Mobility and the scenic intelligibility of social work

Abstract

Introduction

A Happy New Year to all readers of Qualitative Social Work. This is my first editorial for the journal since I became Associate Editor in 2016. I want to use it to write a piece about a subject I am passionate about, discussing the relevance and impact of the mobilities turn for social work research. I begin by briefly introducing the mobilities paradigm in order to demonstrate its emergence and to describe its epistemological and methodological orientation. I then move on to consider the relevance of the mobilities turn to social work research, developing a discussion based on the idea of the scenic intelligibility of experience. I discuss this in relation to a series of research projects, some of which explicitly position themselves in relation to the mobilities paradigm, and others that do not. I am hoping to prompt readers to think about how they might engage with what might be termed broadly ‘the mobilities literature’ and to make future submissions to the journal that are influenced by this body of work.

The mobilities turn

Since the millennium, a new movement has emerged in the humanities and social sciences focused on mobilities. Its objects of study have included both large-scale movements of people, objects, capital and information across the world, as well as the more local processes of daily transportation and movement through public and private spaces (Hannam et al., 2006: 1). Mobilities scholars, such as Büscher and Urry (2009), have argued that mobilities research offers access to different researchable entities, which have allowed researchers to explore the centrality of movement to the social and material realities of our lives. This turn has been termed the ‘new mobilities’ paradigm (Sheller and Urry, 2006), supported by its own journal launched in 2006 – Mobilities.

This mobilities turn has challenged social science to change the objects of its inquiries (Hannam et al., 2006). Its scholars argue that the focus on movement undermines sedentiarist theories present in a great deal of research in geography, anthropology and social science in which bounded places become the fundamental units of social science study. Büscher and Urry (2009) and Ingold (2004) argue that a mobilities turn is part of a critique of a head over heels and mind over body humanism, and especially of human subjects able to think and act in ways independent of their material worlds. As Hall and Smith (forthcoming) suggest, the mobilities turn involves reconsidering the relation between mobility and perception. ‘They configure this in terms of the difference between ‘looking at’ something and ‘looking for’ something, suggesting, whilst looking ‘at something is always to have it located already … Looking for something … is more obviously, always and unavoidably, to move; to be engaged in a search’.

This focus on movement also calls for new approaches to research; ones which allow researchers to track movement, to be co-present (literally or digitally) with people as they move and to observe, record and elicit meaning from people during, before or after they move. As Law and Urry (2004: 392) argue …

[Existing methods] deal, for instance, poorly with the fleeting – that which is here today and gone tomorrow, only to reappear again the day after tomorrow. They deal poorly with the distributed – that is to be found here and there but not in between – or that which slips and slides between one place and another. They deal poorly with the multiple – that which takes different shapes in different places. They deal poorly with the non-causal, the chaotic, the complex. And such methods have difficulty dealing with the sensory – that which is subject to vision, sound, taste, smell: with the emotional – time-space compressed outbursts of anger, pain, rage, pleasure, desire, or the spiritual; and the kinaesthetic – the pleasures and pains which follow movement and displacement of people, objects, information and ideas.

While a great deal of mobilities research has focused on tracking mapable and calculable movement, some more recent research has demonstrated an interest in both the interconnectedness of different forms of movement as well as the meaning of movement.

Traditionally, research on social work and welfare practice has shown little interest in mobilities, and mobilities researchers have show little interest in social work and welfare practice (Roy et al., 2015). However, recently, this has begun to change. In 2015, the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University hosted an event entitled ‘Work on the Move’ in which there were several contributions from academics interested in welfare mobilities. Contributions at the event addressed questions such as: What happens when workers go on the move? What are the rhetorics and material practices that bond work to place and how are these disrupted (and hence accounted for) when work goes on the move? More recently, a new journal has been launched by Taylor Francis entitled Applied Mobilities, which includes applied research and practice-oriented perspectives. The second edition of this new journal will be a special issue focused on mobile work which will include contributions on social work (from Harry Ferguson), homeless outreach work (Robin Smith and Tom Hall) and my own research conducted with vulnerable young men in Manchester. These examples demonstrate that, informed by the mobilities paradigm, a number of academics have begun to theorize and conceptualize social work and welfare practice through the lens of movement (Ferguson, 2008, 2010a, 2010b, 2014, 2016; Hall and Smith, 2013; Roy et al., 2015, forthcoming).

