Nurturing “Critical Hope” in Teaching Feminist Social Work Research

Despite the congruence between critical feminist values and the cardinal values of the social work profession, feminist research in social work has lagged behind its feminist cousins in the social sciences, particularly in terms of critical uses of theory, reflexivity, and the troubling of binaries. This article presents as praxis our reflections as researchers, teachers, and feminists inside social work. We draw from a review of feminist social work research and offer suggestions for teaching critical feminist approaches in social work research. Incorporating critical feminist values and research practices into social work research courses creates the potential for greater integration of research, practice, and the principal values of our profession.     

Sustainability Assessment and Reporting for Nonprofit Organizations: Accountability “for the Public Good”

Nonprofit organizations serve the public good by offering services that benefit communities and the individuals who live in them. While many large for-profit companies and a few international nonprofits have begun voluntarily assessing and reporting their environmental, cultural, economic, and social sustainability performance in response to growing public awareness of sustainability issues, nonprofit organizations have generally been slow to adopt the practice. This paper makes the case that nonprofits have an obligation to assess and report sustainability performance to account for their positive and negative environmental, cultural, economic, and social impacts in the communities they serve precisely because of their promise to serve the public good; and that sustainability assessment and reporting are not only possible, but that they can actually offer several practical advantages for organizations that integrate the practice into their missions and models. Several sustainability reporting frameworks are reviewed. Two case examples are presented to illustrate the utility of sustainability assessments and reports for different types and sizes of nonprofit organizations. Challenges to the process of adoption and implementation of sustainability programs in the nonprofit sector are discussed.     

Integrating Human Rights and Trauma Frameworks in Social Work with People from Refugee Backgrounds

Abstract

Social work practice informed by human rights and trauma frameworks can be empowering and enabling. While both frameworks are complex and contested, their implementation “from below” via praxis can maximise benefits for social work with people who have experienced trauma and human rights abuses, such as those from refugee backgrounds. This article presents an exploration of this practice approach through the presentation of the story of Zillah and Amman, a fictionalised composite of many real refugee experiences. Taking as examples the education and child protection systems, the discussion highlights how theory to practice integration requires cross-cultural engagement, critical reflection, dialogue, and an understanding of human rights “from below”.     

The rights of the child enabling community development to contribute to a valid social work practice with children at risk

This paper presents a way of thinking about and doing child protection work using community development (CD) principles to guide practice. It suggests that a useful addition to CD can be found within the rights of the child provisions in Human Rights conventions. Using examples from the authors' three countries to illustrate the work that practitioners do in their work with children at risk, we argue that social work practice can be enhanced by the inclusion of these principles and practices which are essentially core generic social work practice. However, much of social work with the protection of children is bound by ‘risk’ perceptions which result in investigatory approaches being used as a first action, often to the exclusion of preventive approaches. This article demonstrates that in very different situations from different environments, CD in concert with the principles of the rights of the child can assist good outcomes with children at risk. A model is presented for unifying the worldview of human/children's rights with social work's core concern, the protection of children, using generic social work skills.     

From Mastery to Accountability: Cultural Humility as an Alternative to Cultural Competence

Cultural competency has been a long held ideal for social work educators and practitioners. However, definitions and approaches to cultural competency vary widely depending on worldview, discipline, and practice context. Within social work and beyond, cultural competency has been challenged for its failure to account for the structural forces that shape individuals' experiences and opportunities. In contrast, the concept ofcultural humility takes into account the fluidity of culture and challenges both individuals and institutions to address inequalities. This article takes a critical look at cultural competence as a concept, examining its explicit and implicit assumptions, and the impact these assumptions have on practitioners. It suggests that cultural humility may offer social work an alternative framework as it acknowledges power differentials between provider and client and challenges institutional-level barriers. The authors advocate a move from a focus on mastery in understanding ‘others’ to a framework that requires personal accountability in challenging institutional barriers that impact marginalized communities. Cultural humility, while a promising concept, has not been fully explored in social work. Therefore, the authors present a conceptual model of cultural competency along with strategic questions for providers and organizations to integrate into social work practice and education.     

Teaching Critical Practice: Resisting Structural Domination through Critical Reflection

This paper explores some of the responsibilities and challenges that face social work educators who teach critical practice to social work students. It is suggested that using critical reflection may enhance social work educators' capacity to prepare practitioners to work towards progressive social change and social justice, despite current social trends, such as globalisation, which potentially marginalise critical practice. This paper provides a reflective account of my experiences of teaching critical reflection to undergraduate social work students, drawing on critical postmodern theoretical underpinnings. Related pedagogies will be discussed which outline experiential reflective learning. It is ultimately contended that critical reflection is an important part of social work education and practice that is committed to enhancing citizenship, human rights, social justice and social change ideals.     

