Addressing the Issue of Psychiatric Disability in Social Work Interns: The Need for a Problem-Solving Framework

Abstract

This article examines the issues that arise when field instructors encounter social work interns with psychiatric problems. The authors discuss how legal decisions and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) provide the organizing framework for developing appropriate policies for addressing these situations. Findings from a survey that asked 61 field instructors about their experiences with such students and their knowledge of ADA guidelines provide additional information for policy development. Based on the survey and the legal guidelines, the authors present a problem-solving framework and recommendations to guide academic programs toward an approach that protects the rights of all parties involved.     

Network structures in cross-movement talk: Democracy Now!, 2003-2013

ABSTRACT

As organizers often remind us, we need to work across movements if we are to make substantive social change. Such talk is central to how we understand what social movements are and how we can work together. But how is that talk structured, and how might we theorize structural change over time as movements emerge and subside? This paper outlines several key considerations in the social construction of cross-movement relations between 2003 and 2013 on a daily independent broadcast news magazine program in the United States. Drawing on relational sociology and network studies, I offer a framework for understanding the changing structure of cross-movement talk as an interplay of a) the narrative clustering of movement labels, and b) the bridging of cross-cluster narrative divisions. Using positional network analysis, I first chart the movement canon – those movement labels that were used year after year for structuring the cross-movement field – and trace how key labels were used as bridging leaders during two periods of mass-mobilization. I then compare the narrative environment over time as it moved between more segmented and pluralistic structural characteristics, culminated in periods of narrative convergence in 2008 and 2011 around the Obama presidential election and the Occupy movement. By examining the overall structure of cross-movement talk in broadcast news programming, I illustrate how movement labels themselves are used by hosts and guests to facilitate the social construction of emergent movement clusters, and point to strategies for future application and analysis in cross-movement organizing.     

Now and again: Eventful experience as a resource in senior activism

ABSTRACT

Shared memories shape relations among social movement participants and their organizations. However, scholars often ignore how experience operates as a means of solidifying attachment in group contexts. In contrast, I argue that activism depends on how participants publicly recall events. In this, I integrate a social memory perspective with the examination of activist movements. Through narrative, participants build engagement by presenting the self-in-history as a model for collective action. I refer to this as eventful experience, utilizing memorable moments as a resource for generating commitment. Movements depend upon members communicating the critical moments of their lives, embedding personal timelines in group culture. The linkage of personal experience and public events is a strategy by which individuals motivate collective action. Drawing on a thirty-month ethnography of a progressive senior citizen activist group in Chicago, I examine how members use an awareness of temporality to build a culture of action. Each movement group uses the past experiences of participants to build their culture – what Jasper refers to as taste in tactics, incorporating past successes, present plans, and imagined futures into a call for direct action.     

Representations of Jewish Childhood From 1950s Communist Romania in Memoirs by Women Émigré Authors to the United States

ABSTRACT

This article examines the memoirs of three Jewish women – Marianne Hirsch, Anca Vlasopolos, and Haya Leah Molnar – to understand how they remembered childhood in 1950s communist Bucharest. I first show how Marianne Hirsch’s part-memoir, part-critical book, Family Frames, uses her personal experiences to theorize tropes of transcultural dislocation as specific features of post-World War II Jewish children’s identities in 1950s Romania. I analyze how these tropes equally permeate the memoirs by two of her generation’s peers, Anca Vlasopolos and Haya Leah Molnar, highlighting how the two authors deploy them in their narratives. Overall, I show that writings of one’s 1950s childhood experiences in Bucharest by Jewish emigrées to the US offer new alternative discourses about facing the past and the present in Eastern Europe and the US by the tropes of initial transcultural, dislocating experiences at the start of their lives.     

Exploring the Climate for Overweight and Obese Students in a Student Health Setting

Attitudes and beliefs of health care providers, in conjunction with a nonthreatening physical environment, are important components in establishing a constructive and supportive climate for care of overweight and obese students. Objective: The authors explored providers' attitudes about obesity and assessed the physical environment in a student health clinic to identify areas that may be detrimental to the care of overweight and obese students. Participants: Eighteen direct care providers participated in the project. Methods: The authors conducted focus groups with direct care providers and assessed their experiences and perceived challenges in working with overweight and obese students. The authors also conducted a walk-through assessment of the physical environment. Results: Direct care providers expressed discomfort in deciding how and when to discuss weight with students. The authors found that elements of the physical environment could present barriers to care for overweight and obese students. Conclusions: The authors make recommendations for improving the health care climate for overweight and obese students.     

