Demanding an ‘adequate solution:’ the American Legion,the Immigration Act of 1924, and the politics of exclusion

This article analyses the American Legion’s role in developing a discourse of exclusion surrounding the Immigration Act of 1924. The Legion strategically used the political rhetoric of states’ rights and federalism in addition to racist and nativist language to emphasise the need for increased federal restrictions on immigration. The arguments found in the Legion’s resolutions, pamphlets and testimony to Congress place the organisation’s emphasis on the political disruptions caused by Japanese migrants within the context of evolving immigration reform. The Legion’s activism in exclusion contributes to an understanding of the history of states’ rights and federalism tropes in anti-immigrant arguments during the twentieth century.     

Exploring inequities in child welfare and child protection services: Explaining the ‘inverse intervention law’

Attempts to record, understand and respond to variations in child welfare and protection reporting, service patterns and outcomes are international, numerous and longstanding. Reframing such variations as an issue of inequity between children and between families opens the way to a new approach to explaining the profound difference in intervention rates between and within countries and administrative districts. Recent accounts of variation have frequently been based on the idea that there is a binary division between bias and risk (or need). Here we propose seeing supply (bias) and demand (risk) factors as two aspects of a single system, both framed, in part, by social structures. A recent finding from a study of intervention rates in England, the ‘inverse intervention law’, is used to illustrate the complex ways in which a range of factors interact to produce intervention rates. In turn, this analysis raises profound moral, policy, practice and research questions about current child welfare and child protection services.     

Social work and the politics of ‘austerity’: Ireland and Italy

ABSTRACT

No detailed analyses have been undertaken comparing and contrasting how social work is responding to the problems generated by the imposition of so-called ‘austerity’ measures in Europe. Comprised of three sections, the discussion is focused on Ireland and Italy. This comparative exploration locates social work within encompassing frameworks related to the changing population, political economy and welfare regime in each of these jurisdictions. Aspects of contemporary social work within Ireland and Italy are charted and the possibilities for confronting neoliberal ‘austerity’ are analysed. The article seeks to prompt and encourage comparative reflection within Europe in relation to how the social work imagination can be imbued with a new radicalism in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.     

‘Us’ and ‘them’: the limits and possibilities of a ‘politics of neurodiversity’ in neoliberal times

The neurodiversity movement claims that there are neurological differences in the human population, and that autism is a natural variation among humans – not a disease or a disorder, just ‘a difference’. A ‘politics of neurodiversity’ is based on the claim that the ‘neurodiverse’ population constitutes a political grouping comparable with those of class, gender, sexuality or race. This paper considers the limits and possibilities of neurodiverse political activism, and concludes by calling for a politics of identity that does not depend on a politics of ‘us’ and ‘them’.     

‘Khalas! Literature is the resistance against politics,and this is the politics of literature’: an interview with Atiq Rahimi

ABSTRACT

Atiq Rahimi is a director, photographer and translingual author who has published in Dari (Persian) and in French since 1999. As an outspoken author, Rahimi did not refrain from narrating loss, trauma and fundamentalism already in the 1990s. For his first publication in French, Syngué Sabour. Pierre de patience, he was awarded the highest literary price in France, the Prix Goncourt. With his recently published novel Les Porteurs d’eau, set in Afghanistan and Europe, Rahimi also explores challenges of the global Afghanistani diaspora. Inspired by his personal experiences of travelling from Kabul to Paris, Rahimi explores, with his Kafkaesque narratives, themes of loss, suffering and survival, all located in a war-torn country. In this interview, conducted in Paris, conversing in Persian and French, Rahimi talks about his personal journey and discusses cultural as well as literary theories. He mentions literature without borders, considers the power of literature as a means of taking a stand against political reality, learning French as a teenager and depicting strong female characters. Additionally, Rahimi explains to what extent Persian linguistics allowed him to depict the absurdity of living exile in his latest novel and ends the interview explaining the rationale behind the idea of authors without borders.     

