The Use of Self from a Relational Perspective

This article explores the implications of a contemporary relational perspective on the use of self in social work practice. The author is responding to an article by Andrea Reupert, who interviewed social workers and reported they tended to see their concept of self as individualistic, autonomous, and only partially defined by others, even though social work practice focuses on person-in-environment. In this article, the author expands the concept of self and argues that a contemporary view of the therapist’s self is one that is dialogic, contextualized, decentered, and multiple. Additionally, the author suggests that this relational perspective has implications for teaching and supervision. Several clinical vignettes are provided to illustrate the concepts under discussion.     

Fingers,Flexors and Flaps: Impressions of a Hand Unit Social Worker

This paper examines the first six months the author spent as social worker in the Hand Unit, Sydney Hospital. She describes her introduction to the Unit, how she set about learning a completely new area of expertise and offers some case examples. She discovers that because the hand is so crucial to our self perception, damage to it cannot be taken lightly. Further, hand injuries can often mask much deeper emotional injuries that must be treated. The social work role in the Hand Unit is as diverse as it is important.     

The State of the Network: Radical Anxiety,Real Paranoia and Quantum Culture

In this article, the author proposes to explore the state of the contemporary network society through an analysis of the human effects of the conditions of globalisation, fast capitalism, postmodern warfare and quantum culture. In the first section of the article, the author considers the problem of social relations in the global network society and, in particular, examines the effect of radical anxiety on self—other communication. Following this section, which turns off a consideration of the violence of fast capitalism, the author focuses on the relationship between the science of immunology, paranoia and postmodern warfare. Here, in the second section of the article, the author shows how the radical anxiety that plagues those who inhabit the lightning‐fast network resolves itself in paranoid reaction formations that make productive self—other relations more or less impossible. Finally, the author explores potential solutions to the problem of self—other violence in the network and concludes with a discussion of the stumbling‐block to the invention of a more humane social and political form of globalisation, neo‐liberal/neoconservative quantum culture.     

Developing the Capacity for Reflective Functioning Through an Intersubjective Process

The following paper explores the concepts of reflective functioning, metacognition (Main et al. in Adult attachment scoring and classification systems. Regents of the University of California, Berkeley, 2002), and mentalization (Fonagy and Target in Mind to mind: Infant research, neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Other Press, New York, 2008; Fonagy et al. in Affect regulation, mentalization and the development of the self. Other Press, New York, 2002). Using an extended case illustration, the author demonstrates how she uses the clinical process to develop more mature reflective and mentalization capacities with a client through dream analysis, identification of affect states, therapeutic ruptures and mutual play.     

Interview with Susie Orbach,Ph.D., C.S.W.

An interview with Susie Orbach highlights the trajectory of her career and current thinking on body image issues and eating disorders. Dr. Orbach’s work in this area as a clinical social worker, psychoanalyst, best-selling author and social activist has spanned three decades. In this interview she reflects on her earlier books, Fat is a Feminist Issue and Hunger Strike: An Anorectic’s Struggle as a Metaphor for Our Age, and discusses her current work and perspectives within the context of contemporary culture.     

Integrating Dream Analysis with Intersubjectivity in Group Psychotherapy

The author discusses her application of Daniel Stern's theories of intersubjectivity to group psychotherapy. The group members were women presenting with issues regarding childhood molestation and/or abuse. From her case notes, she examines the dreams the women discussed in the group treatment setting and illustrates how the group members mutually constructed life narratives, which ultimately created new meanings regarding their lives. Through mutual construction of these narratives, her clients ultimately organized new senses of self, affecting them both interpersonally and intrapsychically.     

Twenty-first century skills for students: hands-on learning after school builds school and life success

At the core of the movement for twenty-first century skills are students. The growing efforts to increase programs leveraging out-of-school time are focused on giving American youth everything they need to compete in this increasingly complex world. The author is one of many students who have been well served by initiatives imparting twenty-first century skills during after-school hours. Now a senior at Boston Latin School, the author has been helped along the way by Citizen Schools, an after-school education program focused on hands-on learning apprenticeships and homework help. While enrolled in the program as a middle school student, the author took part in projects that exemplified hands-on, inquiry-based learning that helped her develop twenty-first century skills. For example, along with dozens of other students, she advanced her data analysis skills by analyzing statistics about Boston Public high schools, which also helped her select and enroll in one of the city's premier exam schools. Also, she and her peers worked with corporate attorneys who served as writing coaches and whose expertise the author drew from in producing a published essay and greatly improving her writing skills. The author now finds that the public speaking, leadership, organizational, social, and management abilities she built through her participation in Citizen Schools are a great asset to her in high school. The confidence with which she tackles her responsibilities can also be traced back to her experiences in the program. As she looks toward college, the author reflects and realizes that being actively involved in a quality after-school program put her on track for a successful future.     

