Making visible an invisible trade: Exploring the everyday experiences of doing social work and being a social worker

This paper focuses on qualitative findings on how young people in long-term foster care in Ireland 1 interpret permanence and stability. We focus principally on subjective and relational permanence, emphasising the significance of these concepts for social work, while extending some conceptual approaches to permanence. Importantly, findings from this study highlight conceptual gaps in how permanence and stability are conceptualised in research and we outline an approach which more fully embraces the multidimensionality of young people's life experiences and emotions. Recent studies underline that permanence encompasses several elements (e.g. ecological, legal). However, this paper extends current research in illustrating how Irish young people in foster care experience permanence and stability every day, and how these experiences embrace discursive, emotional and temporal dimensions.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the multi-dimensionality of permanence and stability: Emotions, experiences and temporality in young people’s discourses about long-term foster care in Ireland

Moran

McGregor

Devaney

2019

“…A growing number of social work and anthropology scholars have utilized ethnographic and phenomenological approaches to illuminate social workers’ experiences in child welfare work (Ferguson, 2014, 2018; Lee, 2016; Leigh, 2019; Leigh et al., 2020; Montigny, 2018; Smeeton, 2017; Smeeton and O’Connor, 2020; and Thompson et al., 2017). Most notably, Harry Ferguson (2018), draws on a 6-month ethnographic study to consider how social workers practice reflexivity in the field, particularly within highly stressful and potentially unsafe circumstances.…”

Section: Scholarly Cross-pollination: Reflexivity and Ethnographymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It explores how front-line workers navigate the phenomenological dimensions of casework—namely, the constant threat of delegitimization from the media, juvenile court personnel, or colleagues, and the crushing pressures of DCFS’ productivity standards. As various scholars have pointed out, such phenomena arise within a larger institutional climate of suspicion, scrutiny, and distrust—a climate that I experienced first-hand during my ethnographic fieldwork (Cook, 2020; Lee, 2016; Leigh et al., 2020; Leigh, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Audit culture, accountability, and care: A phenomenological anthropology of child welfare

Valenzuela

2021

Front-line child welfare workers have long since preoccupied social work, sociological, and anthropological scholarship. This article employs phenomenological anthropology to attend to the embodied, experiential, and sensorial dimensions of front-line child welfare work. However, rather than renew calls to improve casework through increased institutional support, resilience-building, or retention efforts, I draw on caseworkers’ lived experiences to engage in a critical examination of the state’s role as parens patriae. What do caseworkers’ experiences “on the inside” reveal about the state’s capacity to care—both for its own frontline staff and the families in its purview? How do such experiences problematize our understanding of state accountability? Ultimately, how can they shift the scholarly fixation on developing “better” workers who can accommodate the ever-increasing demands of casework, to a larger critique of the state’s ability to serve as “the guardian and ultimate guarantor of child welfare” ( Boyden, 2005 : 195)? By locating caseworkers’ experiences within a larger context of “audit culture”—a climate of suspicion and surveillance that forces workers to constantly account for their productivity and performance—this article problematizes the state’s model of accountability and care ( Shore and Wright, 2000 ). I argue that, in light of the toxic social dynamics it creates, “audit culture” is incommensurable with the state’s role as parens patriae.

Thoughts on files

Clapton

2021

With the benefit of an anthropological attention to the importance of ‘things’ and the relations between ourselves and things (‘artefacts’), this paper gives attention to the Social Work File. Despite the rise of electronic recording, social work archives remain full of thousands of files that are increasingly accessed, especially by those who have been in care, and physical file-keeping remains a regular feature of practice. There is already a body of literature relating to the information in social work files, however this paper shifts the focus from this to the nature and role of the File itself. ‘Hidden in plain sight’ but laden with meaning and capacity, I identify the little we know already about the file. The various ways files and their authors and subjects, can interact are explored together with the file’s symbolic properties and the power held by the file’s owner, and the ability of the file to ‘other’ its subject. Whilst we understand that the practice shapes the file, how might the file shape practice?