Omniscience at the Edge of Chaos: complexity,defences and change in a Children and Families Social Work department

ABSTRACT

This paper will explore a period of organisational change in a Children and Families Social Work team, applying ideas from complexity theory and psychoanalysis to explore the changes that occurred. In doing so it will critique the Newtonian concept of cause-and-effect linear causality, instead positing a nonlinear model of an organisation as a complex adaptive system in flux as it interacts with its environment. The paper will go on to posit that Bion’s psychoanalytic concepts of Omniscience and K Activity are self-organising forces in social care organisations, and when anxiety is not managed effectively, reductionist technical-rationale approaches to Children and Families Social Work dominate practice. It will conclude by outlining how the organisation’s effective management of anxiety through the creation of containment, created a series of organisational changes. These changes better supported the management of the complexity and uncertainty inherent in the social work task, raising possibilities of improvements in social work practice beyond the organisation.     

“Mapping Social Justice”: Integrating Policy Practice Across the Curriculum

ABSTRACT

The National Association of Social Workers and the Council on Social Work Education identify social justice as a guiding principle of the social work profession, yet there is little consensus in the field of what the term actually means and how it can be achieved. Master of Social Work programs are likewise struggling with how to educate students on social justice and prepare them to engage in macro-level advocacy after graduating. This article examines how one student-led social justice initiative at a school of social work is seeking to increase student engagement in macro-level social justice work through the use of targeted advocacy alerts. This article explores the project’s development, implementation, first-year feedback, and modifications made to provide other MSW programs a blueprint to adopt their own version of the project. Findings suggest that the targeted alert model may be successful in engaging clinical MSW students in social justice advocacy.     

A Profile of The National Policy Summit on Elder Abuse: Perspective and Advice on Replication

ABSTRACT

Social change results from concerted and informed action by people who care about solving problems. However, the interest of concerned individuals must be focused on priority issues, and the experts, those who know the impact of the problem, those who can envision a preferred future, must be involved in defining the solutions. This article briefly describes The National Policy Summit on Elder Abuse where experts and visionaries came together in Washington, DC, in December 2001 to develop the first-ever national elder abuse action agenda. The article contains suggestions and advice for those interested to utilize the elder abuse summit approach for influencing policy change at the state and local levels.     

Being neither Pollyanna nor Henny Penny: Responding to McDonald and Jones

Abstract

This paper provides an account of the earliest contributions to family theory and practice by social workers, beginning in the late nineteenth century. The paper argues that the first widespread practice of ‘family work’ by the helping professions was carried out by social workers, primarily women, despite this being rarely acknowledged in the family therapy literature. An analysis of gender and its place in the development of professional status and the ownership of ideas is provided.

Summary

This paper has traced the place of the family in social work theory and practice since the beginnings of the profession, with a particular focus on theoretical developments in social work in the United States. A number of points have been argued. Firstly, there is significant historical evidence that social workers, most of them women, pioneered family work many decades before the term ‘family therapy’ was invented. This directly challenges the claim made by a number of family therapy historians that work with families was pioneered by psychiatrists in the 1950s and 1960s. It is argued here that this discrepancy is largely a result of differences in professional power and gender status.

Secondly, it is argued that the impact of psychoanalytic theory on social work was profound, not only in terms of how it might have distracted the profession from further developing its early family systems focus, but also in how its multidisciplinary practice tended to place social workers, again mostly women, in somewhat limited and prescribed positions.

In addition, it is argued that social work's emphasis on the family and family intervention has waxed and waned due to these concepts not appearing to fit neatly into divisions between fields of practice, such as casework, group work and Community development. While social work struggled with finding a place for the further development of family social work theory, the rapidly growing domain of family therapy quickly colonised this field of practice, giving little credit to the ground already laid by social workers.     

