W(h)ither the academy? An exploration of the role of university social work in shaping the future of social work in Europe

A controversial proposal to pilot the training of child protection social workers through an intensive work-based route in England is being supported and funded by the UK Government. Frontline, the brainchild of a former teacher, locates social work training within local authorities (‘the agency’) rather than university social work departments (‘the academy’) and has stimulated debate amongst social work academics about their role in shaping the direction of the profession. As a contribution to this debate, this paper explores the duality of social work education, which derives its knowledge from both the academic social sciences and the experience of practice within social work agencies. While social work education has traditionally been delivered by the academy, this paper also explores whether the delivery of training in the allied professions of probation and nursing by ‘the agency’ is equally effective. Finally, this paper explores the Helsinki model which achieves a synergy of ‘academy’ and ‘agency’. It suggests that there are alternative models of social work education, practice and research which avoid dichotomies between the ‘academy’ and the ‘agency’ and enable the profession to be shaped by both social work academics and practitioners.     

Young Women in the Australian Women’s Movement

This article explores and documents the role of young women in the contemporary Australian women’s movement. Through case studies of two very different groups of young women, working in submerged networks in the community and on university campuses, it aims to suggest the diversity of contemporary young feminist praxis. Further, it argues that the work that these young women are doing in discursively creating and maintaining a feminist political space is crucial to the future of the movement. Based in constructivist ‘new’ social movement theory this article suggests a way forward from the so-called ‘generational debates’ of the 1990s and argues that, through their own unique processes of collective identity, young women who are active in the Australian women’s movement are dealing with the conflicts that are essential to the movement’s survival.     

‘Birds of a feather stick together’? Negotiating community,family and intimate relationships between ‘established’ and ‘newcomer’ Caribbean migrants in Britain

This article explores the ‘invisible’ boundary separating and informing social relations among ‘established’ and ‘newcomer’ Caribbean migrant communities in Britain. To briefly note, ‘established’ migrants are characterised in the analysis as those Caribbean migrants who settled in Britain from the 1940s, their offspring and subsequent generations. In contrast, the ‘newcomer’ represents a new influx of Caribbean that arrived and settled in Britain from the late 1990s onwards, either with a legal or illegal resident status. The common assumption is that ‘established’ and ‘newcomer’ groups are bonded together through shared cultural and ethnic background. Therefore any differences that exist between the two groups tend to be ignored because it is assumed that the newcomers are automatically absorbed into existing Caribbean communities. However, this empirical study of Caribbean families suggests that inherent differences exist between these two groups. To discuss issues of intra-ethnic diversity the analysis is guided by a social capital approach. It also draws on the views and perspectives of Caribbean people to highlight the social hierarchies and cultural stereotypes that exist between ‘established’ and ‘newcomer’ migrants. Concentrating on the ‘invisible’ and intra-ethnic boundaries between the ‘established’ and ‘newcomer’ migrants, the discussion explores issues of change and continuity, and also problems and opportunities that emerge within Caribbean family networks and their intimate relationships.     

‘What shall I pack in my suitcase?’: the role of work-integrated learning in sustaining social work students’ professional identity

Interest in the reflective practitioner as a model of a ‘good professional’ has increased in several professional fields and is also valued within social work education as a key aspiration to address the uncertainties and challenges encountered in contemporary working environments. Reflecting on their own professional identity, as well as theories, values, and devices used in professional practice, can help practitioners deal with complex work demands and help students be better equipped to transition from university to work. Work-integrated learning (WIL) provides students with an opportunity to integrate academic learning with ‘real-world’ experiences to develop both valuable self-monitoring and professional self-constructive ability. This paper presents a case study in social work higher education in which WIL class-based teaching was combined with the use of reflective journals to explore the role of WIL in developing reflective practices for professional identity formation. 21 reflective journals by social work students are analysed. The findings suggest that teaching practices based on WIL enable professional identity formation by developing reflective practices, and that different learning conditions sustain specific dimensions of professional identity, i.e. professional expertise, membership to a professional community and sense of professional self.     

Exploring Professional Stereotypes and Learning for Inter-professional Practice: An Example from UK Qualifying Level Social Work Education

This paper explores the concept of stereotyping from UK social work students' and educators' perspectives. It discusses findings from an exploration of inter-professional practice with two cohorts of final year social work students in a UK university. The authors adapted a questionnaire to initiate discussion about inter-professional working with BA and MA students participating in a specialist child and family social work module. This paper analyses students' responses to the questionnaire and explores wider issues relating to professional stereotyping and identity, discussing the usefulness of these concepts for social work education and collaborative practice. Results suggest that student social workers held both positive and negative assumptions about specific occupations/professions (such as medicine), and that these acted as a mirror or tool for reflecting back their own views of social work identity/ies. We argue that this pedagogic exercise in identifying stereotypical assumptions about ‘others’ may encourage the building of a positive sense of ‘own’ professional identity. We further suggest that students should be encouraged to construct a core social work identity that is dynamic and responsive to changing contexts.     

