“ To be faithful to ourselves,we pay a price”: Jane F. Gilgun’s journey as a feminist qualitative social work practice researcher

Foundations: The sunshine breaks through

Jane came from a working-class family and was the child of an inter-ethnic marriage, with a Sicilian mother and Irish father. For her, this cultural blending, required “adjusting to both of them,” and she speculated “that might have actually helped me realize that there are multiple perspectives out there and not just mine.” Jane characterized the confluence of familial factors as a “gift” contributing to her understanding of “social justice and existence of oppression.” They understood oppressive social conditions through experience and imparted values of equality, dignity, worth, and self-determination.

Both of her parents were orphaned at an early age and were raised by relatives which had resulted in limiting their educational opportunities. Jane made up for any lack of formal education of her parents by earning not only a college degree but two master’s degrees, a licentiate, and a PhD. Jane’s academic journey zigzagged between family studies, on the one hand, and the study of American or English literature, on the other. Both fields had an enduring influence. Although not overtly apparent in her scholarship, spirituality plays an important role in Jane’s understanding and interpretation of the world. Religion also informed her early choices of educational institutions.

In 1965, Jane earned her Bachelor of Arts in English literature at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Her major poet was T.S. Eliot. She followed this by attending the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, earning a licentiate in 1971 in a multi-disciplinary degree program in Family Studies and Sexuality. There, her thesis was on “The pedagogy of proscribed sexual terms in the classroom.” In Belgium, she was exposed to the phenomenological work of Husserl and Heidegger. “There were,” she said, “a lot of professors who … took phenomenological perspectives. It was built into the course work.” In 1979, she returned to English Literature earning a master’s degree at the University of Rhode Island, writing a thesis on Walt Whitman, a poet known for his transcendental and realist work. She completed the master’s while working fulltime in child welfare services. She studied literature at that time to bring balance to her life. She found working in child welfare to be rewarding and emotionally draining.

Given these early educational influences, it is not surprising that threads of sexuality, morality, ethics, and religion filtered through a phenomenological lens would figure prominently in Jane’s future work. Her scholarship tends to grapple with power differentials, patriarchy and wrestles head-on with a basic philosophical question of how evil can exist in a world rooted in goodness. There is an ever-present subtext in Jane’s work that wrestles with the consequences of gendered abuse of power in myriad fora including the church, the academy, as well as in interpersonal relationships (Gilgun, 2011, 2022, 2024a, 2024b). Jane noted, “I was interested in the abuse of power. So, the abuse of power has been significant to me my whole life.”

Jane received her PhD from Syracuse University in 1983. She explains her decision to seek a doctorate in family studies and not social work by saying, “I was a social worker at heart” but added, “I looked at PhD programs in social work, and I thought I’m not that interested in all that stuff that I have to take, but I am interested in gender roles and human development. That’s why I didn’t get a PhD in social work.”

It was several months into her doctoral program at Syracuse—while doing a graduate assistantship as a statistics tutor and taking research courses where “there was no mention of qualitative research”—that she stumbled on qualitative inquiry. Jane was attending the presentation of a dissertation proposal of a more advanced student when she learned the student’s research was to be based on interviews. Jane “sat there, amazed. It was like you mean you can do interviewing and get a PhD? …That was like the clouds parted and the sunshine broke through.” Jane was subsequently exposed to the scholarship of Anselm Strauss, Howie Becker, Everett Hughes, Blanche Geer, and Bob Bogdan, among others.

Jane’s own dissertation, entitled “The Sexual Abuse of the Young Female in Life Course Perspective,” focused on child sexual abuse of girls between the ages of 10 and 15 using the life history method of the Chicago School but importantly also approached the topic using a theoretic life course perspective. In the future, her questions about the gendered abuse of power would continue to be filtered through a human development and life course theory lens. She did both life histories and a survey of more than 150 young people. She was afraid the faculty would not accept a proposal based only on qualitative methods.

