This article presents a genealogy of social work approaches to sexuality via critical examination of the relevance of queer and post-queer theory. The key tenets of queer theory are outlined before the authors go on to assess how social work has responded to this body of work. The authors offer some critical comments on social work's engagement with queer theory before moving on to discuss a range of post-queer developments, focused on race, empire, the neoliberal state, class, austerity, gender and anti -normativity.As social work has yet to engage with post-queer theory, the authors assess some of its key contributions and, finally, discuss their suggestions for ways in which this literature might offer opportunities for the reinvigoration of research, theory and practice in the contemporary field of social work and sexuality.
A B S T R AC TThere has been a shift towards social workers in many areas of the UK being based in large open plan offices and working more flexibly and remotely in space. This approach is commonly referred to as 'agile working'. The paper explores the impact of agile working on social workers' practices and experiences in office spaces. It discusses data from an ethnographic study of children's safeguarding social work teams in two locations. One team was based in a large open plan office and was engaged in agile working, the other team was located in a much smaller office and was not using this approach. Data from observations of practice, analysis of material spaces, and interviews with social workers and those responsible for planning office space are examined. The paper concludes that there are qualitative differences between such spaces which are due to agile working arrangements and which are likely to impact significantly on social workers' experiences of practice, interactions with colleagues and development of practice knowledge. The data also suggest a lack of understanding in social work of the spatial requirements of practitioners and the significance that private and open space has for children's social work in the current UK context.
This article presents findings from an ethnographic study of child protection social workers in Britain, which explored social workers’ experiences of and practices in space and place. It draws on data from interviews with practitioners and observations that were carried out as social workers moved around the places (the town, estates, streets and areas around service users’ homes) where they worked. It focuses on the significance of a particular affective experience, the uncanny, which social workers evoked in many of their accounts of these places. The article introduces recent conceptualisations of space, affect and the uncanny before going on to consider data from the interviews. The following themes are explored: the relationships between the intimate spaces of service users’ homes and the neighbourhoods in which they were located; social workers’ accounts of feeling vulnerable in public and open spaces; social workers’ experiences of feeling unsettled by apparently mundane features of neighbourhood spaces. The article draws on critical engagements with the uncanny to consider its significance for child protection social work practice in Britain and its consequences in terms of social workers’ potential to work in emplaced and locally sensitive ways.
Agile working (flexibility about where and when practitioners do their work) is increasingly common across public sector social work, but there has been little research about how practitioners engage with it or its impacts on communication between social workers, their colleagues and the families with whom they work. This article presents findings from an ethnographic study of a children’s safeguarding social work team in an English local authority who were engaged in agile working. It draws on data from observations, local authority documents, semi-structured interviews, participant research diaries, participants’ photographs and the researcher’s photographs taken during fieldwork. An analytical frame drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s concept of spatial dialectics and Wanda Orlikowski’s concept of sociomateriality is used to identify how agile working involves entanglements of practitioners and families with restructured office spaces, digital information systems and mobile devices such as convertible laptop–tablet computers and mobile phones. Innovations such as these are commonly understood as promoting more effective and transparent social work practice, but the study’s data show that entanglements between workspaces, digital devices and people in practice are having multiple effects, producing new hierarchies of belonging in space, shaping what can be communicated, and the ways it can be presented and received. The article argues for critical attention to the role of material space in digital and place-based innovations in social work practice.
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