Throughout her career Dr. Karen Parker has worked with child victims of sexual assault, youth foster-care and veterans. These experiences have influenced her thirty years teaching higher education. She has been an associate professor of psychology at Texas A&M University-Texarkana since 2020.
Dr. Parker worked 20 years for non-profit organizations. She decided that it was time for something different as a result of a traumatic event she experienced while working at a group home for boys. She had gotten close to one of the boys and decided to get him a fur companion. “I had gotten [the boy] a pet rabbit, and then he ended up going into a foster home and he left the pet rabbit back with the boys. Two of the boys were rebellious and had a lot of stuff going on. They killed the rabbit,” she said.
However, the beginning of her career in the counseling field was just as jarring as the end. She recalls her most memorable case being one of her first ones involving a three year old girl that had been raped. The case was memorable to her because of the severity of the matter and because she was able to provide comfort to the girl. “In I guess two-three months she crawled up in my lap and laid her head right here in my chest. That was telling me that my relationship with her and my rapport were important for her and she felt like she trusted me. One of the most moving moments in my entire career,” she said.
Dr. Parker’s research has been bringing focus into art inspired by her own experiences. Her PhD dissertation followed her journey navigating the grief of the passing of her wife through the paintings she did while her wife battled cancer. This experience influenced her dissertation and encouraged her to write her own ethnography. Ethnographies are scientific studies of people and their cultures from their point of view. Dr. Parker’s auto-ethnography focuses on the prejudice she experienced from the medical community during her wife’s cancer treatment. This auto-ethnography was published in the “Journal of Feminist Family Therapy” in 2021. Dr. Parker emphasizes the importance of narratives and auto-ethnographies in research saying that “a lot of times you can read research that has a thousand people that they interviewed or that they get a questionnaire on, but a personal story makes that research real.”