Even after earning a doctoral degree at Syracuse, Jane returned to school, this time the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration (now Crown Family School of Social Work) earning a social work degree (MA) in 1984 with a concentration in marriage and family therapy. Unbeknownst to her at the time, she would also be swimming in the waters of “the Chicago School” which would figure prominently in her future thinking (Bulmer, 1984).

Jane spent her professional academic career at the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities in the U.S. She worked her way through the ranks from Assistant Professor (1984-90); to Associate Professor (1990–1988); to Professor (1998–2021). She was also on the graduate faculty in Women’s Studies, later renamed the Graduate Faculty in Gender, Women and Sexuality studies from 1996 to 2021. All told, her academic career at Minnesota spanned nearly four decades. She retired May 31, 2021.

Tea with Jane: Lost legacies and intellectual companions

Jane’s enthusiasm for “the Chicago School”—probably an intentional truncation of the “Chicago School of Sociology” which she asserts is “a misnomer” because “in true chauvinistic fashion” male sociologists appropriated the name from the many academic disciplines initially associated with it—borders on proselytizing. Nonetheless, her reasons for promoting awareness of the role women played in the development of this intellectual tradition—and their integral place in social work’s history—warrants excavation.

The scholars associated with the Chicago School have been Jane’s intellectual companions for decades, particularly those progressive era women connected with the Hull House settlement, including Jane Addams and Frances Perkins. “I needed my intellectual companions,” Jane acknowledged. “I wish I could sit down have a cup of tea with them.” Of Addams, she says, “I would have loved to follow her around for a couple weeks” and adds, “I feel like she’s my great grandmother or my grandmother.”

Beyond, a familial relationship with Addams on intellectual grounds, Jane also forged a spiritual one with Addams and Perkins. Nee Jane Gilgun, she explains that 13 years ago, she decided to rededicate her name. She renamed herself Jane after Jane Addams and Frances after Frances Perkins “because I identified with Frances Perkins.” Frances was the name Jane had taken for confirmation in honor of her older sister whom she adores. Howerver, Jane goes on to say, “we haven’t lionized Frances Perkins, you know. Frances Perkins was a social worker, for God’s sakes. Look at what she did. She transformed the friggin’ country.” Indeed, among other things, Perkins was one of the architects of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and his Secretary of Labor from 1933 to 1945. Jane wonders whether the general lack of recognition of Perkins’ accomplishments is attributable both to her gender and to her profession of choice, social work.

In fact, Jane’s overall understanding of the Chicago School is both gendered and disciplinary. Although Jane credits the usual male intellectuals associated with the School, including Anselm L. Strauss, John Dewey, Florian Znaniecki, W.E.B. DuBois, and W. I. Thomas, she also simmers with annoyance at what might be characterized as the patriarchal theft of the contribution of women—arguably a disciplinary abuse of power—and the subsequent erasure of women from social work’s intellectual history. “I know how much time, say, Dewey and Thomas and others spent with Addams and other applied sociologists at Hull House,” she says but, “I had to get through all those guys to get to Jane Addams…. I had to go through a lot of male work to get to her….It was men, men, men.”

Influenced by the relatively contemporary writing of urban sociologist Mary Jo Deegan (1988), Jane has particular annoyance for Robert E. Park, who was on the faculty at the University of Chicago from 1914 to 1932, whom she characterizes as a both a “real chauvinist” and “misogynist.” He also contributed a great deal to the Chicago School (Gilgun, 1999). Although the roots of sociology and social work were intertwined—intellectually and methodologically—for their first quarter century, the disciplines diverged by 1920. This occurred when women were “kicked out” of the sociology department of the University of Chicago, an ejection Jane sees as primarily “engineered” by Park. He “and some of his male colleagues decided that the women were too interested in social reform.” He thought that “you simply inform the general public and reform happens…Research and advocacy were two different endeavors that shouldn’t mix” she explains. Park, Jane said, “was against social reformers” and had unique “disdain for women reformers” even though his wife, Clara Cahill Park, was a prominent reformer, and he was proud of her (Deegan, 2006). In short, Jane characterizes Park as wanting “to take the scientific detached view.” So, the split involved a debate over scientific objectivity and the role of advocacy as a matter of practice.

