This special issue is dedicated to Professor Birgit Rommelspacher (1945–2015), leading researcher and educator on diversity, anti-oppression and the cultures of dominance in social work and social sciences
This issue of the European Journal of Social Work brings a selection of papers presented at the Fifth European Conference on Social Work Research in 2015, entitled Re-visioning social work with individuals, collectives and communities: social work research. The conference, which I had the honour to chair, was organized by the local committee of the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Social Work and the European Social Work Research Association. Since then, the world, and Europe with it, has become economically, socially, politically and environmentally an even more unjust and dangerous place. Not only for the poor and the structurally disadvantaged – the traditional clientele of social work – but also for the refugees who are desperately fleeing wars, hunger and death and are, because of governmental managerial regimes that prevent mobility, dying along and at the European borders; for the local people and tourists in the most beautiful European cities that are met with horrors of terrorism; for the people who experience natural disasters across the world; for the middle class who find their livelihoods shrinking at the edge of Branko Milanovic’s elephant trunk’s curve. Many social work scholars who have long contemplated political conflicts, wars, ecological and unemployment-leading-to-poverty disasters have been proven prophetic in their analyses. As Guy Standing argued in his keynote speech at the conference, towering global inequalities, the precarization of work and lives, and increasing economic insecurity translate into an opportunity for racism, xenophobia and populism. The transforming, and at times collapsing, structures of our societies pose new, complex problems, and recast the old ones. This special issue was compiled around the idea, indeed the necessity, to give voice to those social work academics who are looking for new perspectives with both a sense of urgency and an acute analytical propensity, and are in quest for effective, inclusive and ethically just social work services, reflexive, critical and broad social work education, and an internationally oriented social work as a human rights profession.
Included in the volume are four keynote speeches presented at the conference. Sadly, Birgit Rommelspacher died just days before she could deliver hers; the editor and the authors dedicate this special issue to her unique contribution to social work theory and practice. Her keynote lecture on religion and welfare discusses one of the cutting edge issues of our time: the growing re-traditionalization and ‘cultural re-Christianization’ of European societies, and the growing numbers of social services run by religious institutions. Social processes as dictated by neoliberal ideology, and the all-encompassing privatization of assets, institutions and services cause disorientation in people in an increasingly atomized and insecure world in which the appeal to Christians to ‘reaffirm their collective identity’ in the face of rising numbers of Muslims in Europe finds fertile ground. Birgit addressed the ensuing controversies in social work: professionalization versus faith; the anti-egalitarian agenda of religion-based social services; the vastly different moral bases and priorities between professional-secular versus religion-based social work services.
The leading scholar in the field of comparative history of European social work, Sabine Hering, shows in her keynote address that international comparative studies are an old endeavour in social work, which goes back to mid-nineteenth century. At the time, the internationalization of social problems shaped both social reforms and the practice and theory of social work. As early as 1928, these processes transformed the ‘comparative exchange of social ideas and practice models to comparative research as a framework for worldwide progress of welfare’. Today, similarities and differences in the practice of social work remain a necessary, but also an increasingly challenging task: some countries lack empirical studies that would yield to such comparison; the language barriers still exist; and the disruptors in evolving social work theory and practice remain numerous and diverse. Nevertheless, comparative work is crucial in endeavours to overcome the political, social and symbolic divisions between the West and the East.
The contribution of the third keynote speaker, Michal Krumer-Nevo, calls against the depolitization of social work in favour of recognizing poverty as a political phenomenon that social work theory, research and practice need to address. The author argues that social work is not and cannot be value-free, much less politically neutral and must not pretend to bogus objectivity. Presented is the groundwork of what she terms a ‘Poverty-Aware Social Work Paradigm’, building on a structural analysis of poverty and recognizing the social work practitioner as the central agent. The author suggests that the notions of social and cultural capital can profitably be used in micro-level analyses of poverty. The article reminds us just how exclusion, discrimination and oppression conspire to create social hierarchies that are subsequently internalized and normalized on both the personal and interpersonal levels.
The fourth keynote speaker, Mojca Urek, focuses on the loss of contract power of children with disabilities in Slovenia and presents the results of her research into their access to justice. Children with mental disabilities remain the least visible, most marginalized and socially oppressed people in postsocialism societies. She points to the gap between policies and ideology of participation on the one hand, and lived experiences with the care systems on the other. Children with intellectual disabilities are not seen as political subjects and have no actual right to appear in the court of law or at other formal proceedings, regardless of whether they live with their families or in public care institutions.
Darja Zaviršek shows that not only children but adults too experience spatial segregation, loss of choices and long-term institutionalization in postsocialist public institutions of care; more than 22,000 persons in Slovenia. She argues that deinstitutionalization, as both a process and a philosophy of public care, is culturally, politically and locally specific, and needs to be understood within the framework of postsocialism care-violence-paternalism, economic scarcity and fear of impoverishment and as a transgenerational aversion towards disabled people.