A Bionian Approach to the Body and the Feminine in Cammell and Roeg’s Performance

ABSTRACT

This psychoanalytic study of Performance (directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, 1970) explores the importance of the bodily, sensorial, and material aspects of a pivotal moment in the development of the protagonist’s sexual identity and considers how this moment has been conceived as being dependent on a certain containing function that is performed by a female character. Drawing on Bionian and post-Bionian theory, the article proposes that this containing function is fundamentally feminine. The feminine function of Bion’s concept of container is one that has been discussed especially in the theorization of the roles performed by the mother and the analyst. This article aims to investigate the importance of the bodily and the feminine aspects of the container as part of a psychoanalytic conceptualization of psychical growth as they present themselves in this film.     

Rethinking and Revising Goode’s Contribution to Global Family Change

Abstract

This essay provides a comprehensive overview of William J. Goode’s contribution to the study of global family and social change. I begin by describing Goode’s theoretical perspectives and outlining his theses dating back to the 1960s. I then provide an assessment of where and why some of his predictions proved wrong and elaborate on what we have learnt on changes in families at the global level over the past half century. Lastly, I speculate on how Goode would rethink his arguments nowadays in light of fifty years of new evidence and scholarly developments – both theoretical and methodological. In so doing, I highlight shortcomings of current approaches and outline directions for future family research and theorizing.     

Indigenous perspectives for strengthening social responses to global environmental changes: A response to the social work grand challenge on environmental change

ABSTRACT

The “Grand Challenges for Social Work,” is a call to action for innovative responses to society’s most pressing social problems. In this article, we respond to the “Grand Challenge” of Creating Social Responses to a Changing Environment from our perspective as Indigenous scholars. Over the last several decades, diminishing natural resources, pollution, over-consumption, and the exploitation of the natural environment have led to climate change events that disproportionately affect Indigenous peoples. We present how environmental changes impact Indigenous peoples and suggest culturally relevant responses for working with Indigenous communities. We propose a decolonizing cyclical, iterative process grounded in Indigenous Ways of Knowing.     

The Application of the Culturagram in Cross-Cultural Practice with Elder Abuse Victims

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the application of the Culturagram, a screening instrument designed to assist practitioners to work more effectively in the assessment and detection of family abuse among immigrant elders. Case studies of selected immigrant groups are presented to illustrate how the Culturagram can be used to promote culturally sensitive practice with immigrant families where elder abuse may be a factor. Assessment, detection, and intervention strategies specific to selected immigrant groups are included in the discussion.     

Migrant Workers Home and its practices on shaping the culture and community of ‘New Working Class’: a criticism on cultural-political activism in contemporary China

ABSTRACT

New Workers Home (Beijing, China) has been the most important site of activism and organizing of New Workers culture in Mainland China over the past 15 years. Beyond today’s intellectual atmosphere of liberal and ‘left-phobia’ in China, exploring the formation of a New Working Class can give us a new sense of class discourse and imagination of socialist China in the dimensions of both knowledge and activism. Based on my half-year fieldwork in New Workers Home and participant observation in knowledge and activism of New Workers culture, this paper aims at providing an in-depth analysis of the implications and tensions in the Migrant Workers Home’s imagination of New Workers culture and the organization’s energy and internal turbulence in their imagination of the community of the New Working Class, through reviewing their cultural actions focusing on the ‘cultural battlefield’ and community culture of Pi Cun (an urban fringe village in Beijing), their wider actions in social enterprise, ecological agriculture, organizational works among New Workers and their own organization’s internal situation. The outline of the problematics in this paper can be drawn by putting forward the following questions. How is the New Workers culture shaped by Migrant Workers Home? According to the situation of New Workers in contemporary China, what is its imagination of this forming class? How does it intervene the forming of a New Working Class with its cultural activism? By establishing a museum, college, social enterprises and ecological farms, how do these practices show its imagination of labours’ culture and politics? Located in Beijing and facing special political conditions, how does it arrange the guidelines and strategies of movements? What are the dilemmas of these practices, strategies and real politics?     

“Let Us Continue Free as the Air”: Truthfully Reconciling Social Work Education to Indigenous Lands

ABSTRACT

Social work is being challenged to situate its theories and practice within the lands it finds itself on in North America. This article considers the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls for change from the perspective of how social workers are educated in relation to land, from Indigenous views on its colonial conversions to the land’s role in healing. The discussion is grounded in a course I teach on Reconciliation and Indigenous-Social Work Relations on the Haudenosaunee lands of the Grand River in Ontario. Social work students consider their vocation in relation to a truth-telling process that is a first step for reconciling with Indigenous nations and land. The article concludes with general implications for social work educators.     

