Developing and Maintaining Foster Family Identity Through Foster Parents’ Identity Work

There are hundreds of thousands of children in foster care in the United States, nearly a majority of whom are placed with nonrelative foster parents (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2015). Few scholars (e.g., Nelson, 2014) have explored the communicative process through which a sense of family is created and maintained in foster families, despite the potential positive impact that developing a foster family identity may have on foster family functioning. The purpose of the present study was to understand the communicative strategies that foster parents use to create family identity. Data from interviews with 18 current and former foster parents revealed that through their talk inside and outside of the family, foster parents engaged in integrating biological and foster families, ritualizing, explaining, labeling family roles, and reframing. I discuss the importance of these findings for foster families.     

Dynamic social security: A framework for directing change and extending coverage

The developmental path of social security organizations has typically been one of incremental but steady adaptation in order to realize improvements in organizational performance and desired social security programme outcomes. In the evolving context of ageing society and globalization, there is increasing pressure for further and more rapid adaptation. To this end, this article proposes a unifying framework for action to help all social security organizations better realize improvements in performance and desired programme outcomes. This proposed framework is called "dynamic social security". By seeking to link social security organizations' aspirations and actions more closely and positively with those of economies and society, the aim is to help better realize, at least, a basic level of social security for all.     

Criteria families use to select nursing homes

The study is conducted to determine families' rankings of characteristics they consider most important when selecting a nursing home. Friedman's two-way analysis of variance is used to test for differences in the rankings. In response to a mailed survey, 231 families rank the characteristics in the following order: quality of care, appearance, atmosphere, location, reputation, building safety, quality of food, cost, and activities. Relationships are also found between the rankings and the demographic characteristics: gender, marital status, education, income, number of homes available, patient/respondent relationship, and distance respondent lived from the chosen home.     

Erotic pedagogies

This article considers the role of Audre Lorde's notion of the erotic as transformative pedagogical practices that can empower teachers and students to passionate learning and community formation. I argue that the erotic has been contained within the private sphere under neoliberalism through its articulation to heterosexuality, Whiteness, and U.S. exceptionalism. Neoliberalism contains the transformative potential of queer, feminist, and antiracist movements through circumscribing the transformative power of the erotic. When the erotic appears within the realm of the public sphere, it is articulated through the pornographic-as against the seemingly progressive agenda of neoliberalism-in order to contain its transformative effects. I then consider what it may look like, as well as what pitfalls we may face, if we engage in erotic pedagogy. I argue that the healing of the mind/body split goes beyond an intellectual exercise. Therein lies transformative power to heal both the political and the spiritual body.     

Exploring the Nexus Between Social Work and the Environment

Abstract

Within social work discourse, “the environment” seems inevitably to refer to the sociocultural environment. Such a focus reflects the domain that social work has defined for itself through various codes of ethics, as well as the theory and practice focus of social workers. Over a long period of time, doubt has gradually been dispelled about the effect that humankind has had on the environment, and it is now largely accepted that global warming has an anthropogenic basis. The present paper examines the place of social work in a world that is trying to come to terms with various ecological disasters, not the least of which is climate change. Social work is cast as a profession that needs to become more aware of the ways in which society is embedded in the natural world and our physical environment as a whole. The issue of social sustainability is explored as a focus for the relevance of social work knowledge and practice in this time of environmental crisis.