What's wrong with rights? Rethinking human rights and responsibilities

This paper examines the relationship between social work and human rights. It argues that the concept of human rights, as it is currently understood, is insufficient as a framework for social work theory and practice. Human rights are inherently individualistic - a problem that a focus on collective rights does little to rectify. What is absent from the human rights discourse, and what is directly relevant to social work, is a corresponding discourse on human responsibilities. This paper addresses the major criticisms of a human rights discourse by proposing a developmental model of human rights and responsibilities. The model establishes its applicability to social work theory and practice by demonstrating the counterbalancing forces of individual rights and collective responsibilities operating on the person in the environment.     

Promoting Evidence-Based,Trauma-Informed Social Work Practice

ABSTRACT

Given the human costs of psychological trauma, social workers should be well versed in trauma-informed care (TIC). This framework helps guide the efforts of systems, organizations, and practitioners toward reducing trauma or mitigating its effects. The field has created TIC principles, although they have yet to be fully realized as practical applications. This article makes the case that theoretically and empirically grounded content on trauma should be foundational to social work education. We also argue that social work practice will be advanced by clearly defining trauma and by distinguishing TIC from trauma-focused and trauma-sensitive approaches. Finally, a TIC certificate program illustrates how graduate student training and social work practice are enhanced by integrating trauma content into classroom and field settings.     

Women's Human Rights Activists as Cross-Cultural Theorists

In addition to offering a basis for the criticism of universal human rights theorizing and practice, women's experience contributes to universal human rights theory building. Women's human rights activists' insights provide the foundation for a theory of universal human rights that is cross-cultural and critical. In sharing their work and strategies, two online working groups of women's human rights activists demonstrate that a theory of universal human rights must offer both (1) common ground on which the parallel efforts of human rights activists around the world can be acknowledged and (2) recognition that though sometimes networked and integrated with those parallel efforts, activism for social change is local, and uses locally appropriate ways to promote women's human rights. Using a theoretical method that treats non-theoretical texts as important sources for theoretical insights, the article introduces an activist-authored cross-cultural theory of human rights, its assumptions, and its theoretical framework. Finally, it draws implications from the activists' theory for human rights scholars.     

Teaching Critical Perspectives: Analyses of Professional Practice in the Film Ladybird,Ladybird

This article presents three critical analyses of social work practice as depicted in Ken Loach's 1994 film Ladybird, Ladybird. The analyses are intended to serve as a teaching tool in a course on critical perspectives in social work. The tool applies the radical, feminist and postmodern critiques of social work practice to the depiction of the practice in the film. It seeks to contribute to a better understanding of those critical approaches that have developed within the social work profession and, in particular, to emphasize the relevance of these approaches to actual practice. The article explicitly endeavors to arouse debate and reflection on practice among social worker students and to encourage self‐criticism in order to further the development of anti‐oppressive social work practice.     

LEGITIMATING TRANSPHOBIA

Transgender persons are strangers to the law; or put more accurately, the legal imagination is so deeply entrenched in normative gender binarism as to effectively render transsexuals a ‘freakish’ anomaly to law. This essay attempts to offer a reflection on transgenderism, law and sexual crime from a human rights and criminal law perspective. It focuses on one of the most violent types of institution in society – the prison – and asks: what are the legal imagination and practice surrounding transgender prisoners as they are linked to social and cultural transphobia? What ‘human’ rights can be practiced for a dehumanized class? It first surveys the legal predicament of transgender prisoners in the US prison system in relation to Eighth Amendment rights provided by the US Constitution. The US situation has seen cases that have importantly shed light on other jurisdictions when engaging with the combined questions of prisoners’ rights and transgender rights together. The analysis is then taken to the context of Hong Kong prisons in a modest application. In contrast to some other Asian contexts (such as Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia), critical cultural studies of transgenderism are non-existent in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, human rights studies of the same have only emerged through the work of legal scholar Robyn Emerton. It is hoped that a rights-based approach will emerge in Hong Kong for the protection of transgender inmates from sexual violence in local correctional facilities.     

A Perspective on Critical Social Work

This paper articulates a perspective on critical social work that draws from poststructuralism and critical theory. Arguing that the critique of positivism, the unreliability of generalizations about humans, and the influence of new social movements have undermined the credibility of mainstream social work practice and theory, the author advocates the need for social work theory and practice that is predicated on social justice. The paper offers a critique of structuralist approaches to practice and then seeks to embed social work practice in epistemic responsibility and communicative responsibility.     

Innovating adult social work practice—learning from the Named Social Worker for adults with learning disabilities pilots

In 2016, following the publication of the vision for adult social work in England, the Chief Social Worker for Adults at the Department of Health in England announced the intention to pilot a new social work role—that being a Named Social Worker supporting people with learning disabilities. Phase 1 of the pilot has tested a reframing of the social work role as a relational practitioner with an expertise in human rights, freed from transacting the management of care. Phase 2 is now underway testing key knowledge and skills requirements for post-qualifying practice in the field of social work supporting adults with learning disabilities. Heuristic approaches are capturing outcomes from generative learning processes throughout the pilot. The insight emerging from this national pilot is that at its heart, named social work is about qualifying and on-going post-qualifying social work education which promotes and maintains practitioner reflexivity and connection to their social work values. We are finding that self-advocates may be a critical influencing factor, positively affecting the sources of resistance through making explicit the connection between social work values and lived experience of practice from the people social workers are there to serve.     

