This article explores the link between ethical issues and inequalities in social work, ethnographic research processes. It suggests that, although the issue of inequality in social work research has been well documented, it has not been analyzed sufficiently as an ethically important factor in the building and maintaining of research relationships and consequently in the production of knowledge. Furthermore, it discusses how equality and social justice can be promoted in social work research, at both a practical and ideological level, and it aims to investigate how socioeconomic and gender inequalities between the researcher and research participants can lead to epistemological inequalities and can affect knowledge production from an ethical perspective.
This article addresses the complexities and dynamics of promoting social change with marginalised communities in the Global South. It builds empirically on a social work ethnographic study about the change process(es) and development of women’s social position in rural Nepalese communities. The research results suggest that the tools to promote ethically sustainable social change are based on decolonial and transnational feminist solidarity and its different, overlapping forms: solidarity through dialogue, alliance and exchange. The study argues that international social work and community development need to strengthen the approaches that recognise and deconstruct white and economic power dominance within their research, theory and practice. The research produces knowledge on a context-sensitive transnational solidarity praxis, which contributes to the discussion on social justice and ethicality in international development and social work paradigms.
This article analyses the 'European refugee crisis' in the context of Northern Finland, building on the concepts of exceptionality and affect. Conventionally, exceptionality is conceptualised from the perspective of the state that does not enable analysing exceptional situations in their broader social context. A shift in focus is required to understand how people perceive and experience exceptionality and what kinds of affects this involves. Based on participatory engagement and in-depth interviews with asylum-seekers living in reception centres in Northern Finland and local residents in their neighbourhood, our analysis demonstrates that exceptionality gains diverse meanings in different contexts. We propose affective exceptionality as a conceptual tool for analysing affects in transformational situations in which people's sense of the 'normal' becomes disrupted and illustrate how placing emphasis on subjects who experience and embody exceptionality in their everyday lives enables a more nuanced understanding of exceptionality, centralising the people instead of the state.
This article discusses how art-based research can function as a decolonizing research method. Its analysis is based on the collaboration of social work and art education disciplines for advancing social justice and deconstructing power dominances. Empirically, the research builds on a participatory theatre project, “My Stage,” with immigrant women. The project was established as part of a larger interdisciplinary project, “Art Gear,” in Northern Finland, which promoted the bidirectional integration of the local population and people with immigrant backgrounds. The research data were collected through participatory observation and reflective discussions by the social work researcher in the theatre workshops. By the analysis of an interdisciplinary team of social work and art education researchers, we develop a context-sensitive framework of art-based research to advance decolonizing research methods, which contribute to supporting the agency and inclusion of marginalized populations in research and in their integration processes at times of complex and rapid demographic and societal changes.
This paper analyses social workers' moral agency in addressing child abuse and neglect. We argue that ethically sound social work requires the capacity to exercise strong, multidimensional moral agency. The contribution is based on a qualitative interpretative meta-synthesis of four studies representing different forms of child abuse and neglect in varied contexts. Drawing on our analysis, we identify three thematic categories of moral considerations in terms of social workers' moral work in addressing child
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