Off-centring empire in the Anthropocene: towards multispecies intimacies and nonhuman agents of survival

ABSTRACT

This paper examines colonial legacies in human-nonhuman relations to off-centre empire in the Anthropocene. Imperial methods of collecting, preserving and displaying nature profoundly shaped species perception, which in turn affected the scientific attention and ecological relevance a species was granted. In particular, I reflect on the category of invasibility to show how empire sanctioned the mobility of specific population groups and animal species as border-crossing. This further shows how speciesist logics served to extend, maintain and legitimize imperial power. This analysis is relevant in the Anthropocene where invasibility is mobilised to police movement in the context of increased human and nonhuman migration. Further, I discuss how invasibility is considered as one of main threats for biodiversity, which may misdirect conservation efforts. Overall, the article examines the potential in human-nonhuman encounters to challenge colonial legacies. Based on an ethnographic example of multispecies homemaking with species considered invasive in (hetero)normative modes of intimacy and domesticity, I argue that colonial legacies of racialized, gendered and speciesist hierarchies can be disturbed by human-nonhuman relations of companionship, care and interdependence. Finally, I scale-up the analysis to the landscape, by tracing the transformation of a former imperial wasteland in Vienna’s peripheral South from being perceived as economically and aesthetically worthless to a natural monument. Attending to multispecies entanglements is key here to understand the transformative process that led to the recovery of this wasteland. Here I off-centre empire by challenging anthropocentric narrations of how landscape transforms in favour of a narration that re-centres nonhuman agency. I argue that stories of wasteland recovery guided by nonhuman animals are crucial due to the increase in industrial wasteland and environmental degradation in the Anthropocene.     

Writing birthing bodies: exploring the entanglements between flesh and materiality in childbirth

ABSTRACT

This article enquires into the lived experiences of childbirth as a site of ‘fleshy becomings’ that disrupts the dominantly cleaned-up approaches to organising. Theoretically, we approach childbirth as a primitively humane experience in which birthing bodies become entangled with the materiality by which they are surrounded. The empirical material of the article consists of 12 in-depth interviews with first-time mothers in Finland as well as of photographs and autoethnographic research notes taken by the two authors of this article. By empirically highlighting the interplay between flesh and materiality in the ‘making’ of birthing bodies, this article offers novel viewpoints on the discussion of embodied experiences as well as on the entangled relations between flesh and materiality in the field of organisation studies. It also makes an empirical contribution using a unique contextual example of ‘birthing’ to illustrate how vulnerable topics can be researched, offering critical viewpoints on this subject.     

Disabled citizens as researchers – Challenges and benefits of collaboration for effective action and change

ABSTRACT

This article reports on the evaluation of an initial pilot for a collaborative research project undertaken in an English county between a service user-led Coalition of Disabled People, the local authority and local university. The project sought to map the assets and resources for/of disabled people in their local community as well as needs and gaps, to inform the Coalition’s strategic planning and raise awareness of disability issues across the county.

The article discusses an inclusive, co-productive approach using participatory action research. It focuses on experiences from the pilot stage of the project and considers how the authors worked together with the required knowledge exchange and power-sharing to recruit and train researchers with expertise from their personal experience of disability. Recruitment ensured they had relevant qualities and skills that could be developed, to increase their confidence, knowledge and skills set as researchers. They then undertook photo-elicited, semi-structured interviews with other disabled people, analysed findings and created photographic exhibitions for dissemination and awareness raising.

Demonstrating a commitment to emancipatory research and collective action for change, the discussion considers the promotion of shared values within the research team, and explores the benefits and challenges encountered during the process and how the particular stages were managed to achieve the beneficial outcomes of the pilot. The article seeks to add to the literature of participatory/emancipatory action research for social work.     

A place for mobility in metaphors of youth transitions

ABSTRACT

Metaphors are central in the study of youth; in fact, it has been argued that ‘youth’ itself could be considered a metaphor. In a recent assessment of transition-related metaphors, Cuervo and Wyn [2014. “Reflections on the Use of Spatial and Relational Metaphors in Youth Studies.” Journal of Youth Studies 17 (7): 901–915.] have noted that such metaphors as ‘niches’, ‘pathways’, ‘trajectories’ and ‘navigations’, often contain an element of movement. However, it is still under-debated how we can systemically incorporate mobility into the study of young people to capture the precarity characterising their lives (a), but also heuristically link to metaphors used to describe the changing shape of careers of young people (b). Indeed, scholarship on ‘boundaryless careers’ and ‘peripatetic careers’ appear to have developed separately from the youth-related literature, albeit dealing in part with similar issues. Departing from Furlong’s work on metaphors in youth studies, this article interrogates potential for intertwining research lines within the growing debate on mobility in youth transitions. The article develops at a conceptual level; however it takes on Furlong’s legacy in the sense of contributing to a youth research agenda which is attentive to both the creation of new imaginative categories for the study of current conditions of youth, and the challenges that emerge in discursively positioning youth in society.     