‘Your momma is day-glow white’: questioning the politics of racial identity,loyalty and obligation

This article utilizes discourse analysis and an auto-ethnographic approach to explore the impact of US racial and ethnic categorization on the experiences of an individual marked as ‘mixed-race’ in terms of individual identity and familial/cultural group loyalty and obligation(s). This essay focuses on an incidence of public policing through the popular social networking platform Facebook, centring on the invocation of racial obligation by white friends and family members. I analyse how racial loyalty is articulated by friends and family members in their posts on my personal Facebook page and how this ‘loyalty’ is used as means of regulating my mixed-race identity performance. This essay aims to understand several things, namely how identity is mediated through the invocation of racial obligation and how tension around identity plays out in the multiracial family.     

Caught on camera,posted online: mediated moralities,visual politics and the case of urban ‘drought-shaming’

The ‘shaming’ of subjects caught on camera, engaging in socially transgressive acts of varying kinds, has become a familiar occurrence and locus of ambivalent possibility in contemporary public culture. In this article, I theorise the socio-moral complexities and visual politics of ostensibly civic forms of online shaming through an in-depth analysis of a single case: urban ‘drought-shaming’ in California (2014–2015). Drawing on interpretive methods of social analysis and anchored by the classical sociological tradition, I highlight the role of images, especially the circulation of still photographs taken and posted by ordinary members, in the emerging problematisation of excessive water use at the centre of this case. Understood as a vital and diminishing resource within an interconnected and interdependent social order, water was made sacred; it was prohibited from being handled in mundane or carelessly reckless ways during the drought. A state-of-emergency came to be constituted (also) as a moral drama. The language and practices constitutive of drought-shaming, I argue, contributed to a popular sociological imagination of water use whose critical dimensions transcend the specificities of this case. To highlight its ritual structure within the context of a viable and organically solidaristic collective order, I compare online civic shaming with the ‘status degradation ceremony’, as theorised by Harold Garfinkel in the 1950s. Comparable in that it constitutes a new form of public denunciation with socially integrative and renewing possibilities, there are also differences that shed light onto some of the new and defining elements of public shaming in a digitally convergent, visually mediated, and (more) participatory media-sphere. Finally, revealing significant overlap and collaboration between social, news, and tabloid media in the social production of mediated shaming today, this study is located at the border of visual sociology and a critical sociology of visual representation in contemporary mediated society.     

Reconsidering the ‘idea’ of evidence in evidence-based policy and practice

Evidence-based policy and practice (EBP) has become an important social work conceptual framework. Yet, the core EBP concept, the concept of evidence, remains ill-defined. I propose a modification of the concept of evidence as applied to EBP effectiveness questions. As a basis for this reformulation ideas about evidence are examined from cross-disciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives including epistemology, philosophy of science, evidence-science, and law. I propose that for EBP effectiveness questions: (1) to be considered ‘relevant evidence’ an explanatory connection between an intervention and an outcome must be established rather than a mere association; (2) the EBP definition of ‘best available evidence’ should include total available evidence (rather than a subset) about effectiveness, causal roles (i.e., mechanisms), and support factors and be inclusive of high-quality experimental and observational studies as well as high-quality mechanistic reasoning; (3) the familiar five-step EBP process should be expanded to include formulation of warranted, evidence-based arguments and that evidence appraisal be guided by three high level criteria of relevance, credibility, and strength rather than rigid evidence hierarchies; (4) comparative effectiveness research strategies, especially pragmatic controlled studies, hold promise for providing relevant and actionable evidence needed for policy and practice decision-making and successful implementation.     

PEGASE Program: Identification of babies in the child protection system at risk of developmental delays or disorders and the implementation of a ‘supra-optimal’ care pathway

The importance of the first three years of life for children's development and the consequences for their general health in adulthood have been widely documented in the international literature, including the benefits of early identification and intervention programs. Additionally, convergent research has highlighted wide-ranging negative trajectories attributable to both the short and long-term consequences of abuse and neglect and their neurobiological impact on health and development. However, formal identification processes and the use of standardised screening tools in child protection remain relatively rare despite the potential societal impact of child maltreatment in terms of public and economic health. Moreover, delays between the initial identification of mental health problems and health and developmental disorders, and the introduction of appropriate interventions persist. Abused and neglected infants risk an exacerbation of the consequences of early maltreatment due to insufficient access to prompt assessment and treatment, including appropriate responses to their health needs. The aim of this article is to present the PEGASE program, an innovative French program for very young children in care, which is modelled on the care of premature babies. By setting up an early care pathway, it aims to ensure adequate medical follow-up – both somatic and psychiatric – through standardised examination and tailored interventions in order to limit the adverse health and developmental consequences of abuse. The presentation of the PEGASE program is supplemented by a case study.     

