Roadmap to recovery: Reporting on a research taskforce supporting Indigenous responses to COVID‐19 in Australia

In April 2020 a Group of Eight Taskforce was convened, consisting of over 100 researchers, to provide independent, research‐based recommendations to the Commonwealth Government on a “Roadmap to Recovery” from COVID‐19. The report covered issues ranging from pandemic control and relaxation of social distancing measures, to well‐being and special considerations for vulnerable populations. Our work focused on the critical needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities; this paper presents an overview of our recommendations to the Roadmap report. In addressing the global challenges posed by pandemics for citizens around the world, Indigenous people are recognised as highly vulnerable. At the time of writing Australia's First Nations Peoples have been largely spared from COVID‐19 in comparison to other Indigenous populations globally. Our recommendations emphasise self‐determination and equitable needs‐based funding to support Indigenous communities to recover from COVID‐19, addressing persistent overcrowded housing, and a focus on workforce, especially for regional and remote communities. These latter two issues have been highlighted as major issues of risk for Indigenous communities in Australia It remains to be seen how governments across Australia take up these recommendations to support Indigenous peoples' health and healing journey through yet another, potentially catastrophic, health crisis.     

Reflection on action: The process of helping social work students to develop their use of theory in practice

Over the years, college and practice-based social work teachers have been expected to help social work students to relate or integrate theory and practice, to transfer knowledge and/or to be a reflective practitioner. This paper first seeks to unpick and clarify what integrating theory and practice actually means and then goes on to suggest a model for exploring the use of theory in practice which a practice teacher could use with students in supervision.     

Implementing human resource development best practices: Replication or re-creation?

Abstract

Firms increasingly introduce HRD ‘best practices’ developed somewhere else, but results often fall short of expectations. Much of existing theory fails to guide the implementation of HRD best practices because it does not recognize how introduced practices interact with existing practices in the firm. In this paper, we contrast the dominant perspective ‘Implementation as Replication’ with a perspective of ‘Implementation as Re-creation’. Through four stages of the implementation process, we identify and discuss how these contrasting perspectives yield different implications for how firms go about introducing HRD best practices. First, when firms take up a practice, is this a process of adoption or translation? Second, is it assumed that new knowledge can be implanted directly and lead to new behaviour, or is active experimentation a necessary precondition to gain new knowledge? Third, are deviations from the intended plan considered errors to be corrected or sources for learning? Fourth, are introduced best practices treated in isolation or as integral parts of the firm's management system? We argue that implementation efforts guided by the re-creation perspective increase the prospects of HRD best practices succeeding as a useful tool in the receiving firm.     

Visual sociology: A practical pedagogy

As a part of an organisational sociological study of Danish film projects, I followed the development of a feature film over a one-year period in 2006–2007. Coincidentally, this film came to be about a drama in the academic world. Thus, while I researched the filmmakers, they investigated life in Academia, using me as an informant. In that way, the positions of researcher and informants were turned upside-down. Or rather, a two-way relation of mutual investigations was introduced between the filmmakers and me. In the empirical analysis of the filmmaker's work, I employ the concept of symmetrical ethnography, which has been introduced by the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Vivieros de Castro in an attempt to equalise the knowledge practices of informants to those of ethnographers. Vivieros de Castro suggests that such symmetry entails a turn from epistemology to ontology. Hence I discuss whether the filmmakers’ work can be seen as an invention of ontologies. Whereas studies in organisational aesthetics and sociological appraisals of documentaries within visual sociology have a tendency to compare art to academic work, I suggest looking into the filmmakers’ ‘point of view on point of view’, suggesting that the filmmakers and I may not be representing the same world differently but representing different worlds.     

A retrospective visual study of social change: the pulp-logging industry in an Upper Peninsula Michigan county1

This article outlines a strategy for reconstructing and visually documenting social change after the change is already largely completed. The example used is the pulp-logging industry in Ontonagon County, Michigan, in which change occurred slowly until 1970–1985, when a profound transformation took place.     

Confidence and the effectiveness of creative methods in qualitative interviews with adults

ABSTRACT

This paper examines two contrasting creative methods; a drawing task and a LEGO building task used in a study exploring the gap between policy and practice in widening participation to higher education across two different types of university in England. These creative methods were used within 16 semi-structured interviews in seven universities to attempt to explore deeper understandings of everyday policy and what they mean in practice and to make comparisons across types of institutions. This paper examines the role that creative confidence played in the effectiveness of both methods through exploring the successes and failures of each arguing that understanding these barriers can improve the successful use of these methods, especially with adults. When these barriers are overcome, the paper also demonstrates how creative methods encouraged more reflective discussion of everyday issues, increased levels of rapport, and shared engagement in the interview process.