Limiting relationships through sousveillance video based digital advocacy: multi-modal analysis of The Nervous CPS Worker

ABSTRACT

Digital media technology and Internet-based/social media sharing are shifting the contexts and processes of social work, including the relationships emerging in practice. The Nervous CPS Worker, a digital video shared via YouTube, provides a concrete practice-based example of the use of social media self-advocacy by professional foster parents. This case-study demonstrates the fragmented and shifting power-relations brought to bear within contemporary social work. Multi-modal analysis facilitates the development of a layered qualitative understanding of this video, shaped by the researcher’s inter-textual relationship with the material. Supplemental online texts are applied to the Nervous CPS Worker and relevant scholarship, including discipline specific knowledge, reveals the layered and convergent meaning making processes present in this video through the use of auditory communication, visual representations and genre. Analysis demonstrates how contemporary social work contexts, such as neoliberalism, and standardisation are implicated in practice and how identity and context compete for recognition and space within the home visit depicted in this video.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• multi-modal analysis
• sousveillance
• digital advocacy
• Social Work

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Searches conducted within the YouTube search infrastructure using the terms: ‘child+welfare+worker+visit’, ‘social+worker+homevisit’, ‘CPS+visit’, ‘child+protection+worker+visit’, ‘Social+workers+at+the+door’. This search is limited to English language videos.

2. See: La Rose (2013). Reading YouTube for Social Work. Ph.D. Dissertation University of Toronto.

3. By University of Toronto (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education) Research Ethics Board.

4. The Blog posts created by Katie and Jeff Bettendorf are now archived and can be accessed online through the site ‘Wayback Machine’. The citation included in this paper references both the original URL used when this research was initially completed and the Wayback Machine URL. Some blog postings archived on the ‘Wayback Machine’ are incomplete.

5. HRT stands for Human Resource Training, however, the organisation represents itself as HRT in promotional literature.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tara La Rose

Tara La Rose is an Assistant Professor and Associate Graduate Chair of the Master of Social Work Critical Leadership in Social Services and Communities.  Her research interests focus on professional identity and work-life, critical perspectives on leadership, and use of digital media as a space for critical reflexivity.