Mobilities and scenic intelligibility

A focus on mobilities demands attention to the ways in which the movements of people, objects and information make social and material realities (Ingold, 2011; Sheller and Urry, 2006). Hence, the mobilities turn poses important questions about what forms of research might capture, describe and account for these movements and hence make social life intelligible in new ways. David Silverman (2007) makes the case that ‘understanding mundane life extends beyond listening carefully to how people speak to one another’. He suggests that ‘It also requires observation [and description] of fine detail’ (p. 17). To judge on the basis of the examples he selects to make this argument, well-observed treatments of mundane life are often easier to find in art (including photography), fiction and theatre than in social research. For example, he draws on Harold Pinter’s play ‘The Birthday Party’ suggesting that part of its strength is that ‘instead of launching us into dramatic events, Pinter writes a dialogue far closer to the tempo of everyday life’ (p. 17). Silverman (2007) emphasizes that the lesson for the social researcher (he focuses here on ethnography) is that we need to see the ‘remarkable in mundane settings’. However, I am interested in exploring Silverman’s use of theatre in making this argument. A scene in a play presents the audience with a matrix of setting, characters, action, stasis, meanings, intentions, desires, talk, silences and relational encounters all at the same time (Froggett and Hollway, 2010). Those who write plays understand that they must describe the scene in order for the words and actions to make sense to the audience, and this is because the works of theatre, to an extent, become intelligible through shared cultural resources and reference points (Froggett et al., 2014). Hence, in a theatre script, what is said is carefully crafted around a finely detailed description of the scene, the characters, their movements and interactions. However, Silverman’s use of Pinter is also interesting, because in his plays we must learn to cope without a clear or consistent story and must understand that nothing that is said can be taken at face value.

Recently, some mobilities researchers (including Monica Büscher) and psycho-social researchers (including Lynn Froggett and Wendy Hollway) have written about the ‘scenic intelligibility’ of experience. For example, in Wendy Hollway’s (2015) research on maternal identity change, she describes how her decision to represent participants in a ‘scenic’ way is taken in order to allow them to come alive in the minds of readers and to keep close to experience, so that it is easier to identify with the person, and to traverse imaginatively the distance between the participant and the reader. Here is an excerpt from this research:

In the living room of a cramped East London council flat, three people and a baby are gathered. 17 year-olds Jenny and Anthony sit sifting through the jobs pages of a London newspaper. Jenny is holding a young baby, 11 weeks old, who faces out, dribbling. Anthony is in high spirits, celebrating his exam success. A white woman in her forties sits alertly, looking at the baby and asking Jenny how she and the baby are. She asks if the young man is an uncle. Jenny laughs and replies “no man, huh some uncle. He’s a good friend, aren’t you Anthony?” Jenny and Anthony engage in youthful repartee and the older woman continues to observe the baby, not being drawn in to laughing at Anthony’s good humour. The TV is tuned low volume to an MTV station playing reggae and hip-hop. Loud music is playing in a bedroom from which another young man emerges, briefly looks in and moves off down the corridor. The woman observing the baby feels a ripple of unease, which she notices and registers through a feeling of “what is this person doing here?”