Eva Klimentová, Vit Dočekal and Kristina Hynková likewise focus on disabled people, here the non-disabled children of parents with impaired hearing. Often, children become the interpreters or ‘language caretakers’ of their parents, a situation that can burden them. The authors’ empirical research into the life experiences of children living with disabled parents in the Czech Republic reveals the everyday challenges they face, and the lack of social support to them and their parents. The authors outline several possible ways of supporting families.
The contribution by Carla Moretti brings an overview of her study carried out in the Marche Region of Italy with people who live with severe acquired brain injury, and their close relatives. The author shows how these people navigate the stress caused by illness and disability, the uncertainties of the future, and the financial and organizational difficulties. Her action research identified the complex needs of persons with brain injuries once they are discharged from hospitals, assessed the outcomes of social work interventions and outlined a support path for social workers in their efforts to help.
The following two contributions, both by Scandinavian authors, present country-based research on children. Anette Bolin and Emma Sorbring identify the affordances for self-referral in school-based social work dealing with children at risk. The study defines three affordances that can successfully facilitate children’s self-initiated contact and ways of building trust: regular contacts between social workers and children in the school environment; the use of communication technologies between children and social workers and the visibility of the social workers’ practice that encourages contact initiation. Sissel Seim and Tor Slettebø bring an overview of three Norwegian studies that looked into the conditions for the development of participatory relationships with children in child welfare services. They show that children often do not participate when their families are in contact with child welfare services and that judging social workers as unable to involve children in participatory practice is an oversimplification. Instead, they argue that social workers indeed harbour interests to involve the children but that organizational difficulties, work routine and the material design pose the key obstacles.
Sofiya An describes social work’s struggle in Kazakhstan to become a profession and to be recognized as such by both the government and the wider public. She looks into the post-1991 economic ‘restructuring’ that the Kazakhstani remember as a ‘human crisis of monumental proportions’ in the context of welfare system and social work development. Numerous non-governmental organizations with strong globalizing agendas, and the state-run services that were developed during socialism, or immediately after, conjoined to cause a fragmented, incoherent social work theory and practice. The author describes the notorious »illness« of postsocialism semi-peripheral spaces in which international »investors« cause the very controversial and disruptive »NGO-ization« (in Paul Stubbs’ term) of the social sphere.
Paula Nurius, Susan Kemp, Stefan Köngeter and Sarah Gehlert open a discussion on the ‘increasing disciplinary integration’ in social work research that will have to become substantially more transdisciplinary than it currently is in order to address the growing complexities of social-, health- and ecology-related issues in a globalized world. In an active dialogue, the European and American scholars claim that bridging theoretical and methodological boundaries of disciplines, and taking into account the inputs of local communities, are the core dimensions of ‘sophisticated, community-engaged, transdisciplinary research’, especially at the doctoral level, in social work and other social science disciplines.
Sylvie Van Dam and Peter Raeymaeckers discuss poverty among people with a foreign background in Europe, a key process of our time that Étienne Balibar calls a specific »demographic expansion of Europe«. They analyse the effectiveness of migrant organizations in providing services or various activities for groups of migrants dedicated to addressing poverty. Based on the quantitative social network analysis of a deprived neighbourhood in Antwerp, the authors demonstrate the lack of collaboration between migrant organizations, public services and other civil society organizations.
In an innovative effort, and by making use of impressive transdisciplinary knowledge, Lel Meleyal focuses on ‘unintended consequences’ of the tightening of professional regulation in times of austerity that adversely impacts the work of social workers. In order to relieve the impact of the negative processes of enforceable standards of conduct against which practitioners are held accountable and to discourage potential unethical professional practice, the author proposes the use of behavioural approaches as derived from risk management in heavy industry, nudge theory and theory of interpretive vigilance.
Tony Evans and Mark Hardy weigh the role of ethics in reaching practical judgements in social work practice and systematically examine the complex nature of ethical questions. They show that practising ethics entails a critical engagement with social issues and can prove challenging for idealised value statements. They argue that social workers need to equip themselves to function as ‘practical day-to-day ethicists who engage in dynamic ethical analysis based on different ethical resources, and generating new ethical thinking in the process’; in other words, social workers need to do ethical thinking on their feet. Although there exist significant works on the role of values and ethics in the practice of social work, the authors maintain that much of this writing tends to idealise morality and sets up external standards by which social work practice is assessed.
Lastly comes the rigorous and frank contribution of Silvia Staub-Bernasconi on the Montreal global definition of social work (2000) as compared to the recent Melbourne definition (2014). While the former defines the domain of social work as ‘solving of the social problems’, the latter lacks critical concepts but introduces instead a number of empty signifiers to mask the power relations and to blur the social realities in consequence of growing inequalities, injustices and managerialism. Human rights and social justice principles that the author views as the ‘unifying universal common link of the profession’ were perverted into a mere ‘value-roof’ for the profession and were downgraded to just one value-set among many others.
Finally, it is important to state that these papers represent just a selection of the papers that were successfully submitted to the journal following the conference. Others will be published in later issues. I wish this combined body of work a warm reception among social work scholars and practitioners; I believe that the authors who contributed to it have created a valuable vade mecum, addressing much-needed critical thinking, research and professional practices, and ethical guidelines in this turbulent, significant moment in time for our profession, and for millions of people around the world.