligan"

This paper describes a program informed by art therapy and Photovoice approaches and techniques aimed at helping new immigrant and refugee teens to navigate personal and cultural identities by reflecting on their experiences as new residents in the US. Photovoice is a photography and social action method that encourages participants to photograph aspects of their daily lives, reflect on their meaning and significance and galvanize necessary changes. The program began in February 2020 at the Arab-American National Museum (AANM), but was adapted for an online format and re-framed towards a reflection on the COVID-19 pandemic.

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This article is a descriptive study of two groups who came together through service-learning: The first group is graduate art therapy students enrolled in a research class, who partnered with six community agencies to help them prepare assignments for undergraduate service-learning students in a subsequent semester. The art therapy research students also assisted the agencies with program evaluation. The second group is the six directors of the community agencies who were preparing for service-learning students enrolled in an art history class titled Art as A Social Practice.

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The arts have been integral to the human experience fostering innovation in social arrangements, strengthening group cohesion, and merging esthetics with the utilitarian properties of technology. For intervention design research in the human services the arts can harness innovation and creativity in meeting human needs and addressing social issues. Given their capacities to stimulate expression of first person experience through interpretative strategies, the arts can equip people and groups, including researchers, with opportunities to express primary experiential knowledge through creative means, portray useful ways of meeting human needs, educate others about the social issues people experience, and formulate intervention strategies or even models to address the causes and consequences of those issues.

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Little is known about the relationships between spiritual resources and life attitudes of homeless African American women. Spiritual resources may serve as protective factors for women leaving homelessness. This descriptive study examines spiritual resources, life attitudes, and selected demographics of 160 African American women who were homeless in the Midwestern United States.

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This article describes the incorporation of the arts into a community-based participatory action research (CBPAR) project formulated to develop and test practices for helping homeless older African-American women. Studying how older African-American women become homeless has evolved into developing and testing promising interventions by the Leaving Homelessness Intervention Research Project (LHIRP). The women's participation in creative group activities helped them to communicate their experience with homelessness, express their concerns, develop personal strengths, and obtained mutual understanding.

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