Amina,Dreaming Beyond the Walls

Intersubjective Dialogue for Reconstructing the Past and Discovering the Future

The application of the biographical approach, a communicative methodology technique (Flecha & Soler, 2014; Sánchez, Yuste, de Botton, & Kostic, 2013), has two essential purposes. First, the intersubjective dialogue between the researchers and the protagonist of the biography is based on egalitarian dialogue. Understanding the lifeworld of the protagonist was crucial, and questions formulated within the communicative orientation facilitated an in-depth exploration that allowed Amina to identify the exclusionary situations she experienced and those whose transformative dimensions promoted personal growth. According to Denzin’s (2014) recommendations, the turning points in Amina’s biography were identified to better analyze both dimensions (exclusionary and transformative). Moreover, the dialogue developed among the inmates as they discussed classic literature helped to recover the turning points that Amina related to the researcher. Above all, Amina remembered significant persons who encouraged her to change, trusting in her ability to transform her situation.

Second, as other researchers have argued, research with prison inmates must be undertaken with greater sensitivity, ethicality, and respect (Piche, Gaucher, & Walby, 2014; Reiter, 2014). Amina has been appropriately informed of how her biography will be presented. Measures have been taken to protect her identity, and the elements shared in this article include only those that she has indicated to the researcher, such as key elements of her own trajectory.

Amina knows that sharing her biography is a potentially transformative act itself because other individuals in similar situations could be identified with her. Furthermore, having her voice heard in the international scientific community could improve the conditions of female inmates through their participation in successful educational actions such as DLG. In this sense, this article is based on Oakley’s (2010) assertion that the application of the biographical technique is suitable in the social sciences because it allows researchers to analyze the profound impact of social structures on individuals’ personal lives and the particular meanings that subjects attribute to their experiences. Communicative biography enhances the biographical technique because the intersubjective dialogue established between the researchers and the interviewee results in a deep understanding of social reality and the participants’ own lives. Their dialogue is focused on identifying exclusionary and transformative experiences produced by the social system and resulting from the subject’s choices. This dialogic reflection empowers the subject to become more conscious of his or her capacity to transform his or her own story, and this technique offers insight into the elements needed for success.

The Amina biography is divided into three representative sections highlighting topics of significance to her. The first section describes her childhood, the second discusses her current and potential transformations, and the last section details her dreams for the future. Each section exemplifies how communicative biography has influenced the recovery of turning points that include meaningful lived experiences, reflections on the improvement of personal relationships, and anticipated future achievements, and identifies those elements that have had a negative impact on her life and those that have proved transformative.

Childhood Dreams and Obstacles

Amina was born to a Moroccan Muslim father and an atheistic mother. She is the youngest of four siblings and has two brothers and one sister. She remembered her childhood in detail, responding without hesitation to the question “What were your dreams when you were a child?” that her dream was to help hungry African children. She also mentioned that she felt her calling was to be a veterinarian; she enjoyed caring for animals. However, her mother was not supportive of this vocation.

Amina was a good student, but her sister and brothers were not when they were young. Amina remembered that she thoroughly enjoyed studying. As a child, she was eager to show her grade book to her parents because she was proud of her grades, though her sister urged her to hide her grade book because her brothers wanted to hide their grade books from their parents and would be angry if she showed them hers:

I always slept with my sister in the same room. She didn’t like to study and read, but I liked to read very much; I was bookworm. My brothers scolded me because they failed everything and when I showed my good grade book, my parents lectured them because they failed everything, they told me, why do you show your grade book? And I answered because I have passed everything and I like to share it. My parents are workers and humble all their lives.

Amina related that her academic trajectory until eighth grade (14 years old) was excellent and that she liked every subject. However, when she went to high school, she experienced educational exclusion and acquired unhealthy habits:

I studied until 8th EGB [that is, compulsory education], when I went to high school I became rebel and then . . . they expelled to me, I began to work and go out and then I took a bad path.

Her educational exclusion triggered other problems that led to her first judicial conviction and detainment in a juvenile penitentiary. Amina is an example of how educational exclusion (Aubert, Duque, Fisas, & Valls, 2004; Thompson, 2011) sentences young people to worse results, including school failure, youth detention centers, and, in the worst cases, prison.