A Strengths Perspective on Caregiving at the End-of-life

Abstract

The most recent version of the Australian Association of Social Workers Code of Ethics includes substantial reference to social workers’ professional responsibilities for environmental awareness and advocacy. This article reports on a qualitative study of 20 Australian environmentally-conscious social workers from a variety of fields of practice. The study found that while there was a high level of awareness of the relevance of environmental issues for social work practice, participants reported professional and organisational constraints, which prevented them from aligning their environmental concerns with their professional practice. The findings from this study suggest that proenvironmental views and actions may not yet be accepted as a legitimate aspect of social work practice, despite strong recognition of the links between social justice, human rights, social work, and the environment in the Australian Association of Social Workers Code of Ethics.     

Navigating the ‘shadow of loss’ in mental health social work

ABSTRACT

The human experience of loss has been at the centre of psychoanalytic understandings of the human condition since Freud’s first writings on ‘melancholia’. This essay draws on psychodynamic theory to show how workers who are attuned to the experience of loss in service users can shape their interventions accordingly. By reflecting on how a diagnosis of ‘depression’ might better be understood as the rippling wave of past grief, professionals can utilise the dynamics of projection, transference and containment to help understand the emotional pain of individuals they support. But this essay also suggests that the use of psychodynamic practice works best when it is bolstered by other frameworks – in this case an understanding of systems theory. When the two traditions are utilised together, they provide an understanding of psychic phenomena which can enable social workers to build a basis for effective interventions with service users experiencing mental distress.     

Dwelling in epistemic disobedience: A reply to Go

In Thinking Against Empire: Anticolonial Thought as Social Theory, Julian Go continues his vital work on rethinking and redirecting the discipline of sociology. Go’s piece relates to his wider oeuvre of postcolonial sociology – found in works such as his Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory (2016) as well as multiple journal articles on epistemic exclusion (Go 2020), Southern theory (Go 2016), metrocentrism (Go 2014), and the history of sociology (Go 2009). In this response article, my aim is to think alongside some of the central themes outlined in Go’s paper rather than offering a rebuttal of any sorts. In particular, I want to think through how the recent work on ‘decoloniality’ may play more of a central role in Go’s vision of sociology and social theory than he acknowledges. In doing so, I hope to engage in Go’s prodigious scholarship through centering discussions of the geopolitics of knowledge, double translation, and border thinking. Before proceeding to this discussion, I will offer a brief review of my reading of Go’s paper.     

Contextual Risk,Individualised Responses: An Assessment of Safeguarding Responses to Nine Cases of Peer‐on‐Peer Abuse

Practitioners, academics and policymakers are increasingly questioning the sufficiency of safeguarding practice in protecting young people from peer‐on‐peer abuse in England. Using the findings from an in‐depth analysis of nine cases where young people either raped or murdered their peers, this article explores approaches to assessing and intervening with those affected by peer‐on‐peer abuse. Building upon international calls for a contextual account of abuse between young people, the article identifies a professional struggle to address the interplay between young people's homes and the public and social spaces in which peer‐on‐peer abuse often manifests. Findings from this study are used to illuminate wider research into peer‐on‐peer abuse which has indicated a professional inability to: assess young people's behaviours with reference to the contexts in which they occur; change the environmental factors that influence abusive behaviours; and recognise the vulnerability of those who abuse their peers. The article concludes that to effectively respond to peer‐on‐peer abuse, multiagency partnerships are required which can identify, assess and intervene with the harmful norms in peer groups, schools and public spaces that can facilitate peer‐on‐peer abuse and undermine parental capacity to keep young people safe – thereby adopting a more contextual approach to safeguarding adolescents. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

‘Explores approaches to assessing and intervening with those affected by peer‐on‐peer abuse’

Key Practitioner Messages

• Social contexts such as peer groups, schools and neighbourhoods can make young people vulnerable to peer‐on‐peer abuse.
• Assessing and intervening with young people and families affected by peer‐on‐peer abuse will not impact upon the social contexts associated with the phenomenon.
• Multiagency partnerships need to intervene with social contexts that, albeit beyond the traditional remit of child protection, facilitate peer‐on‐peer abuse and undermine the capacity of parents to keep young people safe.