Jenny puts the baby in his baby chair and she and Anthony discuss telephone techniques for making job enquiries. Anthony play-acts speaking to a potential employer: “Yes, em, good afternoon. My name is David Harding and I wonder if you have any vacancies. Oh you want people of a very high standard, more than one GCSE, better than a D grade? Yes, well I think I can meet that, I’ve got eight. [Pause.] Yes, well there’s twenty of us and we’re all hoodies, that okay?” Anthony then calls to Jenny’s brother to “turn down that black music, yar. How can you have that stuff on so loud? Turn it down!” (Hollway, 2015: 131–132)

The detailed thick description of the setting, the characters and their movements in this quote emphasizes the scenic orientation of the research. After the quote, Hollway encourages readers to ‘reflect’ on their own emotional responses to the scene (p. 132). This reflects a theoretical orientation – through the work of Alfred Lorenzer – in which the provocations within the scene are understood to reflect shared socio-cultural meanings embedded in interaction forms. As Hollway (2011) explains:

Lorenzer’s ‘scene’ refers to ‘an ongoing register of affective and embodied experience and meaning’ (Bereswill et al., 2010: 225). Like a theatrical scene, it taps into a different mode of understanding – scenic understanding – that is more holistic, closer to tacit, unconscious knowing and capable of accessing societal-cultural unconscious knowledge (Bereswill et al., 2010: 224).

Hence, from a Lorenzian perspective, the successive scenes we ‘pass through’ and that make up our lives, simultaneously bind us together and hold in tension the internal and the external in a process that is ongoing and that results in the endless modification of the one by the other (Bereswill et al., 2010: 30).

A more extended discussion of the depth-hermeneutics of Alfred Lorenzer is beyond the scope of this editorial. Nonetheless, the idea of the ‘scenic intelligibility’ of experience is useful because it suggests that by writing with a scenic orientation we can help those who read our research to ‘imagine’ and ‘inhabit’ the lives and situations of those we write about (Stewart, 2007: 127) drawing on shared socio-cultural unconscious knowledge.

In the next section, I seek to connect up the idea of scenic intelligibility with a focus on mobilities research through a discussion of a series of examples. I use these examples to consider how a focus on mobilities can help make social work practice intelligible in new ways.

Making practice intelligible

In Enid Balint’s study (1993: 3–5) of the use of observation by medical practitioners, she describes how they are ‘amassing facts and feelings about the facts at the same time’, which requires ‘tolerating the absence of a consistent story’, ‘using muddle’, ‘using imagination’, but in the safety of structure and training (Hollway, 2015). This description has much in common with the ways in which social workers generate the knowledge they use in their practice. For example, Skotte’s (2016) research on prospective decision making in child welfare emphasizes how attempts to build a clear and coherent story in social work often fail. It also supports findings from other social work research which suggest that organizational and staffing issues (e.g. people leaving their jobs or being unwell) can affect decision-making processes, as well as the structures of feeling that circulate around these (Broadhurst and Mason, 2014; Broadhurst et al., 2010; Ferguson, 2011, 2016; Jeyasingham, 2014; Leigh, 2014).

For example, Jadwiga Leigh’s (2014) research addresses the ways in which organizational culture influences social workers’ practices in the UK and Belgium. Her research – which includes a visual methodology – focuses on what happens in the office, including the role and impact of the built environment, as well as the affective qualities of team relationships and actions. Although Leigh does not position her work in relation to the mobilities paradigm, the work does provide rich and detailed descriptions of the movements of information and people. For example, it includes intricate observations of where people sit in relation to each other in the office as well as in relation to managers, where meetings take place and how people observe and respond to one another’s movements around the building and in meetings. Hence, Leigh’s work demonstrates a clear scenic orientation, carefully describing the ways in which the social work office is a place made-up of the ‘transit and transition’ of people, objects, information and affect, and in which ‘micro-habitats created by managers, institutional routines, statutory requirements, architecture and equipment’ work on social workers scenically (i.e., psychically and socially), as they engage in ‘the unavoidable challenge’ of negotiating the ‘here-and-now’ of social work practice (Massey, 2005: 140).