‘We feel the responsibility that you shirk’: movement institutionalization,the politics of responsibility and the case of the Swedish environmental movement

This article provides directions for advancing the conceptualization of the relationship between social movements and institutionalization, based on a case study of the Swedish environmental movement strategies. We argue that the concepts of (de)responsibilization and (de)politicization provide tools for an improved analysis of the dynamics of how social movements interact both with established political institutions and corporations in a new context. The introduction of new regulatory frameworks in environmental politics has shaped interaction between social movements and the state in new ways, involving neoliberal responsibilization, meaning active involvement by civil society and business in political responsibilities previously associated with state agencies – a development involving an increasing emphasis on market mechanisms. We argue that this has involved a de-politicization of environmental issues in the sense that it engages political actors in a moral discourse and a technocratic practice that suppresses the (potential) articulation of social conflict through consensus building. However, we also show how movement actors resist the discourse that encourages them to take on certain responsibilities, thus engaging in a politics of responsibility. Empirically, we demonstrate how the changing strategies of the Swedish environmental movement in the 2000s need to be understood in relation to the following processes, indicating that the Swedish case has a general relevance for an understanding of the contemporary environmental movement globally: (1) the transformation of the Swedish model of welfare capitalism under the influence of neoliberal discourse; (2) international environmental policy developments, most importantly the emergence of climate change as a dominant issue globally.     

The struggle for ‘our streets’: the digital and physical spatial politics of the Ferguson Movement

ABSTRACT

The Ferguson Movement of 2014 and 2015 reached national salience immediately following the murder of Michael Brown, after residents took to social media platforms to report from what many activists called ‘ground zero.’ Some popular and scholarly conversations have couched the movement largely through its online manifestations; this study, however, places the movement within the intersections of digital and physical space as well as the broader political context of St. Louis. Triangulating data from 21 unstructured interviews with local activists in St. Louis, Missouri with GIS and digital media analysis, we illustrate how activists in the Ferguson Movement organized within St. Louis’ physical space and challenged popular arguments about resistance in digital space. Consequently, we argue that social movements’ placeness remain important despite recent emphases on digital media.     

Constructions of ‘vulnerability’ in comparative perspective: Scottish protection policies and the trouble with ‘adults at risk’

This paper places Scottish adult support and protection (ASP) policy in the context of debates about the nature of ‘vulnerability’ and its usefulness as a defining concept in law and social policy. It examines the construction of ‘adults at risk’ in ASP policy, using a comparison with the construction of children in Scottish child protection policy, on the one hand, and women in Scottish domestic abuse policy, on the other, to illuminate the nature of the vulnerability that ASP considers itself to be addressing. It then problematises this construction, drawing both on the social model of disability and on an ethic of care. It concludes that current ASP policy remains underpinned by unhelpful assumptions about disabled people, older people and people with mental or physical health problems. A more inclusive understanding of vulnerability would be more empowering to these people and others, in policies concerned with mistreatment and abuse.     

‘That’s definite discrimination’: practice under the umbrella of inclusion

Inclusive practice is well embedded across society and has developed over time. However, although policy and public view have moved forward, the way organisations address the agenda for inclusion often represents a superficial interpretation of this concept. Qualitative data were gathered using new ethnography to explore the experiences of a library-based reading group for visually impaired readers. The voices of the individuals shed light on the individual and collective experience of reading. These insights challenge the traditional views of distinct provision that are designed to address targets for inclusion of individuals with disabilities. We argue for a clearer focus on the unintentional consequences of practice in the name of inclusion that leave individuals feeling marginalised. This paper suggests the alternative focus on social justice as offering a discourse that focuses on society and away from the individual.     