The Mobilization Against the 2005 Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe: A French Mobilization for Another Europe

ABSTRACT

Offering a contribution to cultural approaches to studying social movements, this paper explores how people incorporate social change efforts into broader self-projects. I use the contemporary abstinence pledge movement as an archetypal example of a lifestyle movement, a movement that advocates for lifestyle change as its primary challenge to perceived cultural problems. To capture the public face crafted by this movement, I coded complete website content for ten pledge organizations, as well as their print and social media presence. The data demonstrate: how pledge organizations explicitly target culture, rather than pressuring the state to enact policy change; how participants employ individualized tactics while still believing in their collective power to engender change; and that pledgers craft a moral self, engaging in ‘personal’ identity work. Expanding the lifestyle movement literature to think about outcomes and influence, I then show how pledgers contest perceptions of movement success, redefining effectiveness towards abstract, long-term, and subjective measures. I conclude by locating lifestyle movements in the context of late modernity and suggesting how theorists might use and further develop the concept in the future.     

Feminist Methodology in Social Movements Research

Feminist social scientists have developed distinctive principles of inquiry that depart from the positivist ideal of the detached, value-free scientist and are consistent with the feminist goal of rendering women's experiences visible and challenging gender inequality. In this article, I show how my research on the postpartum depression self-help movement illustrates five features of feminist methodology: a gender perspective, accentuation of women's experiences, reflexivity, participatory methods, and social action. My intent is to demonstrate how attention to the epistemological and methodological questions posed by feminist researchers produces new standards of evidence that allow us to recognize the gendering of social movement processes and theory.     

Nations Rebound?: Crossing Borders in a Gated Globe

This article engages critically with the proposal that flow, fluidity, and mobility are the central and organizing features of globalization. By focusing on the growing obstacles that people- most of them from poorer nations- encounter as they attempt to cross national borders, I explore global interconnection and mobility as stratified and highly regulated. My adoption of crossing borders as a central analytic grows out of a broader discussion within border studies about the problematic way in which "crossings" have been used, namely in cultural studies and Border Theory. This article therefore explores crossing borders as moments in which differences can be powerfully reinforced and opportunities for transnationality systematically denied. Here, I attempt to look at the transnational as occurring within established structures of power (a militarized border) and probe the politics of "border crossings" by focusing on a group of social movement actors as they contest the state's authority to organize and manage movement across its southern border. In this analysis I attempt to frame the United States-Mexico border as a "diagnostic" site where anthropologists can study the dynamics of power and flows across global landscapes in the context of specific political fields and histories. Consequently, this line of analysis leads to a different set of metaphors for globalization-one rooted not so much in an iconography of a world in ceaseless motion, but in an image of a "gated globe."     

Risk of Unwanted Sex for College Women: Evidence for a Red Zone

Objective: University and college health and counseling centers frequently warn female students about the red zone—a period early in a student's first year at college during which she may be at higher risk for unwanted sexual experiences (UWS). The authors designed this study to assess temporal risk for UWS in 1st- and 2nd-year college women. Participants and Methods: In March 2006, the authors randomly selected 50 first-year and 52 second-year students (representing one-sixth of each class year) to complete a modified Sexual Experiences Survey. Results: First-year women were at higher risk for UWS than were second-year women—particularly, early in the fall semester. The authors observed a significant linear effect during participants' combined first years in school, with more reports of UWS occurring early in the year. Conclusion: This study provides support for a red zone and highlights the need for investigating local norms for UWS.     

Participants’ productive disruption of a community photo-elicitation project: improvised methodologies in practice

Abstract

This article reports on an attempt to use photo-elicitation to explore contested intergenerational perceptions and experiences of ‘place’ in one English village. Participants actively disrupted the photo-elicitation project and ended up co-creating an enriched research design that allowed them to represent how they experienced ‘place’. The spontaneous, mixed media-elicitation that resulted overturns some of the more straightforward notions that are aligned with photo-elicitation techniques. This article builds on a growing body of critical literature on photo-elicitation and shows how participants’ disruption of a project’s research methods can be both challenging and fruitful in practice. The researcher’s flexibility and willingness to work with participants’ alternative approaches proved extremely effective in allowing participants to communicate their ‘imagined geographies’ and to identify experiences of social inequality. This article explores how the initially problematic in participant involvement can be turned into the productive through the use of ‘improvised methodologies’.     