The Uses of the Past and European Integration: Austria between Lisbon,Ireland, and EURO 08

This article examines Austrian national identity negotiations through a qualitative analysis of the country's ideologically heterogeneous media, with a focus on Austria's most widely read paper (and its popular readers’ letters pages) between April and August 2008. This turbulent period coincided with widening opposition to the EU's Lisbon reform treaty, Austria's co-hosting of the European football championship, and the collapse of the country's coalition government. This analysis of media coverage and readers’ letters focuses on the rhetorical strategies underpinning various discursive constructions of Austria's place within the EU. The following key findings are discussed: projections of perceived social ills and resulting anxieties onto the EU; the interpretative uses of the past—historical episodes selected from Austrian and other national contexts—to make sense of and politicize the present; constructions of ‘European ideals’ in juxtaposition to perceived ‘European realities’; and competing models of national identity in relation to the European ‘network state.’     

Transnational ties and ethnic identities in the parental homeland: second-generation Indian Americans in India

ABSTRACT

This article explores the ‘return’ migration of high-skilled, second-generation Indian-Americans from the United States to India. Based on interviews with fifty-six respondents, it asks: What transnational ties do second-generation Indian Americans maintain with India prior to return? Upon return, what are their ‘reverse’ transnational linkages to the United States? How do these linkages shape their ethnic identities, if at all? Findings suggest that respondents’ transnational ties to India prior to return reinforce their identities as Indian Americans. Once in India, they maintain affective and civic ties to the United States, the country where they were born or raised. Further, American-inflected social ideas and norms shape returnees’ interactions with domestic workers in India. As they grapple with the disparities between Western and Indian norms on the treatment of domestic help, respondents privilege ‘American’ identities. These findings highlight the transnational ties and identity construction and negotiation of second-generation returnees.     

Training research-minded social workers: experience from Estonia*

ABSTRACT

Social work education in its modern sense started to develop after Estonia regained independence from the collapsing Soviet Union. The aim of this article is to introduce good practices of teaching research-mindedness, this being one of the main principles in teaching social workers-to-be in the University of Tartu in Estonia. We have been inspired by the academic tradition of university teaching in general, the new international definition of social work and, not least, the realisation of social workers in practice of not being able to apply academic knowledge to everyday social work practices. This article revisits the term research-mindedness and examines how it has been integrated into the university level teaching process. Our purpose is to discuss the methods students of bachelor’s and master’s programmes can learn to ‘translate’ social issues into research questions, critically appraise the findings and ‘translate’ them back as new research evidence for social work practice.     

Manacled to Identity: Cosmopolitanism,Class, and ‘The Culture Concept’ in Stephen Crane

Abstract

This article begins with a close reading of Stephen Crane’s short story ‘Manacled’ from 1900, which situates this rarely considered short work within the context of contemporary debates about realism. I then proceed to argue that many of the debates raised by the tale have an afterlife in our own era of American literary studies, which has frequently focused on questions of ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ in its reading of realism and naturalism to the exclusion of the importance of cosmopolitan discourses of diffusion and exchange across national borders. I then offer a brief reading of Crane’s novel George’s Mother, which follows Walter Benn Michaels in suggesting that the recent critical attention paid to particularities of cultural difference in American studies have come to conflate ideas of class and social position with ideas of culture in ways that have ultimately obscured the presence of genuine historical inequalities in US society. In order to challenge this critical commonplace, I situate Crane’s work within a history of transatlantic cosmopolitanism associated with the ideas of Franz Boas and Matthew Arnold to demonstrate the ways in which Crane’s narratives sought out an experience of the universal within their treatments of the particular.     

Polanyi’s two transformations revisited: a ‘bottom up’ perspective

ABSTRACT

In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi offers a ‘top-down’ analysis of the rise and demise of Europe’s unregulated market system. He assumes that changes in the organization of the international economy provide particular kinds of opportunities for states to act which, in turn, shapes the extent to which social forces will be able to influence state policy. Consequently, his analysis focuses, first, on the international institutions created by the self-regulating market system; then on the ‘liberal state’ which these made possible; and finally on how the system impacts ‘society as a whole’. The account which this analysis produces systematically underplays the social struggles which propelled and emerged from the rise of Europe’s nineteenth century system and which ultimately led to its demise. In revisiting the two periods that are the focus of Polanyi’s analysis, this article assumes that states and interstate systems reflect the interests of powerful social forces. Thus, working from the ‘bottom up’, it focuses on the class interests that produced Europe’s market system, the state and international structures which reflected and supported them, and the social struggles that ultimately brought about the collapse of the system. What this ‘bottom up’ account reveals is the centrality of a ‘double movement’, not of market expansion and a protective countermove on the part of ‘society as a whole’, but of dominant classes monopolizing economic opportunities from global expansion, and a rising ‘red tide’ of disaffected workers. This double movement, it argues, better explains the demise of the system and the changes that ensued from it.     