Women—excluded from the sociology department—took action by bringing the independent School of Civics and Philanthropy to the University in 1920. They renamed it the School of Social Service Administration, today’s Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. “Of course, the Chicago School of Sociology would not have existed at all if it hadn’t been for the contributions of social workers.” Nonetheless, Jane is concerned—again on behalf of the status of social work—that this history has been written by sociologists, including Deegan, and not claimed by its rightful heirs, social workers. Jane notes, “It’s been sociologists who said, “Wait a minute. You forgot something. You’ve forgotten these women who made contributions to American pragmatism, and these women were social workers.” It was Jane Addams “who made all these contributions to American pragmatism and symbolic interactionism” (Gilgun, 2023).

There was little if any pushback against the erasure of women’s contributions. Jane wryly observes, “It’s kind of ironic that we let others define us.” She continues, “so many of us walk around with our heads hung low, so to speak, because we’re only social workers” and “the other academic disciplines look down at us.” However, she argues, “We, in social work, have an incredible legacy, and we’ve lost touch with it.”

Indivisibility of social work practice-research-advocacy

Much of Jane’s own writing might be seen as an attempt to rehabilitate what she characterizes as this “gendered inflicted” damage to the history of social work’s intellectual traditions. Jane would mend the frayed fabric on two dimensions. The first is to bridge the artificial division between social work practice and social work research. The second would be to integrate advocacy and social reform as central to social work practice research. Taken together—the inseparable nature of research, practice, and advocacy—Jane posits a unique philosophical orientation toward qualitative social work. Jane believes practice research in social work is distinct from that conducted in other disciplines (Gilgun, 2012). Social work offers a unique kind of qualitative research because, it is “value-based, emancipatory, requires immersion and reflexivity,” and because “we wade into complex, unremitting terrible human situations,” which all “requires continual elaboration.”

Gilgun credits Jane Addams as “the founder of qualitative social work research” but not as its explicit author. Thus, it requires the active engagement of modern scholars to unearth those contributions. She points out Addams, “never wrote a piece on research methodology” so it is necessary “to read her substantive research in order to see what her methodology was.” For Addams they were inseparable, “research was practice and practice was research. I mean they were inseparable and, in her work,” says Jane. Addams “talked about social work as a practice that included research.”

Gilgun’s understanding of this seamless relationship between “practice” and “research” in on display in some of her most often cited scholarship (Gilgun, 2005, 2013). As she notes, “part of the genius is that social work research and practice have many crossovers and are based on the same values: dignity, justice, care, human equality, and self-determination.” Therefore, Jane’s scholarship knits methodological approaches such as phenomenology or grounded theory into the fabric of social work. For example, Gilgun (2013) grapples with the relationship between grounded theory and social work practice” while Gilgun (2005) interrogates the relationship of evidence-based practice and clinical expertise. In the latter article, she argues producing “research evidence” should not be seen as a separate endeavor but rather an integral part of practitioner knowledge. Similarly, Gilgun sees the integrated relationship between “doing direct practice” and phenomenology. In practice, service providers are trying to “understand the phenomenology of human experience of our clients” and relatedly “when we’re doing qualitative research, we’re trying to understand the phenomenology of human experience.” While scholars in other disciplines might label a qualitative project as phenomenology or grounded theory research, Jane argues the methodologies take on a unique form in social work practice which comfortably embodies both (Gilgun, 1993, 1994, 2001, 2022a).

