Public Documents and Legislation: The South Australian Juvenile Courts Act, 1971, and Community Welfare Act, 1972

Abstract

This study of social work practice and disability follows the history of two fields of disability: mental illness and intellectual disability. Of particular interest are two key policy influences in the disability sector, deinstitutionalisation and normalisation. The extent to which deinstitutionalisation and normalisation have brought real benefit to people with disabilities is examined from social workers' perspectives. The implementation of these policies and practices on the daily work of social workers is discussed. This research indicates that social work practice in these two fields involves significantly different foci and approach. The study found that the similarities and differences between the two fields of practice are influenced by the historical and contemporary developments in the care and control of people with disabilities.     

"That's When the Neighborhood Went South": How Middle Class Blacks and Whites Police Racial Boundaries of Stigmatized Blackness

Drawing on evidence from a case study of a racially transitioning suburb of Chicago, we argue that both blacks and whites discursively form, maintain, protect, and navigate contradictory class and racial identities. The interactions between race and class are complex, but how do these complexities manifest themselves? We contend that racial groups utilize discursive storytelling to maintain boundaries, and that this is one of the ways in which racial and class inequalities are created and preserved. Furthermore, we explore the interworking of race and class, focusing on how class location helps mediate self-proclaimed middle class blacks’ and whites’ discourse on stigmatized forms of blackness. We conclude with a discussion of the sociological implications of this boundary maintenance, focusing on the ways in which whites and blacks in the middle class utilize various forms of capital to preserve status and power.     

Approximation for maximizing monotone non-decreasing set functions with a greedy method

We study the problem of maximizing a monotone non-decreasing function \(f\) subject to a matroid constraint. Fisher, Nemhauser and Wolsey have shown that, if \(f\) is submodular, the greedy algorithm will find a solution with value at least \(\frac{1}{2}\) of the optimal value under a general matroid constraint and at least \(1-\frac{1}{e}\) of the optimal value under a uniform matroid \((\mathcal {M} = (X,\mathcal {I})\), \(\mathcal {I} = \{ S \subseteq X: |S| \le k\}\)) constraint. In this paper, we show that the greedy algorithm can find a solution with value at least \(\frac{1}{1+\mu }\) of the optimum value for a general monotone non-decreasing function with a general matroid constraint, where \(\mu = \alpha \), if \(0 \le \alpha \le 1\); \(\mu = \frac{\alpha ^K(1-\alpha ^K)}{K(1-\alpha )}\) if \(\alpha > 1\); here \(\alpha \) is a constant representing the “elemental curvature” of \(f\), and \(K\) is the cardinality of the largest maximal independent sets. We also show that the greedy algorithm can achieve a \(1 - (\frac{\alpha + \cdots + \alpha ^{k-1}}{1+\alpha + \cdots + \alpha ^{k-1}})^k\) approximation under a uniform matroid constraint. Under this unified \(\alpha \)-classification, submodular functions arise as the special case \(0 \le \alpha \le 1\).     

Philosophes of the Conservative Nation: Burke, Macaulay, Disraeli

The argument here concerns the myths of the English, and of English history; it suggests that myths of providential England were powerful elements in twentieth-century British political life. Most of all, they powerfully informed Conservative conceptions of civilization, though they also exerted a wider political influence. The essay explores the invention of these myths in three pre-eminent writers: Burke, Macaulay, and Disraeli, and suggests that from their writings emerged a system of narration which came to be 'remembered' as the founding myth of the political nation — the conservative nation — in the twentieth century. By the time of mass democracy, the partisan divisions (between Whig and Tory) had been forgotten in favour of a wider cultural 'transformism,' which did much to cement the emerging coalition of landed and bourgeois politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the process, the very nature of politics itself came to be redefined.     

Towards an interactional approach to reflective practice in social work

Reflective practice is a key aspiration within social work; being a reflective practitioner is considered to be a foundational attribute of the social work professional. However, achieving reflective practice is not straightforward. Reflection is inevitably subject to issues of memory and recall, so that the recollection of a case is likely to differ in important ways from the original instance. Moreover, giving an account of an event to one's peers or supervisors involves aspects of justification and self-presentation that may emphasise selectively and ignore key details of the original event, whether through a process of conscious omission or subconscious forgetting. This article reports on a knowledge exchange project that sought to enhance criminal justice social workers’ reflective practice through the use of the Conversation Analytic Role-play Method, an approach that is methodologically and theoretically grounded in the study of talk-in-interaction, drawing on video re-enactments of real encounters between practitioners and service users. We argue that by engaging collaboratively in this way, the practitioners and researchers learned a great deal about how practice in criminal justice social work is ‘done’ and also about the wider context within which criminal justice social work is practised.     

Knowledge translation strategies in a community–university partnership: examining local Quality of Life (QoL)

There is a growing interest in quality of life as an integrated approach to addressing key social, environmental and economic determinants of health. The University of Saskatchewan’s Community-University Institute for Social Research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (grant #410-2004-0669) has examined the process and results of a multi-stakeholder approach to the ongoing sustainability of Saskatoon, Canada as a healthy city with an improving and a more equitably distributed quality of life. Using quantitative and qualitative analysis, together with GIS technology, this research has examined the quality of life across three locales in Saskatoon—representing Low, Middle and High socio-economic status in both 2001 and 2004. The participatory action research approach used in this work ensures the value of the outputs to the stakeholders. Given the strong recognition of the importance of interfacing policy, research and community, and the growing impatience with the limited application of research findings to social and health practices and policies, this project has undertaken four major knowledge translation/transfer strategies, above and beyond the traditional academic channels: (1) engagement of local media on a consistent basis, (2) implementing community policy forums to ensure continued community readiness and uptake, (3) facilitation of and successful functioning of a steering committee, and (4) employment of an action researcher to operate as a policy entrepreneur. This paper will review and discuss each of these strategies and outline the evaluative research being done to document the success of these strategies.

Mental & Social Diagnosis and the English Prison Commission 1914–1939

In this article the author argues that there was a strengthening optimism about the value of psychological treatment between 1914 and 1939 amongst medical personnel employed by the English Prison Commission. This optimism contrasted with the pessimistic eugenic notion that there was an increasing and unreformable underclass which transmitted its inferior mental and physical characteristics biologically. Prison Commission medical staff became openly critical of eugenic proposals during the interwar years and, advised by a number of its medical personnel such as medical inspector and later Medical Commissioner William Norwood East, the Prison Commission was influenced towards the mental hygienism advocated by a growing number of American and British clinicians. Fherefore the Commission initiated a number of experiments in psychological treatment and psychoanalysis in English prisons.