The researcher asked her whether she had friends to share her worries with during that time. Amina forcefully expressed that she was in an environment where friendship did not exist: “The only interest was achieving cash, only this goal, the law of the strongest, and I was always isolated, and I only saw people for achieving things I needed.” Amina identified these relationships as belonging to the exclusionary dimension and revealed during the dialogue that she was certain that this experience had led to her prison sentence. She considered it the first step and that not having good friends was harmful to her.

Although Amina felt responsible for the choices that had led to her incarceration, she explained that youth detention centers need to provide real opportunities for overcoming social exclusion, as she remarked in the Future Dreams section. According to Oakley’s (2010) framework, the impact of the social structure on Amina’s biography is apparent; the social system did not offer her opportunities to overcome her social exclusion trajectory (Aubert et al., 2004). Her experience inside of the youth detention center yielded no transformative elements, though such centers aim to put youths back on the track of social inclusion.

Fortune, Thompson, Pedlar, and Yuen (2010) emphasized that penitentiary systems should be based on policies of restorative justice, implementing effective initiatives for the social inclusion of the inmates rather than policies based wholly on penalizing offenders. This recommendation indicates the need to implement programs that support the possibility of social reinsertion. Such programs should consider individuals’ choices and personal trajectories but provide opportunities to participate in educational and dialogic experiences that can inspire hopes of changing those trajectories and are relevant to women. The next section describes how Amina became conscious of her potential for personal transformation once she began to participate in a DLG. These possibilities for change are exemplified in current changes and her new perspectives of the future.

Transformation Is Possible

After reviewing Amina’s trajectory prior to her incarceration, Amina explained the effects of being a participant in a DLG on her personal transformation. The dialogue between the researcher and Amina is full of specific examples of interactions that occurred in the DLG as participants shared their ideas about classic literature. These interactions helped her to recover her values, her future dreams, and to shape a possible future for herself. Amina related recent changes that had occurred because of her participation in the DLG. For example, in her relationship with her daughter, she feels better able to help her daughter and to have interesting conversations with her after discussing classic works of literature with her fellow inmates. In fact, Amina remarked that she recovered enthusiasm for continuing to learn through participation in the DLG. She remembered with special joy an interaction with Isabel, a DLG volunteer. Isabel is a nonacademic adult learner who is participating in a DLG at Verneda Adult School, the first such learning community in Spain. She is now a volunteer moderator for the prison’s DLG. Amina remembers clearly the day that Isabel described the impact of DLG on adult learners without academic degrees, explaining that many people had attained additional educational degrees after becoming DLG participants. This interaction with Isabel had a significant impact on Amina; she said that she immediately decided to improve her educational trajectory. Through participating in the DLG and listening to Isabel, she recognized that it is possible for any adult learner to return to school.

Amina stated that Isabel had inspired her with optimism that she could change her life. Isabel informed her that Verneda was the first center to implement DLG, and Amina expressed a desire to attend Verneda and meet new people with an enthusiasm for learning after being released from prison. Amina revealed to the researcher that this enthusiasm had been key to her learning motivation when she was a young, but now she was excited by the possibility of engaging in healthy social circles.

Overall, the DLG was a crucial educational opportunity for Amina. It gave her new knowledge, the opportunity to share diverse ideas in a respectful and supportive atmosphere, taught her to focus on her interests, and showed her that sharing ideas about classic literature is more satisfactory than reading it alone. In Amina words, “When you read with others, Wow! . . . You discover that it is better than seeing a TV series.” Throughout the communicative biography, Amina reflected on four learning impacts that had influenced her life since she had begun participating in the DLG. By reading A Doll’s House by Ibsen, she engaged in deep reflection about women’s identity and their struggles. While reading Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, she experienced a meaningful life episode during the DLG dialogues that discussed the feelings of Gregory, the main character, which helped her to probe her feelings and identify which were actually positive for her. Third, she realized that the inmates participating in the DLG had better conversations than before they began participating and that there was a better atmosphere among them. Finally, Amina emphasized that she has improved interpersonal communication with her family members, especially with her daughter, pays more attention to her daughter’s academic needs, and listens to her more carefully.

