Information Mourning Among Retired Faculty Members #ECIL2023

Sheila here, liveblogging again from the European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL) in Krakow, Poland (this is Sheila) is of Information Mourning Among Retired Faculty Members presented by Paloma Korycińska (abstract is here). As someone approaching retirement this had caught my attention! Korycińska picked up on an image and a quote from the keynote speech to emphasise that she was talking about pain and potential healing.
Her research was originally about information behaviour of retired Polish academics, but as she started to carry out her research it emerged that the academics' experience strongly resembled mourning and bereavement. In 2020 she discovered that
- Information and data loss may be preceived and lived as a kairotic change
- retirement may be lived as a kairotic loss
- kairotic change and kairotic loss can lead to experience of mourning and bereavement
Korycińska explained that Kairos was the Greek god of thunder, symbolising a single moment of opportunity and also a sudden unexpected event that erases your existence. Death is not the only type of kairotic event, it can be anything where it feels like your life has been destroyed and you have to be resilient and reconstruct.
Korycińska characterised kairotic (information) loss as: a borderline event; expected and announced, yet unbearable; erasing/ reconfiguring existence; with no template or recipe for coping; no turning back from it; "what was yours does not belong to you any more"; it has to be embraced.
The toolkit used to explore information loss was Sonnenwald's Information Horizons (as modified by Huvila), and then for the revised research project it also included tracking resilient information behaviour, undertaking indepth interviews (note taking only) with 12 retired Polish academics. As well as noting modifications to information horizons, the researcher also undertook metaphor mapping.
Korycińskanoted that she had a providential encounter with a professional therapist at this stage, who warned her about the danger both to participants and researcher in undertaking research which arouses such painful emotions.
For the new study she has a new recruitment method, is undergoing training about how to undertake this kind of research, is taking advantage of supervision/mentoring; is doing indepth biographical interviews with transcription; doing information horizon drawing; will undertake discourse analyis and her interpretation will focus on remedies.
She alerted us to Bowlby's and Parkes' four phases of bereavement (numbness; yearning; disorganisation & despair; Reorganisation. There are also the 5 stages of mourning: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. She also presented a diagram showing a bereavement negotiation scheme.
Finally metaphors her particiapants used included: being dis-embedded; being "confronted with my finitude. alone in singularity". A final word "There is no need that scholars should live retirement as an irreversible loss triggering the process of bereavement"
This talk resonated very much with me, which is something I might blog about when I'm not liveblogging. Another delegate (who has a more receptive culture at their institution, it sounded) was talking about how and whether their individual post-retirement scholarship was still relevant and valued by the profession and community of scholars. He mentioned the feeling of being cut off from information sources, from the networks and so forth. The mourning is connected to loss of identity. Korycińska felt that there could be small steps that institutions could take in order to avoid such feelings of loss - she is aiming to discoverthese through her research.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Krakow in autumn