Qualitative Social Work

Agile working (flexibility about where and when practitioners do their work) is increasingly common across public sector social work, but there has been little research about how practitioners engage with it or its impacts on communication between social workers, their colleagues and the families with whom they work. This article presents findings from an ethnographic study of a children’s safeguarding social work team in an English local authority who were engaged in agile working. It draws on data from observations, local authority documents, semi-structured interviews, participant research diaries, participants’ photographs and the researcher’s photographs taken during fieldwork. An analytical frame drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s concept of spatial dialectics and Wanda Orlikowski’s concept of sociomateriality is used to identify how agile working involves entanglements of practitioners and families with restructured office spaces, digital information systems and mobile devices such as convertible laptop–tablet computers and mobile phones. Innovations such as these are commonly understood as promoting more effective and transparent social work practice, but the study’s data show that entanglements between workspaces, digital devices and people in practice are having multiple effects, producing new hierarchies of belonging in space, shaping what can be communicated, and the ways it can be presented and received. The article argues for critical attention to the role of material space in digital and place-based innovations in social work practice.

The dynamics of inclusion and exclusion for people with disabilities and the places in which they live are being challenged in Australia with the transition to the National Disability Insurance Scheme. This paper reports on the experiences of a place-based and participatory action research project in regional Tasmania which sought to co-create citizenship opportunities with co-researchers living with disability. We report on our experience of negotiating this ambitious and emergent project through the uncertain and shifting terrain of the contemporary neoliberal policy and service context. We highlight the rich gains as well as the significant relational, contextual and procedural challenges of operationalising and staying true to bottom up and strengths-based community development principles. Key learnings relate to risks of creating liminal spaces for community action, about power and authority, and about the skills, resources and labour needed to unearth and mobilise individual and community strengths. We argue that there remains a significant tension between the aspirations of collective action and contemporary services and policy structures that reproduce liminality, silent positioning and place denial. This research challenges traditional disability centric notions of inclusion and place and has implications for the NDIS, for policies at risk of reproducing disabling dynamics, for service innovation and collaboration and for all social workers and others working to develop more inclusive communities.

This paper reflects on a cross-sector social intervention that uses roadworthy ‘tiny house’ shepherd’s huts in public spaces as informal locations for connectivity. Working at the intersections between street-level outreach, outdoor education and community arts, the Welcome Hut project can be conceptualised as a hospitality hub. Participants engage in public daydreaming and storytelling that emerges from a welcoming gesture of recognition and reciprocity. The autoethnographic narrative by the project’s initiator traces back how this concrete utopia had initially been created outside of social work networks and gradually gained legitimacy in the field. The paper shares methodological insights from operating a deliberately unlocated mobile practice. It is argued that a ‘vagabond’ intervention opens novel in-between spaces for dialogue through relational disruption. By nurturing spaces for otherness inside social work, the emerging interstices enable practitioners to be inspired by unusual perspectives on professionalism and reimagine their own conditions. This paper is therefore written at the unclassified in-betweens to transcend rigid belongings and disciplinary protocol within contemporary beyond-binary social complexities. The researcher angle that investigates social workers’ everyday realities is voluntarily displaced towards migratory arts venues. Unusual narratives can encourage breathing spaces in fragile and fertile liminalities between life worlds and institutional agendas.

Previous research suggests that the physical environment of the psychotherapy office is important for treatment engagement, client feelings and behavior, and clinician support. However, there is limited research that includes the voices of psychotherapy clients. The purpose of this study was to explore the meanings clients ascribe to the offices in which they seek treatment in order to develop a fuller picture of the importance of the place of treatment. Eight psychotherapy clients in a large urban city were interviewed about their experiences of their psychotherapy offices using semi-structured protocols. Analysis of interviews identified three main themes in regard to client perception of the offices’ uses: (a) comfort, (b) connection, and (c) insight into the therapist. Results highlight the potential importance of the physical environment in psychotherapy treatment and implications for practice are provided.

This article applies the concepts of place and space to understand youth and their engagement in risky behavior, such as drunkenness. It is based on the prolonged engagement with 23 underage youth coming from smaller municipalities in the south of Sweden. The study was comprised of semi-structured interviews, field visits, and observations at sites relevant for youths. In the stories narrated by youth, drunkenness is no longer an ad hoc activity conducted somewhere at the margins of society. The construction of drinking spaces was accomplished through highly managed, monitored, and organized practices, such as sending out invitations in advance, planning how much alcohol to drink, designating drivers, and securing transport means. Crucial to this was that spaces were products of relations existing between various youth, with no adults present. Spaces of drinking changed as those who participated in their construction changed. In addition, certain rules and codes of conduct (e.g. taking care of friends who drunk too much) were enforced to assure that the constructed spaces provided a sense of safety and enabled having fun. We conclude this article by arguing that a focus on place and space brings forward vital aspects in understanding the role of transforming party spaces that would otherwise remain obscure to social work knowledge and practice.