Amina remembered in detail her first DLG about Mother Courage by Bertolt Brecht, but she said that the discussion of A Doll’s House by Ibsen was the most intense because participants focused on the feminist themes addressed by the play. She remembered that a discussion about mothers’ and grandmothers’ struggles to improve their daughters’ lives was prompted by the interactions of the characters in Ibsen’s drama. The women expressed an awareness that their mothers and grandmothers had struggled for the same aim as Ibsen’s women. Amina remembered that one quotation from the protagonist, “I felt in this way because you treat me bad,” had a great impact on the inmates; they reflected on how chauvinism is present in women’s relationships and on the urgency of recovering a female model of progress. Amina said that she knows more women who are hiding such violent situations than women who are demanding respect, as previous generations of women did.

However, the turning point for Amina was a DLG dialogue about Gregory, the main character in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Amina said that this book has an important message despite its tragic ending. She identified with Gregory. When the researcher asked Amina why she identified with Gregory, Amina told a personal story in which she made connections to her own experience and engaged in crucial reflections on her life trajectory:

Oh my god! Yes! Because you wake up and feel yourself such a weirdo, nobody understands you, you don’t know how to go out into the world because you don’t know how to get out of the bed . . . Gosh! All these things . . . , it can’t be! I was angry . . . I think you have to throw it forward! And seeing that nobody understands Gregory . . . And he doesn’t understand why people from his work were disgusted with him, and he suffered miseries, and he doesn’t understand anything, he asked himself . . . why am I a weirdo now? . . . And I identified with him. Because I was young when I began, and I remembered that the trigger was the death of my grandfather. My grandfather was affiliated with the Banhausen factory. My grandfather immigrated to Venezuela with my uncle and my mother, then later he came back and he established a farm there, and here he built a textile factory. However, my family was politically divided because some of them were right-wing and others left-wing, and my grandfather was a speaker, he gave some conferences at universities because of his life experiences—he survived a concentration camp and hid in Mont Perdut, and he was in France. This man transmitted values to me, to be strong without underestimating what my parents do, but my grandfather was my grandfather, suddenly he disappeared from my life, and I felt much like the protagonist of The Metamorphosis by Kafka, a weirdo that didn’t find any sense in life and when I read this I thought that this situation had occurred to me.

Sharing her experience with Kafka’s The Metamorphosis led Amina to recover two meaningful life episodes. First, she recovered a positive figure in her life, her grandfather. As she said, he represented values and the strength to move forward. Recovering his image allowed her to reforge this special link, and Amina came to identify him as a transformative dimension of her life trajectory. Second, Amina also realized that his death had had a negative impact on her life and that the lack of his presence had created an existential confusion during her teenage years, resulting in a loss of meaning that influenced her subsequent actions. She realized that her feelings at that time were similar to Gregory’s. Amina’s reflection indicated that she had achieved a self-distanced perspective. She analyzed her feelings, focusing on “why” rather than only on “what” she was feeling. This process is crucial for positive meaning-making (Kross & Ayduk, 2011). This process of meaning-making was also possible because she had acquired, through dialogues about classic literature, more critical elements to include in her self-reflection. DLG participants combine learning and the acquisition of positive feelings, which promotes their process of meaning-making (Flecha et al., 2013).

Amina also noticed the impact of the DLG on her fellow inmates. Overall, she emphasized that the DLG helped her to hold conversations about other issues and promoted a better atmosphere among the women:

I saw that DLG brightens the group; we have a variety of issues in common. It is a change, a breath of fresh air that helps us to think about other things outside of this place [prison]. Because now with the Quijote, we do comparisons: “This is like Quijote” and we laugh. . . . For us it is like something ours, our conversation is good cheer.