For Jane, one method of synthesizing practice and research is by retroductively theorizing practice (Gilgun, 2019). For example, Jane has written extensively on the role of theory construction and development in qualitative research. Her interest in this area can be understood as part of a larger project of engaging in robust theorizing about social work derived from real-world practice contexts. Theory must be actively forged in this context, hence the inseparability of practice from research. As such, a body of Jane’s work grapples with theory production, theory application, and theory testing. (Gilgun, 1992, 1995, 2015, 2019, 2022c).

A second dimension of Jane’s philosophical approach to social work research practice—and in keeping with Progressive Era pragmatist traditions—is that it must be advocacy oriented. For Jane, social work practice is based on “the transformative dimensions of human knowledge and social reform.” Social workers “are concerned with the transformation of social structures and important things like racial disparities.” Jane ascribes these characteristics as not only functions of practice per se but as contributing to “a distinct kind of qualitative research.” She notes, “I can’t imagine calling yourself a qualitative social work researcher and not being interested in reform.” About her own studies, she says, “I want to transform the world, I want to stop violence today, right now.”

Jane would like to see social work scholars seriously take up the link between modern qualitative social work and that of its historical roots established in the Chicago School. Social work has a “rich history but it’s underappreciated and underdeveloped. It’s underdeveloped in that no one has organized the vast arrays of principles, philosophies, perspectives, and values that are social work’s legacy—both practice and research.” This modern lack of understanding and connection continues to be—in Jane’s view—a major deficiency in existing social work scholarship.

Understanding violence in a world of light: Digging for diamonds in a rough terrain

Topically, Jane’s research has been centered on violence. Her population focus has shifted over time from children to adults, from girls to men, and from victims to perpetrators. However, once she settled on incarcerated, adult male offenders who have been convicted of violent crimes (including assault and battery, rape, and murder), she stuck with them for decades. “I knew gender had something to do with violence from the beginning, way back…it was 1985 or 84 when I started this research.” Studying men became central to her feminist agenda. These were men who exercised “domination without empathy.”

Jane spent 17 years interviewing men at maximum and medium-security prisons and many other years interviewing men and women in community-based programs, many of whom were not known to have committed acts of violence. “Basically, I didn’t know what was going on with these people, and so I took my time…I interviewed at least 200 people in depth.” Drawing on her theoretical interest in life course development and theory, she wondered why some people turn violent when faced with adversity and others do not. Adding that “life course theory, with its core concepts of power, privilege, and prestige, has influenced my entire research program.” She explains she is “trying to understand human development in ecological perspective” while focusing on violent men. Or, framed slightly differently, she says, “part of what I’m really interested in is what stops people from realizing their potential and what facilitates moving toward our potential.” As an example, Jane pointed to a study participant who had committed murder, noting that he had experienced “brutality” in childhood and didn’t have any “positive influences.” The result was, “by eight he was dangerous. He was a little kid.” Jane is inclined to attribute such outcomes to structural failures rather than individual ones. People internalize their interpretations of their experiences, and so there are reciprocal interactions between multiple social influences and the internalized meanings that people make of them. “It’s a total tragedy that we live in a society where a little boy can be brutalized, doesn’t have positive influences, and then becomes a brute himself.”

Over time, Jane has come to a tentative understanding of this violence. She believes offenders think that violence can bring “order to chaotic situations”; “the people who commit violence, think they’re doing something good, because they are the saviors. They’re coming in. and they’re going to right the wrongs of the world. They’re seeking to deal with their inner chaos and bring “peace to themselves. The hell with the consequences for anybody else” (Gilgun, 2022c). She formulates a related question, “what’s the joy of hurting other people? and there’s lots of joy I can document, joy, the joy people take in harming others, although they don’t necessarily see the consequences as harm.”

