Theory for Social Work Practice. Ruth Elizabeth Smalley. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967. 326 pp. $7.50 Hardbound

Study findings suggest that selective processes and graduate education combine to produce a professional social worker who has a favorable orientation toward public dependency. Previous studies which found no relation between graduate education and value change or which found a negative relation, may be explained on the basis that the values studied may not have found expression in the curriculum or were diluted in strength because they competed with other cherished values.     

Looking Forward,Looking Back: Collective Memory and Neighborhood Identity in Two Urban Parks

Collective memory and narratives of local history shape the ways people imagine a neighborhood's present situation and future development, processes that reflect tensions related to identity and struggles over resources. Using an urban culturalist lens and a focus on collective representations of place, I compare two nearby New York parks to uncover why, despite many similarities, they support different patterns of meaning making and use. Drawing on ethnographic observation, interviews, and secondary analysis, I show that multi‐vocal and fragmented contexts of collective memory help explain the uneven nature of gentrification processes, with one park serving as its cultural fulcrum while the other is left at the sidelines.     

Infusing Financial Capability and Asset Building Content Into a Community Organizing Class

As social work’s fight for social and economic justice returns to its historical attention to finances, faculty are called to infuse financial capability and asset building (FCAB) content into their classes. Given few published models, this study contributes a redesign that infuses FCAB in a community organization course, with additional attention to Fink’s taxonomy of significant learning experiences. Results of a pre- and posttest survey suggest an overall pattern of students’ increased interest in further learning about FCAB, understanding its importance to social work, confidence about helping clients with FCAB, likelihood of offering to help a client to manage her or his household finances, and changes to students’ own financial practices.     

Visions of Public Space: Reproducing and Resisting Social Hierarchies in a Community Garden

Urban public spaces are sites of struggles over gentrification. In increasingly diverse cities, these public spaces also host interactions among people of different class, race, ethnicity, and immigration status. How do people share public spaces in contexts of diversity and gentrification? I analyze the conflicting ways of imagining shared spaces by drawing on an ethnographic study of a community garden in a diverse and gentrifying neighborhood in New York City, conducted between 2011 and 2013. I examine how conflicts among gardeners about the aesthetics of the garden and norms of conduct reproduce larger gentrification struggles over culture and resources. Those who wanted the garden to be a lush and orderly space drew on their privilege and resources to leverage support from institutional actors and push through a vision that resonated with aesthetic preferences of affluent residents and developers. At the same time, I found that the diversity, combined with several other characteristics, created openings for cultural disruption. Utilizing relationships built across dramatic lines of class, race, and immigration difference, less privileged gardeners were able to destabilize hierarchies and defend their visions of this public space. Conflict and messy deliberation—rather than harmonious community—facilitated engagement with difference.     

Adolescence and Youth among Displaced Ethiopians: A Case Study in Kaliti Camp

The effects of trauma on adolescent mental health were studied via ethnographic fieldwork and the application of psychological testing. A random sampling of 108 war-traumatized subjects (68 male and 40 female) was given the Trauma Event subscale of the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire and the Symptom Check List 90-Revised. More than 90% of the sample lost their property, 70% suffered extreme thirst, and more than a third witnessed death. They had all been living for the past six years in an extremely poor camp for the displaced. Yet, the psychopathology of the group was considerably less than expected. The authors attributed this to the adolescents' appraisal of the particular circumstances of their lives. They compared their poverty with other Ethiopians, and they compared their relative freedom given to them by their community with the adolescence of their parents and of other Ethiopians. The openness of the community in allowing adolescents to live outside of traditional norms was particularly salient for the females. The authors concluded that situational and circumstantial factors must be considered in assessing the mental health of war-traumatized adolescents.