Applying Complexity and Emergence in Social Work Education

Complexity theory provides social work educators, researchers, and evaluators with a promising approach for examining the concepts of interconnectedness, non‐linearity and emergence. This paper introduces complexity theory, provides an example in which a large international non‐governmental organization developed the capacity to address the issue of human trafficking, and discusses implications for applying this approach to social work education coursework. Social work applications of complexity range from understanding emerging social movements, to encouraging human rights and resiliency in target populations, to understanding the interdependencies of communities.     

Outcharming crime in (D)urban space

This paper is an inquiry into the uses of space and emotions in the governance of urban dangers. Cities have always been affective assemblages, yet the role of both space and affect in the control of urban crime has dramatically changed over the century. What defines spatial urban management today, in Africa and elsewhere, are not the prohibitive, moralising or forcefully exclusionary techniques of the past; instead, the powers of seduction and atmosphere have gained pride of place and given rise to a regime of spatial management through flirty surfaces. Crime, according to security strategists and city makers in the South African city of Durban, can be literally charmed out from particular bubbles of governance. Urban practitioners do not search for the root causes of violent crime somewhere deep in the history of society, but rather in space itself, right at the city's surface. While part of a worldwide trend, this recent fascination with the charming aspects of space has a particularly strong South African dramatic. Governing through handsome space in South Africa is not simply a creation of beautiful illusions against the reality of pervasive violence, but a constant endeavour to re‐draw a troubled spatial history.     

Virtual Social Work Education—Theory and Experience

This paper critically analyses the experience of providing social work education over the Internet. It argues that the interactivity and responsivity integral to e‐learning are significant capabilities that can facilitate the kind of student centred learning in social work that is consonant with the emerging consensus on effective educational and professional practices. Associated with this it argues that e‐learning better provides equality of access and opportunity to a diverse range of students to pursue social work education through the creation of critical mass and technological adaptations to diverse needs. Research with a group of students who have pursued online learning is presented. The research indicates that though e‐learning is largely considered a positive and enabling experience by students, it is still experienced as isolating by most. A balance therefore needs to be struck in future between face to face and online interaction ensuring students are not isolated and that infrequent use of e‐learning does not delay engagement with the medium and the passing of online developmental milestones. This paper concludes that there is a longer term future for e‐learning within social work education but that this future needs to be based on androgenic constructivist strategies to student learning and a responsive blend of online and physical interactivity.     

Service User Involvement in Social Work Education: A Case Example

The financial resources provided by the General Social Care Council (GSCC) which supports the education and registration of social workers, has allowed for an increase in user involvement in social work programmes in England and Wales. This article discusses the sources of knowledge appropriate for social workers and social care workers including the significance of the service user knowledge base for social work theory and practice. A project is described which involved students in a consultation process with service users whose role it was to contribute to the students' learning in a particular area, specifically understanding their experience of social workers and the issues of discrimination which they faced and the processes which were helpful in resisting oppression.     

Firefighters across frontiers: two fire brigades cooperating in the Dutch–German borderland

This article focuses on boundaries as symbolic constructs to overcome structural impediments to cooperation in a borderland constituted by two nation states – Germany and the Netherlands – that, from a global perspective, may be regarded as close cultural neighbours. Empirically, the vicissitudes of cross‐border cooperation are analysed at the level of a Dutch and a German fire brigade in adjacent borderland villages. The diminishing visibility of borders does not necessarily lead to more openness, but gives rise to the emergence of socially constructed symbolical boundaries, which has major effects on issues of national identity and loyalty within organizations operating in trans‐border spaces. Cultural differences can complicate processes of transnational coordination, harmonization, and negotiation. However, cooperation and trust, based on an affinity with a local culture in borderlands, may provide a more stable fundament for successful common ventures than do regulations enacted by state authorities. Addressing the question of how processes of transnationalization affect inter‐organizational cooperation, this article describes and analyses the ways in which European integration, national bureaucracies and cultural similarities and differences form partly converging and partly conflicting forces in cooperative efforts in the Dutch–German borderland.     