In this article, we draw on concepts of time, liminal space and narrative therapy to explore the interactions that we, the authors, engaged in before, during and after our sessions together. New Beginnings is a project which works with parents who have children on care orders or whose children are subject to the child protection process. For a period of six months, women attend trauma-informed sessions where together, with the support of project facilitators and each other, they explore how past trauma has not only affected their identity but has also shaped their parenting practices. The main objective of the project is to provide space for the women to create their own maternal commons, a place where they can share stories and enact transformational beginnings. In this article, we draw on reflective notes from one case which connected the project lead and a mother she worked with to one another. Using the concepts of time and liminal space theory, we explore three themes that emerged: being ready, standing still and moving forwards. The contribution of this article is therefore three-fold; it argues that ‘time’ in the child protection process is compounded by bureaucracy and legal processes which do not take into consideration the trauma that has been experienced or how it then unfolds in present interactions between practitioner and parent; it extends the concept of liminality in social work by exploring the lived experience of a mother on the project and it demonstrates how narrative therapy can be used as a method to elucidate the rite of passage a person can take (or not) when attempting to traverse liminal spaces.

Atmosphere is a neglected topic in social work, and so this article considers the production of atmospheres amongst the residents of an extant 1960s housing scheme in Edinburgh (UK). This is in order to address not only the complexity of feelings about living on such an estate but also to consider what consequences the paying of attention to atmosphere’s production and effects might have for a social work concern with welfare and wellbeing. The article is based upon semi-structured and walking interviews with 17 residents – council or private renters and home-owners – of Claremont Court, a mixed, low-rise estate and analyses their description and crafting of atmosphere as a way to understand questions of belonging, welfare and community in situ. After reviewing some existing research on atmosphere and outlining methodological issues relating to the Claremont Court project, the article goes on to consider how residents described their feelings about or sense of the estate and its design before discussing the emergence of contradictory narratives about home. The production of narratives about those needing welfare support is particularly pertinent to atmospheric accounts of the housing scheme, and so the article addresses this before finally making an argument for the relevance of immersive and emplaced accounts of space and place for both social work practice and research.

A burgeoning literature provides evidence that neighborhood matters, especially in relation to urban adolescent development. Exposure to crime and poverty has been shown to negatively impact key aspects of development, such as physical, mental, and emotional well-being. Traditional theoretical frameworks identifying the social mechanisms of place fail to critically examine how neighborhood effects are socially constructed at the individual level, and rather assume aggregate community narratives. Such blanket measures of neighborhood effects do not account for individual interpretations of space or the impacts of larger structural forces on decision making and developmental processes. A unique combination of qualitative GIS methodologies was utilized to explore how urban adolescents define, navigate, and engage their surrounding environment to better understand the mechanisms of neighborhood effects, and how these interactions shape development. Sedentary and walking interview data were paired with GPS data to develop a real-time understanding of the spaces across which youth were navigating. The findings from this work suggest that how youth perceive space is a complex process, stemming from the interaction of structural and social systems, and highlight the value of understanding varying resident experiences when considering definitions of neighborhood. This study begins to fill a gap in the neighborhood effects’ literature by developing an argument for the social construction of place as an alternative to traditional methodological and theoretical frameworks.

This article examines humour and its connectedness to spatiality in social work by drawing on examples from fieldwork involving vulnerable young people. The article argues that the relationship between a spatial perspective and humour as a phenomenon in social work is an underdeveloped area of social work research. The article draws on De Certeau’s concepts of tactical behaviour and strategically defined spaces, both of which involve a dynamic spatial approach. Connecting these concepts to humour, the article concludes that applying a humour-affective spatial theoretical approach to social work research greatly aids the identification of power dynamics and the tensions that can arise in social situations. In short, the article offers another way of conceptualising the production of the spatial dynamics of power, inclusion and exclusion. The empirical basis for the article is a comprehensive field study carried out at a 24-hour residential institution for children and youth in vulnerable positions.

Pop-up design helps steer city regeneration and community revival. With this belief, Hong Kong-based social creativity studio One Bite Social launched the urban ‘matching’ platform ‘Project House’. Using a tactical place-making approach, it pairs up vacant shops with local social groups facing spatial needs. The win–win results bring local exposure to pop-up vacant shops while providing marginalised community groups with adequate space for new social practices. Can tactical place-making become a tool to create space for place-based community development? What works, and does not work, at Project House, and why? How can Project House be applied to different contexts? By adopting a realist impact evaluation framework, this paper explores the potential of Project House, a first-of-its-kind tactical place-making initiative combining social work and architecture to create a new setting for a community.

Social inclusion for people with disability is bound up with experiences of place in everyday life. In Australia, the inclusion agenda has been recently propelled by the National Disability Insurance Scheme which promotes – and funds – the full inclusion of people with disability so that their lives are conducted in everyday settings. This article addresses what lies between the aspirational policy principles of full inclusion and the experience of family life with a young child who has Down syndrome. Through auto-ethnographic inquiry, a series of vignettes describe my own encounters in everyday places such as shops, childcare centres and public swimming pools. I focus on ‘sense of place’ which is generated through everyday practices and can shape individual identity and belonging. Using ideas from feminist poststructuralism and critical disability studies, I argue that ableist discourses on disability are produced by people in everyday places through their attitudes, actions and expectations, disrupting regular family life and imposing oppressive modes of subjectivity upon children with intellectual disability and their parent-carers. In response, parents of children with intellectual disability are challenged to undertake the political labour of everyday disability advocacy. It is important for social work to recognise that this labour can become a significant part of the contemporary parent-carer role.