The Bad Enough Mother

ABSTRACT

This is a [de]-composed conversation between the author and a few feminist writers about how a mother’s resistance to interpellating gender is an echoed call to resistance against society’s interpellation of mother. Alongside the words of a few selected 20th- and 21st-century writers, as well as a brief personal and a clinical vignette, the author illustrates ways in which the bad enough mother survives the relentless scrutiny of society—starting with experts like doctors, sociologists, politicians, and psychoanalysts. In turn, she teaches her children survival of the very interpellative tenants of culture that tried to funnel her into a binary-gendered social order.     

An ethnographer in the global arena: globography perhaps?

In this article Hendry addresses the difficulties and apparent contradictions of applying the qualitative rigour of the ethnographic research method to fieldwork carried out in a global context. While pursuing a discourse evidently shared by people indigenous to many different parts of the world, the author reflects on why she feels the work she is doing still draws on elements of the qualitative strength of the method first developed by her own discipline of social anthropology. This subject is now somewhat unfashionable for reasons precisely associated with the discourse she is following, namely a status inequality seen as implicit in the representation of ‘other’ peoples. In the article she argues against throwing the baby out with the bathwater, however, and seeks to demonstrate how the value the ethnographic method gleaned from social anthropology offers an important contribution to understanding local aspects of global issues.     

Social Trauma and Models of Ideological Analysis: Commentary on Article by Katie Gentile

Although the author appreciates and agrees with Katie Gentile's (this issue) thesis, the author's commentary proposes some different models besides the model of ideological domination to think about both the social trauma she eloquently describes and the media discourses that seem only to exacerbate the trauma, obfuscate its origins, and oppress women. The models the author discusses question ideologies of progress, understood as central in creating our catastrophic circumstances, and they propose other ways of understanding media discourse; modernity; and subjective relations to past, present, and future.     

Group Dieting,the Stigma of Obesity,and Overweight Adolescents

Natalie Allon was one of the pioneers in the sociological analysis of obesity and dieting, and a consistent voice on the topic in the 1970s. Her contributions to the study of the obese are reviewed in this paper. As an ethnographer who used participant observation and unstructured interviewing to examine organized dieting groups, she provided insight into the structure and function of these groups. She showed how group dieting was a form of religious ritual for the participants, as well as performing the latent function of providing social support. Her analysis of the stigma of obesity examined stigmatization of fatness in four areas: as sin, as disease, as crime, and as ugliness. Work on overweight adolescents showed that they had problems in social interaction. Because obesity often served as the exclusive focus of interaction, it overwhelmed others with mixed emotions, it clashed with positive attributes of a person, and it was an uncertain predictor of joint activity. Negative self image and a mixture of self responsibility for fatness and the negation of responsibility were related to actual weight loss. Allon's analyses provide us with a basis for further sociological analysis of obesity and dieting.     

Searching for self in a world of labels

Searching for Self is a performance poetry piece that demonstrates the difficulties of identity construction in contemporary life. The author challenges the ‘self’ and ‘other’ dichotomy, and in so doing she attempts to reduce the distance between the ‘client’ and ‘expert’; the researcher and researched; the service provider and service user; and theory and practice. The poems are linked to the authors’ experiences of being labeled with a disability.     

Youth research on video self‐productions reflections on a social‐aesthetic approach

This article advances my thoughts on a social‐aesthetic approach within the field of youth and social research. These reflections are not primarily grounded in traditional approaches of visual sociology and anthropology but emerged from the context of media‐educational youth research in Germany. The main assumption of this article is that qualitative youth and social research in particular, which has audio‐visual self‐productions as the object, should—in view of the increasing influence media has on our perception and the way how the reality is experienced—be open to concepts of subject‐related self‐presentations. First I make an attempt to formulate a social‐aesthetic theory which focuses on the media‐ethnographical exploration of symbolic milieus. Next, I introduce projects run by media‐educational youth researchers in Germany, emphasizing the question of conceptions and methods when working with adolescent video self‐productions. The final section reflects upon the quality, the validity and the hermeneutics of self‐produced videos.     

“Feeling frumpy”: The relationships between body image and sexual response changes in midlife women

This study investigated the relationships between self‐rated attractiveness and self‐reported sexual response changes (over the past decade) and current sexual satisfaction in 307 heterosexual, midlife women. Results indicated that regardless of the woman's specific age, she was more likely to consider herself more attractive when she was 10 years younger, and her self‐perceived attractiveness did not significantly differ based on her menopausal status. The more a woman perceived herself as less attractive than before, the more likely she was to report a decline in sexual desire or frequency of sexual activity. The more she perceived herself as attractive, the more likely she was to experience an increase in sexual desire, orgasm, enjoyment, or frequency of sexual activity. There were no significant statistical relationships between a woman's perception of her own attractiveness as she aged and her current sexual satisfaction.     