“Koe wai hoki koe?!”, or “Who are you?!”: Issues of trust in cross‐cultural collaborative research

Abstract

Cross‐cultural research designs are increasingly employed in the New Zealand context to investigate a range of complex social and environmental issues. However, there is little guidance for researchers who work for mainstream organisations and hapū (subtribe(s)) and iwi (tribe(s)) on how to undertake cross‐cultural collaborative research. Trust is a key issue that makes cross‐cultural research possible and it is surprising that issues relating to trust have not featured widely in the literature. In this paper, we reflect on our experiences working cross‐culturally and collaboratively with a hapū in Northland, New Zealand. We discuss how a mainstream research organisation worked with a community health trust and developed a working relationship with a hapū, forming the basis of a community‐driven collaborative evaluation of a central government‐funded project. Key findings were the establishment of a tuākana‐tēina relationship (where teacher and learner are interchangeable) between the members of the collaborative research team and the employment of appropriate research methods to develop a research agenda that ensured everyone would benefit from the research.     

Weaving cohesive identities: New Zealand women talk as mothers and workers

Abstract

This exploratory study examines the discourses which construct women as mothers and workers and explores the strategies the women use to weave these sometimes contradictory identities together. Discourse analysis was used to explore the talk of two focus groups of first‐time mothers, all New Zealanders of European descent in stable heterosexual partnerships with babies aged less than six months. The women deployed an intensive mother discourse which privileged their maternal role and positioned the babies as needing parental care and mothers as the natural providers of that care. However, they also felt the pressure of successful woman and economic rationalist discourses in which paid work is essential to wellbeing and good citizenship while motherhood is devalued. The women's decisions about re‐entering the paid workforce were characterised by conflict and constraint. The analysis focuses on the strategies of resistance that the women used to warrant their life choices, including constructing motherhood as a job, and deploying an independent mother discourse which serves to facilitate their striving for the best of both worlds. Also explored are some of the structural barriers that serve to further limit women's choices.     

The solution of time‐dependent population models

We analyze the dynamics of age‐structured population renewal when vital rates make a transition in a finite time interval from arbitrary initial values to any specified final values. The general solution to the renewal equation in such cases is obtained. This solution describes the birth sequence explicitly, and also leads to a general formula for population momentum. We show that the duration of the transition determines the complexity of the solution for the birth sequence. For transitions that are completed in a time smaller than the maximum age of reproduction, we show that the classical Lotka solution found in every textbook also applies, with a small modification, to the time‐dependent case. Our results substantially extend previous work that has often focused on instantaneous transitions or on slow and infinitely persistent change in vital rates.     

The mathematics of sex and marriage,revisited

We analyze the problem of modeling marriages in a two‐sex model of population dynamics. We first deal with the problem of incomplete and inconsistent census data and then use a simulator to compare the performance of a variety of marriage functions in modeling births and couples during the ten‐year period between consecutive U.S. censuses. Unlike most empirical methods for comparing marriage functions based on goodness of fit, the differences in the projections of the various functions in our method are of the same magnitude (or even smaller) than the errors between the projected and real data. We observe that for the population of the United States, the harmonic mean function frequently found and used in the literature is a quite poor performer when compared with many other functions in the family we use.     

‘Autograph of a Nation’: The Daughters of the American Revolution and the National Old Trails Road, 1910–1927

In 1912, a group of women within the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) undertook to become architects of the first continuous transcontinental automobile route, to be called the ‘National Old Trails Road’ highway. Consistent with many of the private road improvement initiatives during the heyday of America's good roads movement, ‘Daughters’ in many states were involved in mapping the route and posing a variety of marking schemes that would etch upon the landscape the DAR's sponsorship of the route. In doing so, the Daughters staked an explicit claim for the DAR and for American women in the project of nation‐building, by promoting their National Old Trails Road as a culmination of Manifest Destiny. This episode highlights the interrelationship of gender and the nation. This article argues that while women function passively in nationalist rhetoric to symbolise the nation, one must also acknowledge the agency of conservative women's groups in constructing and perpetuating nationalist narratives in ways that were often surprisingly complex and not simply imitative of men.