In this year’s first issue, Suzy Braye announced she would step down as Editor in Chief of the European Journal of Social Work. Since then, Jochen and I took over this role, hereby following Suzy, her enthusiasm and dedicated work attitude. Jochen and I are both affiliated to the Department of Social Work and Social Pedagogy at Ghent University in Belgium, where we teach and perform research on a diversity of social work practices such as child welfare and protection and child and family social work. It is fair to say that we are both extremely honoured and excited to have been assigned to this position. For many years, The European Journal of Social Work has been publishing key contributions in the field of academic social work and social professions literature. It is one of the few social work journals ranked in the Web of Science that deals with a broad diversity of topics in different fields of social work. The journal includes work being developed by a diversity of – also non-English speaking – authors across and beyond Europe and offers a critical perspective on the potential role of social professions in relation to societal developments and contemporary social problems.
As social work academics, we highly value the importance of the journal, both as a channel for publications and as an international and critical forum for discussion on the role of social work in general. Although this ambition might be engrained in the history and practice of the journal, it is not always obvious to realise this perspective in contemporary times, especially as social work worldwide is under pressure of being reduced to a functional answer to social problems. We are convinced that there are many reasons for social work as a profession and as an academic field to embrace a journal such as the European Journal of Social Work, which is clearly affiliated with the statements made in the Global Definition of Social Work, putting human rights and social justice in the forefront of social practices.
As said, Jochen and I our proud to be part of the legacy of the European Journal of Social Work. Both well acquainted with Walter Lorenz and Hans-Uwe Otto – two of the founding editors of the journal – we are looking forward to following in Suzy Braye’s footsteps as Editors in Chief. This won’t be easy. As I already was associate editor of the journal, I worked closely and very well with Suzy over the last couple of years in helping to manage the journal. Yet it is only since becoming Editor in Chief that one becomes fully aware of the huge task Suzy has greatly managed all these years. The journal is in her debt, and we are too also for the way Suzy supports us and guides us through this transfer period. We want to thank her and we surely hope we can still call on her in the near and far future. On our behalf, we also want to welcome the new members of the editorial board and we are looking forward to working together with all the board members in a constructive and sustainable manner.
This third issue of this year illustrates the breadth of international perspectives that the journal takes. In the end, we are the ‘European Journal of Social Work’, not the ‘Journal of European Social Work’. We start off with two papers dealing with the development of social work in times of neo-liberalisation and austerity. The first paper by Hay reports on Australian research, presenting concrete understandings of how social workers enact care in everyday direct social work practice. A second paper by Pentaraki draws on interviews with public sector social workers in Greece and presents their perceptions of the consequences of austerity and social spending cuts on their work.
A third contribution, by Kuuse and Toros from Estonia, discusses deinstitutionalisation from a Central and Eastern Europe perspective, focusing on the prospects and challenges for achieving deinstitutionalisation’s intended goals in Estonia.
A fourth and a fifth contribution focus on social work students and education. In the first article from Sweden, Tham and Lunch report on a longitudinal study following the entrance of twelve students into their workplace, illustrating the vulnerability of these new practitioners and the importance of workplace induction and the provision of adequate support in their new professional roles. The second contribution, again from Estonia by Toros, discusses an exploratory study in which she examined Estonian social work graduate students’ understanding of strength-eliciting questions in the context of social work assessment.
The sixth and seventh contributions deal with research on the upbringing of children and young people. The first paper is from Belgium, in which Geens and colleagues discuss the parents’ perspectives of social support and social cohesion in urban contexts of diversity. Their research shows that the role of childcare services might be vital in creating light and temporal communities as the prerequisite for social cohesion to flourish, in both individual as well as collective dimensions. In the next contribution from Norway, Skoglund and Thornblad address knowledge production on formal kinship foster care. The authors argue in favour of approaching kinship care as upbringing by relatives – as ways in which family life can be organised and structured.
In the eight paper, Semigiana explores social work activities during the on-going armed conflict on the territory of Ukraine. The paper suggests possible ways of ensuring social work responses to the emergency situations during warfare within the context of the newly developed professional social work. Next, Ejbye-Ernst and Høybye-Mortensen report on a study in Denmark on the perception of caseworkers on performance information, in which the authors report on the insights into how caseworkers perceived the purposes of performance information. In the tenth article, Psoinos and Hatzidimitriadou from Greece explore the acculturative integration experiences of a small group of migrant social workers, suggesting ways of improving migrant social workers’ acculturative integration by addressing systemic barriers.
The next contribution by Munoz from Spain presents a series of creative social intervention experiences developed with a group of homeless people in the city of Seville, which are a source of inspiration to move beyond the dominant welfare proposals currently in place in Spain. Article twelve by Lopez from Canada deals with the problem of HIV and argues that significant advances and innovations in medical treatments have led to the marginalisation of a number of psychological, social and economic needs that stem from receiving a diagnosis of HIV. The authors state that a specific and tailored social work response is required to support patients in regaining their sense of control and self-determination.
We close this issue with two papers that discuss a diagnostic instrument for social diagnosis in care homes for older persons in Spain, (ISD-1). In the first paper, Cury and colleagues describe the design process and main features of the instrument, followed by a second paper in which they present a validity study. The authors conclude that ISD-1 may be considered a suitable instrument for the formulation of social diagnoses in care homes for older persons.
With this interesting and diverse bundle of contributions from a diversity of countries within and outside Europe, we kick off our editorial responsibilities as Editors in Chief. We hope you enjoy the contributions as much as we do.