Jane draws comparisons between these men and a friend who was “an American Indian” woman who had faced a great deal of adversity in her childhood, including being sent to an Indian boarding school from the ages of 11 until 18. Among other things the child had acted out at the boarding school in order to be “kicked out” so she could live with relatives rather than at the institution. Jane paints a glowing picture of the now-elderly woman’s professional and personal achievements. For Jane, the story is an illustration of overcoming individual adversity and structural oppression and living a productive life without resorting to violence. “Okay, other people have terrible early lives, no question…a lot of us have terrible lives, but we have influences in our lives that show us other ways. We’re open to them.” The woman, “was able to find diamonds in the dirt….She sought out opportunities. There weren’t very many. It was like digging for diamonds in rough terrain, and she found them.” Jane characterizes this as the “self-righting” principle, arguing people—much like plants—“grow toward light.”

Jane’s spiritual and religious nature is deeply intertwined with her ontological and epistemological view of the world of these divergent paths. “We are made to be good, and we are made to love, made to seek community, are made to affiliate. That’s what makes our lives meaningful.” She said, “I think my foundation is that I’m a spiritual person. That’s my core identity. I want to be bathed in goodness” and it’s a condition that she wishes for the world, “I want everybody to be bathed in goodness and love. That’s what’s motivating my research.” She also has a vision of a just and caring world and wants that for everyone. So, a fundamental philosophical question arises for Jane, how can evil exist in a fundamentally good world? Studying violent men has allowed her to ask, what goes astray? However, beyond just understanding them, Jane asks, “how do I stop people from hurting each other?” and she wishes for nothing less than “to transform evil.” She says of her research that it is motivated by, “the desire to make things better” however, “in order to make things better, I had to understand what happens when people do things that make things awful.”

Not surprisingly, all this work studying violence meant Jane was hearing the unimageable. “They are the ones,” Jane reflected, “who took me to places I couldn’t have ever imagined. There’s no way I could have imagined what some of these people experienced as children, as young people, now as adults as rapists, and murderers, as people who beat their wives.” I could never have imagined how they thought about the terrible asks of violence that they committed (Gilgun, 2008).

Consequences of walking into the thicket

There is a cost to spending a lifetime investigating violence. It takes a toll. While some of the consequences may be self-evident others were more surprising. For example, Jane reports that “women faculty at my university, who I very much wanted to be part of my life rejected me and my work.” She says, “I wish I could say I had these wonderful collaborators who are other faculty but I didn’t.” In addition, she reports limited acceptance in some scholarly fora, such as violence conferences, funding or publication outlets. Early on, Jane also learned to shield students from the trauma of being exposed to violence narratives. Given Jane’s embrace of reflexivity, she doesn’t shy away from offering interpretations for this estrangement from feminists, female colleagues, violence researchers, and students, nonetheless the sense of isolation is palpable.

One of the most startling aspects of this isolation were Jane’s feelings of being shunned by feminists with whom she shared a basic ideology. Jane attributes this rejection to several dimensions: that she studied men not women, that she studied perpetrators of violence and not victims, and that, “what I was saying about my findings didn’t fit their beliefs.”

Jane saw feminist approaches of the day as limited and problematic. “I was a woman interviewing men, and there were some who told me women should interview women.” Jane’s reaction was, “you’ve got to be kidding. Right? Why shouldn’t a woman with our perspectives, with our experience, try to understand men. They’re the ones who are hurting us; not all men, obviously, but they’re the ones who are causing the problems.” This self-imposed censorship based on gender meant that, “we feminists only have part of the picture. Our job is to protect little boys as well as little girls and to push back against the social forces that lead little boys to become brutes, murderous brutes. That’s part of our job.”

Relatedly, Jane believes that her basic finding that many adult perpetrators were victimized as boys was off-putting to feminist colleagues. “When I started talking about some of the suffering” that “violent men experienced in childhood, that was really anathema because that went against the idea that gender roles shape men to be violent which they do.” In Jane’s view, this discordance challenged firmly held beliefs and political positions of other feminists, “women at my university didn’t support me at all because what I was saying about my findings didn’t fit their beliefs.”

