And I Still Love Them: On Touching Loss

In this article, the author performs a re‐membering practice that incorporates a relational materialist theory. It traces the disturbances that follow in the wake of three deaths in her family. Written in an autoethnographic voice, the article is a polyphonic composition of the narrative therapy approach of re‐membering entangled with the spacetimematter of silence, speaking, sitting, staying, presence, absence, loss of momentum, dreams, trees, books, cardiac pace‐makers, writing, breath, ashes, murmuring, suffering. Thus, the dispersed agencies of bodies, human and non‐human, reinvigorate a linguistic practice and the author's personal and professional life.     

Curation: a theoretical treatment

Curation is a key mechanism of sociality in a digital era. With an abundance of information, sifting, sorting, selecting, hiding, and standing out become laborious tasks. While researchers have diligently documented people’s curatorial strategies, digital curation remains undertheorized in its own right. I therefore theorize digital curation by disentangling productive curation from consumptive curation, addressing how people curate content that they share, and that which they consume. I embed these agentic curatorial practices within structural bounds, both social and technological. In doing so, I offer a basic theoretical model that captures a dynamic relationship between individual curators, their social networks, and technological design.     

Visions and politics in the making of Stockholm's House of Culture: Institutional complexity within extraordinary projects

The aim of the article is to analyse and comprehend the interplay of institutional logics in the realisation of Stockholm's House of Culture, Kulturhuset, hereby beginning to answer the question of what role cultural logics play in cultural development projects. Based on an in-depth case study of the process leading up to the creation of Kulturhuset, the article explores the interplay of a politico-bureaucratic logic and a cultural–professional logic governing the evolution of the project. Following a Scandinavian tradition of interpretative studies of complex development projects, the making of Kulturhuset is framed as an extraordinary project involving a complicated development process. The process dynamics are explored and analysed through the lens of institutional complexity. The article's main contribution lies in its highlighting the interplay of – and nuancing the relation between – institutional logics. It also serves as a reminder of the power of bureaucratic ordering in urban development projects.     

Birth and initiation on the Peers Plantation: the problem of creolization in seventeenth-century Barbados

A central debate within slavery studies centers on the question of whether enslaved Africans ‘retained’ their cultures or became ‘creolized’ in the Americas. Focusing on two enslaved women and the six children they bore by their master in late seventeenth-century Barbados, this paper suggests how creolization operated in the early modern English Caribbean. The women and children were baptized and provided for in their master’s will. Yet they were also part of the plantation’s 180 strong West African enslaved population. Contextualizing all of the influences that shaped their experiences on Barbados, this paper examines naming, baptism, and birthing rituals to provide an account of the women’s lives that does not privilege either European or West African cultural practices. It argues that creolization was not a marker of identity, nor a unidirectional process of Europeanization, but rather a multivalent and multidirectional negotiation of cultural exchanges.     

Collaborative Approaches to Family Systems Supervision: Differentiation of Self

Many systems approaches speak to the importance of respectful mutual curiosity in supervision rather than linear teacher–learner didacticism. This paper provides an overview of collaborative approaches to supervision in family therapy. It then focuses on Bowen family systems and encouraging differentiation in the relationship process between supervisor and supervisee as a useful approach towards equal collaboration. The authors use case examples to illustrate what impedes and fosters mutuality in the supervision process where both supervisor and supervisee learn from each other.     

Education and training for social work: A response to Tony Novak

Novak's proposal (1995) that student social workers should be taught on the basis of how social work should be practised rather than how it actually is being practised within the current market economy, is challenged as an unhelpful ‘head in the sand’ approach to current dilemmas in social work education. The revised Diploma in Social Work (CCETSW, 1995a) is defended on the grounds that it prepares social workers for the jobs they will have to do on qualifying; that it retains a user-centred anti-racist and anti-discriminatory value basis and that, in spite of serious political threats, it remains rooted in higher education and emphasises the importance of holistic assessment and critical reflection in practice.     

Supporting Care Leavers to Fulfil their Educational Aspirations: Resilience,Relationships and Resistance to Help

Most children in state care do not do as well in school as their peers, but the period of leaving care and transition to adulthood may offer a ‘turning point’ for positive change. Based on a small study of care leavers in England, this article employs the concept of resilience to explore the significance of supportive relationships in enabling this group of young people to make decisions about their future and encouraging them to overcome setbacks in educational attainment.     

Ground Zero: reflections on trauma,in/distinction and response

This essay traces practices of tourism and memory at Ground Zero in New York in 2001 in an attempt to understand the perceived significance of what had happened and what it was that had been seen as traumatic. It describes the endless circling of the site, and the need for people to see for themselves. It argues that what happened included not just the impact of the planes but the collapse of the twin towers and the wound to the cityscape that followed. This exploration leads the paper to propose a more all‐embracing view of trauma, not as an injury to the flesh, to the psyche, to the community, or to the built environment, but as the name for an event where the very distinctions between body, psyche, community and environment are called into question. Practices that took place after 9.11 reveal how visitors and rescue workers sought, for example by taking photographs and in their insistent search for remains, to reinstate distinctions that had been obliterated, and how they struggled not only against the use of victims as a means that took place that day, but the ongoing instrumentalisation of life that takes place anyway under contemporary systems of sovereign power.