The fact that female inmates with only basic educational levels could establish dialogues, make comparisons, and see similarities between themselves and characters in classic literary texts is evidence of a personal and social transformation. Access to culture facilitates a new experience that allows them to see beyond the walls of the prison. Their imaginations and conversations cross the limits of time and space as classic literature becomes a means for recovering their life histories. They are reinterpreting the past and recreating the future. In fact, the same results were observed in a previous study on male participants in another prison DLG (Flecha et al., 2013). The male inmates engaged in similar reflective processes that changed their perspectives of the future.

Such transformations are possible if they are desired and if space is made available for them to occur. Amina recovered her aspirations and a sense of meaning in her life, and she applied this experience to improving her educational relationship with her daughter. As a result of the DLG conversations, Amina reflected, “I sit down and I think, ‘What do I have? Much time. What do not I have? Desire to return here [prison].’ And now I invest my time in my daughter so much.” Amina described how the DLG improved her communication with her family. Overall, she stated that it helped her to listen better to her daughter and niece as they did their homework. Amina profits more from her time with both of them during visits and permissions. She explained during the interview that she pays more attention and is better able to help them than before:

. . . And seeing for them [daughter and niece] is very important. For instance, they are studying Egypt and they are learning the gods’ names, and I see that she checked out a book from library, I don’t ask her, but she is explaining to me, and when she stops, then I ask her, “And this?” And then I pay attention to her point of view, without correcting her, “don’t say this; not in this way,” instead of this I ask her, and then she tells.

Amina has transferred the learning she acquired through participation in the DLG to other areas of her life, improving communication between herself and her family members, especially her daughter. One of the skills she acquired through the DLG is the ability to listen to others and respect their contributions. Amina achieved this and decided to apply it in her interpersonal communications with her daughter, as the quotation above shows. Moreover, Amina is currently studying to obtain the equivalent of her high school diploma, so that she can continue to advance in her academic trajectory. This result is directly related to the self-confidence she gained through the many DLG dialogues she participated in.

Dreams of Solidarity

Amina’s new perspective of the future is inclusive and transformative. She does not dream of obtaining power or money but of improving her life and her family’s life. In addition, she dreams of contributing to improving the lives of teens or women who are experiencing social exclusion like she did. She expresses that she would like to take care of her family: “I really want to pamper my mother and share books with her because she is a great reader.”

Her professional goal is to become a social worker and help other young girls who are experiencing situations similar to what she experienced in the past:

I have been in a youth detention center and I think that if these young girls could have support from somebody who understands them on the same level, I think that it would work better for them. It’s clear that you can’t save the whole world, but if you can communicate to them that they can overcome their situation, that you are not shit for hitting bottom at an early age. I think that to have a social worker that can connect with them because she has lived the same thing as them, this is super! When I met young social workers that had had similar experiences as me, it was great for me, because they helped me see that I am not a weirdo (like Gregory).

She would like to contribute to improving the lives of girls whose troubles are similar to her own when she was young. Amina is aware that she did not receive such support, did not experience understanding when she was in the youth detention center, and she believes that confident conversations can help youth detainees. Not feeling that one is an outcast, like Gregory, is basic for having a positive perception of oneself and believing in new possibilities. Before ending the biography, the researcher asked Amina whether there was anything she would like to add. Amina said,

I would like to add a request, if you can, please, you should organize a DLG with women inmates in normal units [units where female inmates have no educational or cultural activities, only TV]. I’m sure that this activity will have a terrific result with them.

Amina prioritizes solidarity until the last moment of the interview. The female inmates in normal units do not have opportunities to participate in educational activities. Amina knows their situation and worried about it because their time is not being invested in educational or cultural activities that can open new horizons for them. She believes that if those women can participate in a DLG, they will have the opportunity to share classic literature, change their perceptions, and realize new possibilities.

Conclusion

Amina’s biography offers insight into the personal transformation of a female inmate and DLG participant. The analysis of her trajectory clearly shows the negative consequences of school failure. These consequences have a significant negative impact on teens without opportunities whose trajectories of exclusion can end, like Amina’s, in imprisonment (Simmons & Diego, 2012; Thompson, 2011). The application of successful educational actions demonstrates that personal transformation is possible, even for individuals in difficult circumstances such as Amina’s. Introducing DLGs in penitentiaries helps to reverse the Matthew effect (Flecha et al., 2013).