In contrast, Harry Ferguson does locate his research in relation to the new mobilities paradigm and focuses explicitly on mobility – both conceptually and methodologically. Ferguson uses this focus to open out a new set of questions about child protection social work and to understand the daily lives of movement of practitioners. In doing so, he employs ‘go along interviews’ – in cars, streets and social work offices – which encourage practitioners to reflect on their professional actions/inactions, approaches and feelings in the moments before and after client interactions, as well using ethnographic observation of practice itself. The upshot is a set of arguments about how the mobile nature of social work practice is essential to social work knowing. However, in discussing Ferguson’s work, Jeyasingham (2014) sounds a cautionary note about the mobile orientation, in particular arguing that there is a potential for an overemphasis on the home visit as a site of social work research (as well as in lay discussions and public inquiries), and that, as compelling as such work might be, there is a danger in giving social work a mythologized and dramatic quality …

The space of the child protection home visit is endowed with a dramatic force which belies the significance of other events and processes in social workers’ practice and children’s lives. These situated events take on a mythology in discourse about social work, both lay and professional, which strip space of its textured, everyday reality and replace it with a scopically oriented, theatrical quality … (p. 3 emphasis added)

This quote seems to have much in common with Silverman’s (2007) arguments – set out earlier – about the value of the plays of Harold Pinter, in which he argues that, instead of ‘launching us into dramatic events’, Pinter’s work produces a ‘dialogue far closer to the tempo of everyday life’. However, I would contend that it’s possible that Jeyasingham’s (2014) analysis mistakes one understanding of ‘drama’ – (the quality of being dramatic – something exciting, emotional or an unexpected event or circumstance) for another (a composition presenting a scene and story relevant to practice). This distinction is important for reasons developed by Froggett and Briggs (2012) who seek to understand how research can get near to practice. They advocate a mix of experience-near and experience-distant approaches, arguing that one relevant question that researcher’s should consider in developing their methods is, ‘what forms does practice provide for human feeling so that it becomes available for thought and communication?’ (p. 3). Ferguson’s (2016) most recent paper on how children become invisible in child protection social work is a good example. In it, he suggests that detachment from children occurs when a social worker’s anxiety impedes their ability to engage in intimate practice with children (through eye-to-eye contact, talk, active listening, play, touch and close observation). Leigh’s work tells a similar story, which is developed by tracing the transmission of affect within the social work office and the ways in which organizational anxiety influences people’s capacity to think. What these two different studies help us to see is that in any given social work practice situation, the scenic experience of the individual practitioner arises at the conjunction of biographically and dispositionally specific interaction forms (e.g., a specific social worker’s fear of dogs), cultural patterns (e.g., general anxiety about the failures of social work), as well as the manifest forms of cultural life (the specific organizational anxieties and pressures circulating at the time) (Froggett and Hollway, 2010). In this way, the idea of scenic experience can help us to see that what happens in one space is carried into another and vice versa. In the work of Ferguson and Leigh, we can see a desire as well as a capacity to animate the everyday professional experience of social work, through vivid descriptions of the small daily details, rituals, movements and habits of practice which constitute the lived experience of social work and its everyday interactive order (Froggett and Briggs, 2012). The value of this work lies not in its character of being dramatic, although undoubtedly some of it is, or even – often at least – in what is said, but in the careful attention given to detailed descriptions of scenes and movements, which depict the mundane features of the difficulties of realizing everyday social work practice.

In this editorial, I have drawn on a series of research projects with a scenic orientation, which in different ways demonstrate the relationship between movement and knowing in social work. I have made two main arguments about the relationship between mobility and scenic intelligibility. First, that a focus on mobilities captures something important about the relationship between moving and knowing in social work, in which the object of inquiry cannot be ‘isolated and abstracted’ from its context (Hall and Smith, forthcoming). And second, that scenic descriptions can bring into view – and hence make available for thought and communication – an understanding of (some of) the – conscious and unconscious – movements of thought, intention, emotion and social and cultural relations that make-up the practice realm. I hope, with this editorial, that I have enticed readers to delve further into the mobilities literature and sample for themselves, examples of social work research with this orientation.