Workers are parents, too

The nuclear family, whose structure was supposed to permit the separation of work and family, is still the model for employers' social policies toward workers. The efficiency of this model is even less evident today, as the author points out, and she argues that it is in the best interests of industry to support the needs of the changing family, whose adult members, now both mothers and fathers, make up the workforce, and their children, who will be the workforce.     

Immigrants' Identity Negotiations and Coping with Stigma in Different Relational Frames

This research describes strategies that immigrants deploy in face‐to‐face interactions with indigenous locals and links these strategies to their relational frames and networks. By focusing on interconnections between identity management and network management, the author further explores some of the key trends already documented in the contemporary literature on ethnicity. The article also adds new insight to the analysis of stigma and identity by showing how self‐friend and self‐stranger relationships present different opportunities and limitations for self‐presentation. Network fragmentation—commonly associated with a weak degree of social integration—is not necessarily an indicator of unsuccessful integration or segregation; it may be part of a wider immigrant identity project, a way to cope with stigmatization, and an important precondition for integration into mainstream society.     

Mobility and Privilege Within Queer Studies and University

In this essay, the author considers how classist divisions present within queer studies may well be exacerbated by the institutionalization of queer studies within university. In particular, she examines the class privilege that attends both queer theory's and university's deployment of travel metaphors. In both cases, the language of travel is the potentially empowering language of intellectual agility and social mobility. Importantly, though, both queer theorists' and university administrators' employment of travel metaphors often serves to reaffirm cultural hegemony, specifically to sustain rather than to examine and combat social oppression. This sad irony is particularly apparent when one compares university representations of commuter and residential students. Thus, the question that faces universities is how to keep queer studies critically queer so that universities can recognize and address the various forms or models of social mobility that are present on their campuses, commuter as well as residential.     

ETHNOGRAPHIES OF PRACTICE—PRACTISING ETHNOGRAPHY

This paper argues that acquiring competencies in different approaches and procedures in qualitative or interpretative social research provides a strong foundation for case analysis in professional social work practice. When students of social work become familiar with such research and are encouraged to engage in their own supervised projects they develop skills for a circumspect and sensitive practice with clients. The paper reports on work with students of social work in Germany, which can be described as an attempt to help them to become self‐reflective ethnographers in their own affairs, of their own emergent social work practice. It spells out different phases of a process in which they learn to make their own practice strange. This process consists of developing different competencies in observing, analysing and writing, and requires a setting in which students' written observations and reflections can be shared and discussed by their peers in a critical, egalitarian and supportive manner. The author thinks that such a critical and self‐critical discourse which addresses professional issues in general, as well as the individual student's (or practioner's) experiences and reflections, can have important implications for the collective development of social work and its relationship with other professions.     

Embodied Fluidity and the Commitment to Movement: Constructing the Moral Self through Arthritis Narratives

While biomedical research reifies bodily movement in the lives of people with chronic illness as “functional mobility,” our analysis of biographical osteoarthritis narratives uncovers a moral commitment to movement as both a moral imperative and a technique to preserve a self threatened by the limits arthritis places on daily life. A content analysis of twelve interviews with arthritis sufferers shows that, in addition to the practical and emotional challenges of living with arthritis, these actors face the daily challenge of displaying their understanding of embodied fluidity—the timely and fluid movement through time and space—as a virtuous practice. Our informants use the movement mandate—the commitment to move despite the pain it may cause—to produce themselves as competent social and moral actors sacrificing the demands of their bodies to meet social expectations, and they conduct this performance in front of several audiences: the self and specific and generalized others. For these informants, in both private and public realms, the experience and the management of pain and physical limitation are profoundly social and accountable matters, as they affect interactions with others, their own social identities and moral integrity, and their relations with self as they seek to balance their arthritis pain with their past, present, and future self‐concepts.     

Bisexuals Making Out with Cyborgs: Politics, Pleasure, Con/fusion

This article considers the appeal of the figure of the cyborg for bisexuals, offering bisexual readings of both Donna Haraway's cyborg, and of the cyborg self created within text-based virtual reality. The writer argues that understanding bisexuality as part of a web of meanings and material realities can lead to a new political awareness, and suggests ways to make some of these connections. Through her analysis, she emphasises the role of technology in creating and developing contemporary bisexuality.