According to the literature, prisons, especially those in Spain, should include more educational and social activities that promote the possibility of social inmates’ social inclusion once they are released from prison (Fortune et al., 2010; González, 2012). Overall, it is necessary to improve inmates’ educational levels because education is a tool for personal and social transformation, as Amina’s life shows. Reversing the Matthew effect requires offering successful educational actions because such can produce results for all, especially those who have fewer opportunities. Female inmates are among the most vulnerable of such individuals.

The application of communicative biography challenges the poststructuralist belief that transformation is not possible. This technique, which is based on intersubjective egalitarian dialogue, allowed Amina recover the transformative turning points (Denzin, 2014) in her life. Through the dialogue, she gained greater awareness of her childhood dreams; recovered positive models, such as her grandfather; and has recognized the transformative elements of her life that can help shape her new future. Communicative biography helps participants remember their most meaningful life episodes. For example, Amina related how dialogues about Kafka were essential for recovering past events and believing in new possibilities that deviated from her past trajectory. The intersubjective dialogue established between Amina and the researcher has helped Amina reinforce her self-confidence that she can change her life. She was able to achieve a self-distanced perspective of negative episodes in her life and project new directions through a positive meaning-making process (Kross & Ayduk, 2011).

One meaningful life episode that Amina is currently experiencing is the atmosphere developing among the inmates who participated in the DLG. The dialogue they engaged in during their reading of El Quijote was crucial for them. Communicative biography explores why those life episodes are meaningful, and Amina actively engaged in this exploration. The ability of these inmates to relate to each other through the new use of a shared language, for example, as they compare the behaviors of the literary characters, is outstanding. The first book they read for the DLG is often the first book many of the female participants in the DLG have ever read. Their effort has produced the satisfaction of sharing words and thoughts in a respectful atmosphere where diversity is honored. This is one characteristic of DLGs that is observable in many different types of groups, including Muslim women (de Botton et al., 2014), and is a successful tool for overcoming cultural prejudices. Finally, Amina emphasized that the opportunity to talk as they do in the DLG allowed them to transcend the walls of the prison, reinterpret their pasts, and imagine new possible futures.

While participating in the communicative biography, Amina was most conscious about the things she had learned and the changes that had recently been made in her life. For example, Amina emphasized that her participation in the DLG has improved her relationship with her family and her daughter. She applied what she had learned through the DLG to improve her educational relationship with her daughter. According to Amina, she is better able to help her daughter with her homework. In fact, there is evidence that parents’ participation in successful educational actions improves the academic achievements of their children (Rios, 2013). One of the elements discussed in the biography was her increased capacity to attend to her daughter as she explained her homework content. Amina now listens more carefully to her daughter and poses illustrative questions to help her overcome obstacles. Thus, Amina has found that she now has better focus.

Finally, in communicative biography, one of the transformative dimensions of the life episodes related by the participants focuses on their aspirations. Amina identified that the life episode in which she recovered her dreams was her participation in the DLG. She wanted to help others who are close to her; according to her, it is not necessary to go far away to help others. Therefore, Amina has decided to study social work at the university, so that she can become an educational model for other teens who are in similar circumstances as hers. In this case, communicative biography revealed Amina’s desire for solidarity, which was identified through the transformative dimensions of her life trajectory. During her childhood and throughout her social exclusion trajectory, Amina desired to facilitate the personal transformations of other girls. According to Amina, they need to be able to participate in egalitarian dialogue “at the same level” with someone who understands them and does not see them as “weirdos,” as Gregory experienced in The Metamorphosis.

At the end of the interview, Amina explained her dream to help the women around her who are in more adverse situations than hers. Amina suggested to the researcher that it would be beneficial to establish a DLG among the female inmates in the normal units that do not provide any educational or cultural activities. Amina engaged in a confident, egalitarian dialogue with the researcher that has influenced her by allowing her to express this new dream. Notably, after Amina’s call for solidarity, the volunteer responsible for the organization of the DLG met with the director of the prison to make her dream a reality by establishing a new space for dialogue about classic literature among the inmates of other units. The dream of transformation is possible and is continually spreading.