In the end, Jane explained her incompatibility with other feminists as resulting from her own devotion to empirical evidence, “I blame it on qualitative research, the research, the principles that I learned from the research and elsewhere told me that I have to put aside my assumptions so that I could see the points of view of others.” While Jane shared the rage of other feminists, she saw herself as being driven by rationalism and not just emotional ideology. Jane says, “They just were so angry. I was angry, too. I mean I’m like them. I’m just as angry as they are, and still am, but at the same time I knew that there was more to it than what I could see from my perch.” Jane asserted, “we may think we know but … it’s better to assume you don’t and then just go in and see what people are saying and try to understand their point of view, try to understand their experiences.”

Paradoxically, while Jane felt isolated from feminists because of her work on violence, it was her feminist views which isolated her from other researchers in the violence community. “I talked to the head of the federal Research on Rape Center. I told him I wanted to do a feminist analysis of rape. I was interviewing men and a lot of them had committed rape and I really wanted to use the feminist lens to examine their narratives.” She said, “He said to me, ‘Don’t submit a proposal.’” Jane complains, “that’s how contradictory and disjointed discourses on rape are.”

In addition to her feminist lens, Jane found herself isolated from the violence research community because of her methodological approaches. “I didn’t go to conferences on violence…The perspectives of other researchers were so different. It didn’t make any sense to go…I was into phenomenology and understanding people’s meanings and taking a deep dive into what does all this mean, and how does it happen, and they were talking about the independent variable that was influencing the dependent variable. I didn’t find it very interesting.” In addition to her feminist lens, Jane found herself isolated from the violence research community because of her methodological approaches. “I didn’t go to conferences on violence…The perspectives of other researchers were so different. It didn’t make any sense to go…I was into phenomenology and understanding people’s meanings and taking a deep dive into what does all this mean, and how does it happen, and they were talking about the independent variable that was influencing the dependent variable. I didn’t find it very interesting.” Similarly, Jane says of publishing, “another example is the hard time I’ve had figuring out how to publish the work.” She didn’t know how to write it up so other people could bear to read it and find it useful. She thinks that if she can put findings in context, the narratives of lived experience might become tolerable.

Jane also intentionally limited the exposure of her students—doctoral and occasional masters—from her projects. “I tried really hard to shield them from the real harshness of the stories… I didn’t want them to suffer what the survivors of this kind of violence have suffered…I really appreciated their perspectives because they helped me realize that they can’t go there with me. They can’t walk deep into that thicket with me.” Learning this lesson the hard way, Jane recalled an early experience with “a brilliant young student.” She said, “I think the research had a bad effect on her…. nightmares, lack of sleep, heightened anxiety.” At the time, Jane “didn’t see it” as related to her research but “in retrospect I see it more clearly.” Jane characterized this impact as “collateral damage” of her own focus on violence.

Students were not the only ones for whom secondary exposure to trauma had an impact. Jane says, “when I started the research on violence, I was unprepared for what I heard when I listened to the lived experiences…well, I listened, all right.” Periodically, Jane sought professional help herself, “I also had therapy on and off just because sometimes I really needed that therapist. The research brought out every slight and hurt I’d ever experienced in my whole life.”

The most supportive community to Jane was the one which best understood the men she studied, including the prison staff. Jane deemed them wonderful, “I could talk with them. I was totally at ease with them because they knew the stories.”

Finding communities by creating them herself

Given Jane’s isolation as well as her professional action-oriented tendencies, it is probably not surprising that she spent a good deal of time constructing her own intentional communities. She did this in a variety of spaces and in a number of ways. She started support groups, wrote newsletters, and organized conference spaces. Each time, she sought to build collective membership around shared interests but also ones that united her own professional, practice, and methodological perspectives. For example, Jane started a support group, “of community-based [sex offender] therapists and researchers from the University of Minnesota” which met for several years. They served as support but not a writing group. She noted, “‘That was really important because we talked about all these things together’. The group was good for emotional support.” For about 15 years, Jane organized a qualitative methods interest group at the University of Minnesota. Some faculty and graduate students from several departments attended the meetings, held monthly at her home.