‘Changing the way we do child protection’: The implementation of Signs of Safety® within the Western Australia Department for Child Protection and Family Support

ObjectiveThis paper describes a six-year large scale implementation of the Signs of Safety practise framework in a complex statutory child protection context in Western Australia. The case study documents both the practitioner-led and organisational-led implementation journey as part of the State's child protection system reform drawing on Roger's diffusion of innovation theory and Fixsen's five stage implementation model as conceptual frameworks, and highlighting the key facilitators and barriers.MethodsThe study is a collaboration between researchers investigating the impact and use of Signs of Safety in Western Australia who contributed the theoretical perspectives and analysis; and key personnel from the Department responsible for implementation who contributed documents, manuals, records and personal accounts to form the narrative of the implementation. A naturalist, intrinsic and multiple case study design utilising semi-structured interviews was used to consult with 27 Departmental staff and practitioners. Thematic analysis was utilised to identify key themes and patterns of experiences with the Signs of Safety framework implementation.FindingsMuch can be learned from the journey of the Department and their long term commitment and systematic implementation strategy of Signs of Safety including the significance of leadership, learning and developing initiatives, effective communication, instituting continuous improvement processes and the provision of feedback for individual practitioners. Signs of Safety appealed to natural champions of systemic social work practise within the Department whose organisational culture adapted to align with the principles of the framework in building partnerships and understanding with families, being solution-focused, maintaining an open stance of inquiry and balancing strengths and safety around children whilst concurrently working to solve dangers and harm. As a learning organisation, the Department also utilised case practise implementation teams to be able to move through more successfully the different stages of implementation. In utilising Fixsen's implementation framework, the challenges and gaps to implementation strategies were also highlighted, including a problematic data system and an internal focus compromising the success of interagency collaboration.ConclusionThis discussion paper has provided an overview of the key concepts of the diffusion and implementation literature, and highlighted the importance of utilising theoretical frameworks in guiding implementation of practise models especially in complex statutory child protection contexts. Findings will be of particular interest to child welfare leaders and supporters of organisational change, providing concrete examples of implementation strategies and demonstrates the systemic benefits of a theoretical framework for guiding implementation efforts.     

The average child: Lewis Hine,statistics, and ‘social photography’

This project looks at the statistical turn in American sociology in the early twentieth century and its impact on Lewis Hine’s ‘social photography.’ Photographic studies of today are digital and often participatory, yet, their roots can be traced back to Hine’s work. The rise of statistical methods in the social sciences coincides with Hine’s development as a documentary photographer. Hine is often discussed alongside just one or two of his iconic images. This approach overstates the importance of the single, select print, subverting the essence of Hine’s statistical method. The conventional monographic approach is far too limiting for a photographer who produced thousands of images. In 1907, Hine enrolled in Columbia University to study sociology with Professor Franklin Giddings, who was responsible for establishing their leadership position in statistical methods. Hine’s longstanding affiliation with Columbia played an important role in shaping his sociological perspective. Hine never thought of his work in terms of individual photographs. What was central to his picture making was a belief in the veracity of a statistical norm. My project examines how the Columbia School provided Hine with the elements upon which his term ‘social photography’ found meaning and informed how a sociological philosophy might be manifest in photography.     

The other side of Malaysia’s enviable economic and multiethnic stability: the obstinate resilience of ‘money politics’

Many governments, in their zeal to progress and deliver the fruits of development, are caught in a web of unsavory habits and practices that impair not only their international image but also domestic legitimacy. One such perennially persistent and resilient disease is ‘money politics.’ Taking Malaysia as a case study, we note that despite sustaining a remarkable record of economic and multiethnic stability, the country has also been helpless in mitigating this obstinate issue. In this article, it is posited that the phenomenon is not a new or recent portent but has actually persisted even prior to independence. We shall then contend that unless the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition government attaches greater priority in stamping out this political bug, the country’s otherwise enviable development trajectory and the quest to reach a ‘developed nation’ status via its Vision 2020 declaration, even if fulfilled, are not cause for celebration, given its implications to the country’s economic sustainability and multiethnic stability.