Belonging to the library: humanising the space for social work education

Abstract

This article describes the running of four Living Libraries on a UK postgraduate social work course. A Living Library is a metaphoric remodelling of a conventional library where people, as authors of their experiences, provide specialist knowledge based on authorial areas of expertise. In the Living Libraries discussed here, ‘Living Books’ carried stories of social work—their narratives were of lived experiences as people using social care services; as carers in personal relationships with others who use social care services; or, as social work practitioners. The focus of this article is on those Living Libraries involving the participation of the first two of these groups. Drawing on social psychology, phenomenology and human geography, we propose that a Living Library can act as a connective space within social work education by engendering a discursive forum where all participants—people with experiences of services, students, practitioners and social work educators—are given both the freedom and obligation to talk openly about their differential experiences, fears and hopes for social work. Through this process, opportunities are created to consider how improvements that meet all stakeholders’ interests may be achieved.     

Ten years of Boko Haram: how transportation drives Africa’s deadliest insurgency

ABSTRACT

This article challenges the ways in which much scholarship on terrorism and insurgencies have been ‘a-mobile.’ It addresses this problem by drawing on the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ to explore analytically how the decade-long Boko Haram insurgency in north-eastern Nigeria have developed around the system of automobility and have simultaneously been transformed by it. The analysis extends to the impact of the violent insurgency and state regulation on populations whose livelihoods are rooted in mobility. Foregrounding automobility as a lethal weapon, an instrument of power, the article recasts the evolution and mutation of Boko Haram in light of how the group weaponizes transportation/mobility, and how it interacts with differently and differentially mobile others. This article should be seen as a first attempt to insert the subject of (auto)mobility into the rapidly growing literature on Boko Haram, contributing to our meagre understanding of how movement and stasis influences the group’s tactics and choice of targets. It brings together qualitative data collected through in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, media reports, and hours of observations at roadblocks and control posts operated by a local security assemblage of police officers, paramilitaries, and soldiers.     

Becoming aware of the grand social challenges: how an international and interdisciplinary educational context may broaden students’ perspectives on human rights and public health

ABSTRACT

The understanding of contemporary social problems and challenges in an international and national perspective is a significant issue for social work because of globalisation and social problems are too complex to handle by single actors themselves. The need for interdisciplinary and interprofessional collaboration is important. This paper focuses on experiences from an Erasmus Intensive Programme with the title Human Rights, Public Health and Social Service Challenges on Local Government in the Nordic-Baltic Sea Area. Social work students from different countries interacted with students from other disciplines such as political science, psychology and economy to discuss common challenges and solutions in this field. The analysis of the findings shows students reflect upon human rights issues as universal rights and how challenges presented by contextual differences in preconditions for everyday life between the countries, are reflected from different disciplines/professional perspectives. The paper argues that international and interdisciplinary programmes, where students get the opportunity to meet and to work with overarching and transnational issues, have a great potential for engaging students in global development in a rapidly changing world.     

Class,place and mobility beyond the global city: stigmatisation and the cosmopolitanisation of the local

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on a multi-sited qualitative study of youth in regional Australia to explore the contemporary relationship between class, place attachment, and the imperative towards mobility and cosmopolitanism. The paper shows how local classed identities shape how young people situate themselves and their localities in relation to the rest of the world, and how experiences of mobility produce classed attachments to place. Here, place is made meaningful within the broader cultural politics of inequality in neoliberalism, in which the moral denigration of figures of the working class come to stand for the disadvantage currently associated with regional places. However local classed histories offer some young people the capacity for resistance, whilst others are unable to reframe their localities in positive terms. Moreover, whilst cosmopolitanism is a mode of classed distinction across the two research sites, this can be enacted either through practices of mobility, or through the repositioning of the local in cosmopolitan terms through the identity practices of middle-class youth. The paper therefore reveals new ways in which local social and economic histories offer young people different ways in which to relate to notions of mobility as well as to reconstruct the meaning of their home.     

Decentralist vanguards: women’s autonomous power and left convergence in Rojava

ABSTRACT

Since 2012, the Rojava Revolution in Northern Syria has attracted the attention of the global Left. Although this project has been subjected to many analyses from different political perspectives, there has not been a systematic analysis of the way it brings together anarchism and Marxism. By focusing on the question of how a revolutionary movement should be organized, we arrive at the argument that Rojava features a specific hybrid of anarchist and Marxist-Leninist revolutionary methods in the form of ‘decentralist vanguardism’. The most advanced form of this hybrid method in Rojava is represented by women. By virtue of being theorized as a revolutionary agent, having autonomous organizations, and carrying a leading role in educating the general public, women in Rojava become what we call ‘a revolutionary middle stratum’: a distinct revolutionary group with autonomous power that can push forward the revolutionary process while dispersing the authority of the vanguard movement.