Over decades, Jane initiated community-building in three different professional conferences, the National Council on Family Relation (for her family practice interests), the International Congress on Qualitative Inquiry (for her qualitative interests) and Society of Social Work Research (for her social work interests). In each space, Jane played an activist role in organizing and integrating the assorted fields. For example, Jane developed a “qualitative research interest group” in the National Council on Family Relations” and started a newsletter that “was very popular.” [Qualitative Family Research, available through Amazon Kindle). For 15 years, she took a similar approach at ICQI where—with the support of Norman K. Denzin, another influential figure in her life—Jane became the driving force organizing “social work day,” a day-long mini conference within the much larger transdisciplinary Congress. At ICQI, Jane not only took a leadership role but she served as documentarian. She could frequently be spotted circulating in the various presentation sessions and venues videotaping and photographing. These efforts comprise just a few of among the 385 video recordings and photograph compilations Jane has posted on YouTube.

Like her use of YouTube, Jane has been a prolific writer in many publishing outlets beyond traditional peer reviewed articles and edited books. She sought spaces for innovation. Included among her projects are poems, children’s books, workbooks, biographies, and other experimental writing. Jane experimented early on with such newly emerging publishing venues as Scribd.com, Amazon, Kindle, and Wordpress. She has published hundreds of pieces in these forums.

Unfinished business: Qualitative social work in action

Significantly, Jane still has one major piece of scholarship on her bucket list, a magnum opus on violence. “One of my big fears, now that I’m in my 70s, is that I’m afraid I’m going to die before I write up this research. I’m not going to let that happen.” It isn’t that she hasn’t given it a lot of thought over the years. In fact, she started writing a book on violence in 1995. “I realized that I didn’t know how to present this material so that other people could bear to hear it.” She worried the topic could traumatize others or could be sensationalized, making things worse, and resulting in additional “draconian” policy responses. Ultimately, she concludes, “it’s probably better I waited.”

Jane offers several reasons as to why that book didn’t materialize earlier, some of them related to qualitative inquiry more generally. She identifies at least three ongoing problems for resolution. First, the need to articulate a core, organizing principle for the entire work on violence. “I thought if I could find a really good core principle that would allow me to talk about violence in a context that was helpful. I think I’m there after all these years.” To that end, Jane has tentatively settled on her “unifying framework” as “if we are made for love, why do we hurt each other?” Jane points to, “the apparent agreement among philosophers, theologians, psychologists, spiritual leaders, and neuroscientists that we are made to cooperate, affiliate, build community, love, seek survival through affiliation and cooperation.” Violent actors also seek connection, peace, and dignity, but they “mistake evil for good” harming others in the process. She says, “depending on our experiences over time and how we interpret these experiences” seeking connection and meaning can result in “prosocial, anti-social, self-destructive, inappropriate, and dissociative” adaptations.

A second thorny problem is finding a way to provide sufficient context to make sense of the hundreds of violence narratives she has collected. This is easier said than done. It requires finding a way to contextualize the case studies without sensationalizing, unnecessarily vilifying, or essentializing them. She is exploring using moral injury as a theoretical lens. Jane emphasizes is that “it takes a long time to figure out the context because we don’t have a context for this kind of brutality.”

A third problem is finding a compelling way to write the overall book. “I think I can put it in such a way that it's more like a mystery, you know it’s like what happened to this guy he had this, this, this, and this going for him and look what he did.” It is a framework that intrigues Jane, “I think violence will make sense in this context. Audiences might be able to bear the stories because I have provided an interpretive framework.”

Conclusion: “Why didn’t someone tell me?” Unwritten lessons for a next generation

Jane’s career has been defined by a desire to explain things that don’t seem to fit together, that deviate from expectations, or defy everyday experience. Starting from an ontological worldview of the inherent goodness of humankind, she has sought to understand apparent deviations from this path. Jane’s feminist and developmental theoretical lenses merging with her methodological approach to qualitative social work practice research put her on a phenomenological quest to understand the lived experience of men who commit unimageable acts.