In this issue

This issue opens with two fascinating papers that extend the preceding discussion about the epistemological and methodological elements of social work practice and research. First is a paper by Joe Smeeton, which explores the relationship between different forms of knowledge and the kinds of activity that arise from them in child protection social work. The paper draws on Aristotle’s views of the forms of knowledge which privilege’s ‘praxis’ over ‘theoria’. The author highlights dangers in social work relying too heavily on technical knowledge and the use of theory as a tool in seeking to understand and engage with the complex realities of people’s lives and situations, stressesing the importance of a phenomenological approach to research and practice as a valid, embodied form of knowledge. The paper emphasizes how practitioners don’t apply knowledge learned elsewhere in the practice context, but come to know along the way and ‘by way of’ their practice (Ingold and Kurtilla, 2000: 191–192). Second is paper by Lisa Morris and Andrew Clark, which presents a narrative review on the use of visual methodologies in international social work research over the last decade, presenting an overview of the types and range of visual methodologies which have been employed. It describes some of the benefits of visual methodologies, outlining important considerations for researchers thinking of working with visual approaches, which include a deeper, reflexive engagement with practical, methodological and epistemic complexities of undertaking visual research. These are explored in relation to a specific project.

The next five papers address different aspects of diversity and difference for social workers and users of different services. The first two of these are based in Israel. Anat Freund and Tova Band-Winterstein’s paper uses a phenomnological lens to develop an analysis of social workers accomodation of different cultures. The study examines social workers’ various encounters with social problems in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Israel. The authors argue that multi-culturalism is a common reality and is expected to become even more significant in the future and that one of its challenges is the need for professionals to accommodate their practice to clients of various cultures. A phenomenological lens is used to expose the inherent duality in the work of social workers in a multi-cultural society between an awareness to cultural codes and professional ethics. Maya Lavie-Ajayi and Ora Nakash explore critical approaches in psychology and social work which criticize the current mainstream psychotherapy discourse. Data are drawn from a large study of mental health intakes in clinics in Israel working with culturally diverse populations. This paper – rooted within a post-structural perspective based on Foucauldian analysis – emphasizes the multiple ways in which power differences are created and maintained through accepted forms of discourse and knowledge. It sheds light on the way this discourse conceals social injustice and contributes to the disempowerment of the client and ultimately to poorer quality of services.

The wonderfully named Looking through the magnifying glass, written by Alex Wagaman and Ira Bohm-Sanchez, presents a duoethnographic exploration and analysis of the experiences of working on a participatory action research team. The authors participated in a research team, made up primarily of LGBTQ-identified young adults, which studied intra-community bigotry. They expain that duoethnography is a qualitative method that reflects on a shared experience or cultural event from two different viewpoints in order to juxtapose perspectives without attempting to resolve differences or converge into conclusions. The authors identify three praxes that offer guidance for qualitative social work researchers. The authors reflect the value of a research process that reflects and aligns with social work values.

A mixed methods study is presented by Mavis Dako-Gyeke on the Challenges and coping strategies of among Liberian refugees in Ghana. Focus group discussions and in-depth interviews were conducted followed by thematic analysis. The findings report a series of challenges and coping strategies reported by refugees in the study, offering insights for social workers, policy actors and future research. The paper by Adrianne Nelson, Chloe Waters, Amy Beeson and Sonya Shin explores the issue of social support for HIV patients living in poverty in Lima, Peru. The paper reports a study of 33 people with HIV and 15 of those who supported their treatment who were interviewed about changes in their social support and well-being at the point of accessing antiretrovival treatment. It describes the ways in which economic restraints, stigma and the difficulties of negotiating a fractured health system make it difficult for people to access the support they need. It explores the ways in which people with HIV restricted their social networks and drew personal strength and self worth from old and new relationships.

The final paper in this edition is Sarah Serbinski’s exploration of the long-term impact of living with foster siblings on children of foster parents. The paper reports a mixed methods qualitative study of the experiences of 12 daughters of foster parents (aged 20–33 years) which includes the use of Dedoose, a data management system for dealing with multiple data sets. The authors argue that the temporary nature of fostering exposes these children to multiple sibling relationships, and the authors discuss the ways in which this effects their long-term relationships with parents as well as romantic partners. It finishes by making recommendations for foster parents, and social workers are suggested.

Finally in this issue, is the book review section, which is introduced by Lisa Morriss.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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