While the food movement includes many critical positive initiatives, it shows little recognition of the labor contributions of the farmworkers who produce the food. A visit to a few local towns in western Michigan revealed farmworkers are invisible in “farm to table” tropes. A study was undertaken to explore farmworkers and their living conditions, and the links between their local invisibility and historic, political, and global processes. Using ethnographic fieldwork, the author visited housing camps, spoke with farmworkers, rode along with outreach workers, and volunteered at migrant summer schools. A framework of structural violence informed the analysis. The findings include descriptions of migrant housing camps, in which migrants face substandard and overcrowded conditions, and their placement in hard to access locations. The study describes how outreach is conducted, highlighting strategies and methods outreach staff/interns use to connect with farmworkers in labor camps, taking information and services directly to them, sensitive to their circumstances, which include limited time availability and communal living conditions. The study also highlights the invisible faciality of farmworkers locally and in international agribusiness restructuring and concludes with a discussion on the role of social work in increasing farmworkers’ visibility in the food movement and practice.

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Summary Outreach is an important element of social care. It is an informal but planned form of on-site service delivery to vulnerable populations. Outreach affects some target populations, such as migrant farmworkers, immensely. Outreach staff demonstrate a unique capacity to navigate remote and hard to -to-reach areas, making contact with farmworkers who would otherwise not receive essential services. This ethnographic study describes how organizations make first contact with farmworkers in normal times, and the changes to outreach observed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings Outreach workers connect, interact, and provide services to farmworkers in unique settings and situations. The general components of farmworker outreach are planning, engaging, improvising, and initiating services. During the pandemic, the changes observed were a sense of urgency to serve farmworkers, and adaptations in the modality of outreach to include a focus on health, collaboration with health clinicians, and the use of social media to contact farmworkers. Applications Outreach matters to farmworkers and other groups that are secluded, isolated, and vulnerable to abuse. In crisis times, such as the pandemic, outreach is even more vital. Hence, outreach, including the skills required t o conduct outreach, should form part of social work curriculum. Different models and outreach components should be evaluated to assess whether organizations providing outreach services to target populations deliver results beyond immediate benefits and contribute to structural change and advocacy on behalf of them.

Examining the results of the ''narrative turn'' in social work in their seminal article for Qualitative Research in 2005, Riessman and Quinney found themselves disappointed with the size and quality of the research corpus they reviewed. However, they also identified three exemplars of promising work, including the research of Faye Martin (Martin, 1998). Riessman and Quinney highlighted Martin's narrative-gathering strategy, devised on the basis of her practice experience and dubbed ''direct scribing.'' The direct scribing method of narrative data collection disciplines the work of the researcher, who becomes the ''scribe,'' and elaborates the roles of the interviewees as authors of the narratives that they create. This article on capturing (and being captured by) the narratives of marginalized young people is situated in an increasingly significant movement in the social work literature that promotes giving voice to young people, so that they may have their views taken into account. We highlight the benefits of direct scribing as a means of narrative-gathering in social work and then address the challenge of interpreting these narratives, drawing on examples from our research. We suggest connections between direct scribing and the interpretive approach of dialogic narrative analysis as a method of interpretation that requires ''letting stories breathe.'' (Frank, 2010). The aim of this contribution is to describe specific ways in which linking direct scribing and dialogical narrative analysis may contribute to the advancement of narrative research in social work, and, in particular, to the enhancement of efforts to amplify ''youth voice'' in social work policy and practice.

This article highlights the use of direct scribing to gather special education narratives of homeless youth. Direct scribing is a method of qualitative research developed in child welfare practice and adapted for research with foster youth. Its strengths include offering voice, power, and ownership of narratives to participants using minimal technology and the framework of narrativity. The article improves on the rigor of this method, highlighting considerations about ''working up'' or attention to interactional processes leading up to direct scribing, and the need to offer narrative power to participants. It offers a different take on interview practices including eye contact, listening, and the use of a computer screen as an interface. Through an extensive illumination of the narrativity of one participant, the preparation, process, and outcome of direct scribing are highlighted. The fit between social work values and this method is in keeping with advancing an anti-oppressive focus in research and practice.