Yet there is an epistemological subtext in Jane’s work that provides a unifying framework for her scholarship. It is that male violence has inflicted harm—sometimes unintendedly—on women. Wrestling with this gendered abuse of power is consistent in her thinking across domains. Of course, this includes her in-depth interviews of violent men but is also apparent in her interpretation of intellectual and disciplinary histories (or herstories) of the Chicago School where male sociologists appropriated the work—and erased the voices—of female social workers. Relatedly, some of Jane’s more personal self-published writing deal reflexively with her own experiences of victimization and how she coped and grew emotionally and spiritually (Gilgun, 2023, 2024a, 2024b, 2024c). In short, Jane has spent a lifetime at the irregular seams of gender, violence, power, and ethics.

Admittedly, long-term, reflexive qualitative social work research practice has taken a toll on Jane. “When I started the research on violence, I was unprepared for what I heard when I listened to the lived experiences.” She doesn’t see that as particularly unique to her own work but rather as a common consequence of the fact social workers deal with some of society’s most complex and entrenched problems. Nonetheless, she laments the relative absence of scholarly literature that grapples with this emotional toll. “Why didn’t somebody tell me? Why didn’t Strauss and other people who have been studying painful human experience tell others?” She laments. She points to Glaser and Strauss’s classic works on death and dying but marvels, “they didn’t talk about what it was like for them. Can you imagine? There they were witnesses to deaths; death after death and they were witnesses to the suffering of the families.”

While Jane has published reflexive pieces on her relationship with violence, her question is posed as a larger challenge for future generations of scholars and as a warning to those who follow in her path (Gilgun, 2008). “We as social workers have yet to describe the effects of the research on us as researchers, including the far-ranging consequences.” She concludes, “Very few people talk about reflexivity as the impact of the research on us… I don’t think we’re prepared for what we’re going to hear.” It is a gaping hole which needs scholarly plugging.

The rest of us can draw some implicit lessons from Jane’s experiences and thoughtful reflections. First, Jane’s work should remind us of the importance of deep historical connections. Too often, today’s writers frame their projects with superficial and functionary literature reviews. Jane’s scholarship reminds of the value of deep, immersive, and engaged historical thinking about the ideas, traditions, and practices from which our work stems.

A second lesson gleaned from Jane’s work might be a reminder of the time and dedication it takes to seriously investigate a difficult topic using qualitative methodologies. In a day and age of accelerated publication demands to meet escalating expectations of the academy, Jane’s career offers an illustration of why careful and thoughtful work requires time. Beyond the obvious time-consuming task of collecting empirical evidence, lies the enormous burden of finding appropriate contextual frameworks and theoretical lenses with which to properly situate qualitative stories. Furthermore, even once a researcher has solved the puzzlement of context, there is the time-intensive task involved in careful craftsmanship which is required for presenting the best quality qualitative research.

A third lesson of note is that choosing the path less traveled—or resisting majority-held views—can be a solitary experience. As Jane’s reflections’ show, it can lead a scholar to a surprising sense of isolation. Yet a remedy can also be found in Jane’s dedication to building intentional communities of like-minded people. Doing so mitigates individual loneliness but it also offers spaces for other to gather and built shared sites of belonging. These sites can offer a place of transformational impact.

Finally, lifelong research quests are often animated by large and important philosophical questions. In the day-to-day pressure modern scholars feel to publish or find the next funding source, today’s researchers can lose sight of their bigger questions and not take sufficient time to pause and ponder reflexively what they are and why their work really matters. For Jane those questions have included understanding what explains divergent paths between good and evil. Or as she likes to say grappling with what it means to be human. “I cared and I wanted other people to understand how wonderful life can be, and I wanted to understand what keeps people from experiencing life in all its wonders. That to me is a caring approach to my life work, as well as the pursuit of a just world.”