BSW Students of Color: Principle Factors Influencing Intent to Persist Through Completion of Degree

Students of color remain underrepresented in social work education programs. According to the Council on Social Work Education (2016), only 37.4% of the 19,596 BSW degrees awarded during the 2014–2015 academic year were awarded to students from historically underrepresented groups. Through the lens of empowerment theory, this article presents a conceptual framework for understanding the varied and nuanced influencing factors contributing to BSW students’ intent to persist through completion of degree. This article explores ways social work education programs can provide opportunities for students to demonstrate that they are motivated and competent learners who intend to persist in their social work education endeavors. Findings will inform postmatriculation activities such as academic advising and field-practicum.     

‘I Don't Just Want to Do It for Myself’: Diverse Pespectives on Being Successful at University by Social Work Students Who Speak English as an Additional Language

This article gives attention to furthering understandings about what being successful at university means to social work students, focusing on the perspectives of students who speak English as an additional language (EAL). It departs from approaches in the literature that focus on problematic aspects of teaching and learning. The article is informed by data from a small-scale focus group study of nine students from an undergraduate and a postgraduate social work programme in a South Australian university. Drawing on a methodological approach known as ‘Appreciative Inquiry’, students were asked how they conceptualise, experience and imagine success at university. The study found that students’ understandings of success are inextricably intertwined with their individual, family and community aspirations. These findings are discussed in the light of current dominant assumptions about the notion of success and possible directions for future research and implications for social work education.     

Is there a European social work identity?

The aim of this paper is to examine whether at this point in time the notion of a ‘European social work identity’ can be sustained. The paper commences with some brief consideration of theories of identity, and particularly draws attention to social constructionist identity theory, highlighting its focus on identity as a process. Ideas about what constitutes ‘collective identity’ are then examined. From this, two particular models of collective identity are presented which are helpful for understanding cultural identities. These are the more ‘traditional’ notion of collective culture being evidenced by the presence of shared histories and traditions, and the more social constructionist view of collective processes and action to form identities – whether imposed by the state or generated by the people – as constitutive of identities in themselves. ‘European identity’, and then ‘European social work identity’, will then be examined using these models of collective identity. The paper concludes that using social constructionist versions of identity (identity as a process of collectivisation), European social work identity can certainly be established.     

Oasis in a concrete jungle: arts-informed methods in social work classrooms

This article presents a qualitative arts-informed inquiry on teaching and learning in social work education. Using arts-informed research methodology and grounded theory methodology, the research analyses ten interviews of social work educators in two Canadian provinces. This article focused on how university educators use arts-informed methods of teaching about social justice through anti-racist and decolonizing lenses; also discussed are the educators’ personal and professional transformation and development within this process. The main findings discuss the importance of creating an ‘artful’ space as a platform for experiential, embodied and emotive learning, which offers an innovative, more holistic and comprehensive way of teaching social justice. This way of teaching emphasizes personal transformation, giving space to marginalized voices and expression; as well as collective co-creation of meaning and creating practical tools for future social change. The study also touches upon challenges and gaps in using an arts-informed approach, which include student resistance to alternative ways of education, expressed specifically by racialized educators and ambiguity related to assessing artful works in an academic setting. The paper ends with recommendations for social work education.     

‘Northernness’, gender and Manchester’s creative industries

This article explores northernness and gender in the context of creative industries in Manchester. I argue that a version of northernness has been mobilised by those within the creative industries and that this identity is strongly linked with masculinity. The article examines the emergence of new creative industries in Manchester from the 1980s onwards. Many of these new creative industries were connected with music and club culture and often prioritised ‘lads’ and their interests. The ‘heritage’ and influence of this seedbed stage of Manchester’s creative industries and the dominant discourses about Manchester’s pop cultural creativity has had a profound influence on the ‘gendering’ of subsequent creative industries in this city. A paradigm of northern ‘laddishness’ pervades the creative sector in Manchester, and this is amplified and sustained by a powerful, media fuelled, cultural identity of the city and its popular culture. A number of local specificities have had an impact on linking creativity to ‘northern’ masculinity in the Manchester case. This has contributed to the ascendency of closed, male-dominated networks in the creative sector. This appears to stand in the way of women’s full access to, and participation in, the city’s creative industries. I suggest that all empirical case studies of creative industries could find value in reflecting on the local context and specificities of place. Using Manchester as a case study, I argue that place-specific identities could productively be explored in debates about exclusion and underrepresentation of women in creative industries.     