‘Social contexts such as peer groups, schools and neighbourhoods can make young people vulnerable to peer‐on‐peer abuse’

     

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.     

Black Lives Matter: Racialised Policing in the United States

Abstract

In August 2014, 18 year-old Michael Brown was shot in his hometown of Ferguson, Missouri, launching a series of events that would lead to increased media scrutiny of police interactions with people of colour in the United States. Since then, the news has been filled with accounts of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, and more than a dozen other African-Americans who have died at the hands of police. This article examines how the events surrounding Michael Brown’s death shifted the American public’s knowledge of police brutality, creating an opportunity for change. Using social movement theory and a comparison with other historical racial movements in the US, the article analyses how BLM both fits and defies the expectations of a social movement. I conclude with a discussion of some changes that are a direct or indirect result of BLM’s efforts.     

Responding to teen dating violence: Perspectives from mothers who have been abused and seeking services in domestic violence shelters

ABSTRACT

Teen dating violence (TDV) is a significant public health problem, but we know little about how mothers who have been abused respond to TDV. This article analyzes qualitative data from three focus groups conducted with 17 mothers who had experienced abuse. Mothers responded to four hypothetical scenarios of their child reporting TDV to them. Mothers reported that their approach to children’s reports of TDV would entail engaging in varying levels of authoritarianism, considering the gender of the child, and exercising caution in their responses. In response to the scenarios, mothers stated that they would ask questions, educate their teens, contact the perpetrator and/or parents, share their own experiences, and call for outside help. The study’s findings may assist prevention educators working with mothers who experienced abuse in responding to their children’s disclosures of incidents of TDV.     

Exegetical explorations: Parsons’ problematic aim

The aim of this article is to encourage ongoing and close exegetical study of sociology’s theoretical texts. Attention is drawn to two instances where Talcott Parsons’ theory project seems to be at odds with itself. Both are related to his “first major synthesis” The Structure of Social Action (1937). The first concerns Parsons’ opening discussion of Crane Brinton’s question “Who now reads Spencer?” Parsons’ discussion of Spencer is examined and then compared and contrasted with what he later wrote in the “Introduction” to the 1961 reprint of Spencer’s The Study of Sociology. The second concerns Parsons’ problematic view of his contribution to social theory’s “secondary literature” and how this relates to his claims about “convergence.” The article notes that Parsons was trying to identify what he believed to be a new norm for social theory. Sociological theory, he believed, would from henceforth have to be formulated in terms of this newly emerging normative frame of reference.     

Greening transport in Sweden: the role of the organic intellectual in changing union climate change policy

ABSTRACT

This article engages with the role of the individual in transforming union organizations by discussing the experiences of Ulf Jarnefjord and his efforts to introduce climate change policies into the Swedish Transport Workers’ Union [Transportarbetareförbundet]. Research investigating the integration of climate change policies into the agenda of Swedish trade unions has identified a disconnect between policy development among leaders on the one hand, and engagement among members on the other. Employing the life-history interview method, and the analytical concept of ‘organic intellectual’, this article focusses on the ways in which Ulf, as a regional health and safety officer, has experienced engaging with climate change issues in relation to both members and the leadership of his union. His experiences point to the importance of learning about how climate change and production impact on the everyday lives of members for developing and mobilizing support for climate change policies in unions.     

Sigmund Freud's Discovery of the Etiological Significance of Childhood Sexual Traumas

ABSTRACT

Challenging assumptions that Freud's early writings have no place in the current discourse on child sexual abuse, this article reconstructs Freud's early treatment of Emma Eckstein. Setting Emma's account of childhood sexual abuse in the context of Freud's early therapeutic practice reveals how Freud first formulated his radical theory, that his patients' psycho-neuroses were due to their having been sexually traumatised as children. The article concludes by inviting a reevaluation of Freud's work.