Spatial approaches to social work – theoretical foundations and implications for practice and research

ABSTRACT

Spatial approaches have inspired and grounded the social sciences and social geography already for a longer time. Beyond these models, the theory discourse on social work developed innovative concepts and models of socio-spatial approaches. They set a special focus on aspects of individual and social development, the concept of acquirement and emancipatory approaches to spatial design. For interventions, special methods for socio-spatial analyses were developed. This article reflects the main approaches of this theory discourse and asks for its key implications for social work practice and research.     

Vernacularization on the ground: local uses of global women's rights in Peru,China, India and the United States

The articles published in this special journal issue examine how global ideas about women's rights actually get used in four contexts – China, India, Peru and the United States. Our findings result from collaborative research conducted by teams in each country. We call the process of appropriation and local adoption of globally generated ideas and strategies vernacularization. In each country, vernacularization differed depending on the contents of the global women's rights packages at play, the work of vernacularizers and the different social positions they occupy, how human rights ideas are framed, the channels and technologies of transmission, and the local geographies of history and culture within which circulation and vernacularization take place. We find that vernacularization is a widespread practice that takes different forms in different kinds of organizations and in different cultural and historical contexts. Ongoing tensions between global and national rights ideas are quite common. Finally, our work brings to light two dilemmas in the way human rights are appropriated and used – a resonance dilemma and an advocacy dilemma – both arising from the disparity between human rights as law and human rights as a social movement.     

Critical social work and competency practice: a proposal to bridge theory and practice in the classroom

Social work education in North America is increasingly focused on competency criteria and micro skills training for future practitioners. Market forces are transforming the nature of social work practice in Canada, and social work regulators are concerned about the lack of evidence-based competencies in social work education. Since the Controlled Act of Psychotherapy was proclaimed in 2017, social work practitioners are in a position to offer psychotherapy services; as a result, universities are under greater pressure to shift to competency-based learning that meets the requirements of a regulated profession. This has raised concerns about the narrowing focus on critical social work theory in preparing students for practice. The divergence between anti-oppressive and direct practice schools is widening with the result that many students have difficulty bridging the gap between critical theory and competency-based practice. This paper attempts to integrate both traditions by offering students a course that directly links critical analysis of structural barriers and client centered interventions. The course is part of a developing critical competency curriculum that focuses on methods of facilitating empowerment and change in the helping process by articulating key relational components between service user and practitioner from a critical-competency perspective.     

Reconceptualizing Social Work Behaviors From a Human Rights Perspective

Although the human rights philosophy has relevance for many segments of the social work curriculum, the latest version of accreditation standards only includes a few behaviors specific to human rights. This deficit can be remedied by incorporating innovations found in the social work literature, which provides a wealth of material for reconceptualizing social work behaviors from a human rights perspective. This article summarizes these reconceptualizations and presents corresponding behaviors for courses addressing human behavior and the social environment, policy, practice, and research.     

Evidence-Based Practice: Current Issues and Future Directions

Abstract

Evidence-based practice approaches continue to increase in popularity in health and human service contexts in Australia and internationally. As social workers face pressures to evidence practice and justify outcomes, the limitations in applying an evidence-based practice approach to social work are confronted. The present paper identifies the features of evidence-based practice and notes the potential benefits and limitations of this approach in social work. Debates surrounding the nature of social work interventions, effectiveness and evidence are reviewed. The current context and climate influencing the use of research and other evidence in social work are discussed. The paper also considers the position of qualitative, interpretive and critical reflective approaches in relation to evidence-based practice. Issues for the future of evidence-based practice in social work are identified, including the need for the profession to examine more closely the relationship between critical reflective and evidence-based approaches to practice.     

The Apparent Conflict between Commitment to the Development of the Profession and the Imperatives of the Academy

It has been argued in a number of publications in the social work field that the current preoccupation with evidence-based practice is problematic, in that it offers a restricted and sometimes inappropriate understanding of the fundamentals of research in the social sciences. As a result social work and social care are at risk of deprivation of appropriate knowledge to inform practice. This article takes up this critique, in particular pointing out that the tendency for the debate to be reduced to one of competing (qualitative and quantitative) research methods is unhelpful. The issue is an epistemological one about the nature of knowledge and the authority of 'knowers'. The article gives examples of participatory approaches to research that start from a valuing of a range of kinds of knowledge. This opens the way for both quantitative and qualitative methods to have a place in social work research and social work education.