REPRODUCING NATION,REDESIGNING POSITIONING: RUSSIAN AND pALESTINIAN STUDENTS INTERPRET UNIVERSITY KNOWLEDGE

This paper discusses the reproduction of hegemony and social hierarchy through education. It brings together two case studies of marginal groups at a university—Russian Jewish immigrants and Palestinian Israeli women—who make sense of their position in social hierarchies and power relations through constant interpretative work on the various dimensions of university knowledge. The article reveals how marginal actors’ interpretations of knowledge simultaneously are guided by students’ positioning vis-à-vis the dominant collective and also articulate and redesign positioning. The two groups redesign their marginalities vis-à-vis the Israeli-Jewish collective by transforming knowledge to identity. In so doing, these groups reproduce national borders of Israeli social hierarchy, while working to change the meaning of these borders for their group's positioning.     

‘Do I Still Belong Here?’ The Body's Boundary Work in the Israeli Fat Acceptance Movement

Boundary work is important in all social movements, but the instability of bodily-based categories makes boundary work particularly complicated in movements where bodily attributes are key to identity formation. Many Anglo-American fat acceptance groups have attempted to draw boundaries on the basis of two ‘ideal fat subjects’: one with a stable, unitary ‘resisting’ consciousness and/or one based on excluding those who are not ‘really’ fat or fat ‘enough.’ The former excludes members who display ambiguity or ambivalence in relation to accepting their bodies, while the latter excludes members seen as not fat enough to participate. In contrast, the Israeli fat acceptance community establishes its boundaries based on shared negative social reactions to body size. This increases its ability to tolerate ambiguity and contradictions among members, and to accept members who do not fit into fixed bodily identity categories. Simultaneously, this collective identity poses other problems, like reducing members to their identity as fat and encouraging constant preoccupation with weight or social oppression based on body size.     

Rereading David Morley’s The ‘Nationwide’ Audience

This article intends to revisit David Morley’s work, The ‘Nationwide’ Audience: Structure and Decoding, by reanalysing his findings in a way of revealing some distinct decoding patterns. While The ‘Nationwide’ Audience has been acclaimed as one of the most influential empirical works in audience studies, it has been often misunderstood as if the work failed to find out systemic and consistent influences of viewers’ social conditions on decoding practices. On the contrary, by using a statistical method, this paper demonstrates that the audiences’ decodings of the programme presented by Morley are in fact clearly patterned by their social positions. The findings reveal the over-determined effects of various social conditions such as class, gender, race and age. Particularly, the results seem to restore the importance of social class on the interpretive process, which has been displaced and ignored in many current media studies. Highlighting audiences’ structural social positions, the reading patterns rediscovered here allow us to rebut not only the traditional Marxist view of class determinism but also any relativist accounts of cultural activity.     

Finding common ground: how superdiversity is unsettling social work education

For social work education in the Netherlands, the rapid transition towards superdiversity means that its capacity to adapt to this new reality and to adjust to diverse students’ backgrounds is fiercely challenged. The key aim of this article is to discuss how social work educators are dealing with the unsettling challenges of increasing diversity, based on the research outcomes of an explorative study amongst Turkish–Dutch and Moroccan–Dutch female professionals. Two different groups of educators were asked to comment on the outcomes of this study. One of the dilemmas for educators is to determine what can be considered supportive and inclusive and as reducing inequality in education. The authors used two key theoretical concepts, ‘superdiversity’ and ‘the capability approach’. These theoretical perspectives were used to deconstruct the rather massive concepts of diversity and social justice, by emphasising contextual approaches. Both perspectives stress the urgent need to involve students as ‘active agents of change’, by building a social work community to stimulate and facilitate an on-going dialogue. To successfully fulfil a pivotal role in the upward mobility or emancipation of ethnic minority students, social work education needs to be adjusted to accommodate diverse student groups.     

Learning to Be a Social Worker in a Non-traditional Placement: Critical Reflections on Social Work,Professional Identity and Social Work Education in England

Drawing upon findings from a national evaluation of student social workers' experiences of ‘non-traditional’ placements with a national charity, this article considers what such placements can contribute to the development of an individual and collective sense of professional identity for social work. This is explored against the background of current developments in social work education in England, including changes to the requirements for practice placements and the introduction of ‘fast-track’ routes to qualification, preparing students for social work in statutory children's services. The article suggests that with the establishment of The College of Social Work and the development of the Professional Capabilities Framework, relevant to all social workers throughout their careers, the profession has an opportunity to promote a concept of social work in England beyond that required by statutory sector employers; and that practice learning in non-statutory and non-traditional settings has an important role to play in this.