Civic Engagement

Author(s):  
Amanda Moore McBride

Civic engagement is the backbone of the social work profession. Through our civic mission, we have long organized and empowered citizens in common pursuits to address social, economic, and political conditions. In the United States, the status of social and political engagement is of heightened concern, particularly as emerging research demonstrates a range of effects. The challenge for social work is to increase the capacity of the nonprofit sector to promote and maximize engagement, especially among low-income and low-wealth individuals, through theory-driven, evidence-based interventions.

1988 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 593-606
Author(s):  
John Villiers

The numerous and voluminous reports and letters which the Jesuits wrote on the Moro mission, as on all their missions in Asia, are perhaps of less interest to us now for what they reveal of the methods adopted by the Society of Jesus in this remote corner of their mission field or the details they contain about the successes and failures of individual missionaries, than for the wealth of information they provide on the islands where the Jesuits lived and the indigenous societies with which they came into contact through their work of evangelization. In other words, it is not theprimary purpose of this essay to analyse the Jesuit documents with a view to reconstructing the history of the Moro mission in narrative form but rather to glean from them some of the informationthey contain about the social and political conditions in Moro during the forty years or so in the sixteenth century when both the Jesuit missionaries and the Portuguese were active in the regio Because the Jesuits were often in close touch with local rulers and notables, whether or not they succeeded in converting them to Christianity, and because they lived among their subjects for long periods, depending upon them for the necessities of life and sharing their hardships, their letters and reports often show a deeper understanding of the social, economic and political conditions of the indigenous societies and, one suspects, give a more accurate and measured account of events and personalities than do the official chroniclers and historians of the time, most of whom never ventured further east than Malacca and who in any case were chiefly concerned to glorify the deeds of the Portuguese and justify their actions to the world.


Author(s):  
Yen Le Espiritu

Much of the early scholarship in Asian American studies sought to establish that Asian Americans have been crucial to the making of the US nation and thus deserve full inclusion into its polity. This emphasis on inclusion affirms the status of the United States as the ultimate protector and provider of human welfare, and narrates the Asian American subject by modern civil rights discourse. However, the comparative cases of Filipino immigrants and Vietnamese refugees show how Asian American racial formation has been determined not only by the social, economic, and political forces in the United States but also by US colonialism, imperialism, and wars in Asia.


2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-139
Author(s):  
Monika Jean Ulrich Myers ◽  
Michael Wilson

Foucault’s theory of state social control contrasts societal responses to leprosy, where deviants are exiled from society but promised freedom from social demands, and the plague, where deviants are controlled and surveyed within society but receive some state assistance in exchange for their cooperation.In this paper, I analyze how low-income fathers in the United States simultaneously experience social control consistent with leprosy and social control consistent with the plague but do not receive the social benefits that Foucault associates with either status.Through interviews with 57 low-income fathers, I investigate the role of state surveillance in their family lives through child support enforcement, the criminal justice system, and child protective services.Because they did not receive any benefits from compliance with this surveillance, they resisted it, primarily by dropping “off the radar.”Men justified their resistance in four ways: they had their own material needs, they did not want the child, they did not want to separate from their child’s mother or compliance was unnecessary.This resistance is consistent with Foucault’s distinction between leprosy and the plague.They believed that they did not receive the social benefits accorded to plague victims, so they attempted to be treated like lepers, excluded from social benefits but with no social demands or surveillance.


1994 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 659-694 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Crotty

The research on political parties in developing nations is difficult to aggregate and to place in a comparative context. The reasons are many. The body of work is at best modest in size as well as uneven in focus, theoretical conception and empirical execution. Often comparative or more generalizable indicators and conclusions must be extracted from studies intended to clarify social developments over broad periods of time or, alternatively, within carefully set historical boundaries (the colonial; the transition from the colonial period to independence; post-independence developments; political conditions under specific national leaders, as examples). The efforts are broad stroke, primarily descriptive and usually interwoven with historical accounts and explanations of the social, economic and cultural factors that condition the life of a country. The range appears to run from megatheories-or, more accurately, broadly generalized interpretative sets of categorizations and conclusions applied to a region or a collection of countries (the research itself is seldom theoretically focused), supported by interpretative essays and expert, professionalized observation and background knowledge-to case studies of differing degrees of elaborateness. There is little in between.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (40) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gilmaisa Macedo da Costa

Resumo − Este artigo tem por finalidade revisitar o tema das origens do Serviço Social em seu processo de institucionalização nos Estados Unidos. Expõe aspectos das bases históricas e teóricas da profissão, revelando conteúdos referentes ao Serviço Social clássico, hoje pouco analisado no interior da formação, limitando possivelmente a informação aos estudantes e profissionais sobre a produção do Serviço Social em seu contexto originário e talvez até mesmo a crítica a ele realizada. O texto trata do pensamento de Mary Ellen Richmond e sua proposição do Serviço Social de casos individuais, mostrando as bases teórico-metodológicas para uma ação sobre os indivíduos sociais em meio a um conjunto de interpretações divergentes sobre o tema. O pensamento de Richmond exerceu forte influência no Serviço Social europeu e no Brasil, oferecendo o suporte para que se fizesse uma crítica às tendências oriundas da base positivista e as insuficiências ali contidas como proposição conservadora. Palavras-Chave: Serviço Social clássico; institucionalização; bases teórico-metodológicas.   Abstract − This article aims to revisit the origins of social work in its process of institutionalization in the United States. It exposes aspects of the historical and theoretical bases of the profession, revealing contents referring to classic social work that are little analyzed today in undergraduate courses, possibly restricting information valuable to students and professionals about the inception of social work in its original context and perhaps even the criticism it received. The text deals with the thought of Mary Ellen Richmond and her proposal of the social work of individual cases, showing the theoretical-methodological bases for an action on social individuals in the middle of a set of divergent interpretations on the subject. Richmond's thought exerted a strong influence on both European and Brazilian social work, offering support to the criticism of tendencies originating from the Positivist base and the inadequacies contained therein as a conservative proposition. Keywords: classic social work; institutionalization; theoretical-methodological bases.  


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  

Developed by Paulo Freire, critical consciousness (CrC) is a philosophical, theoretical, and practice-based framework encompassing an individual’s understanding of and action against the structural roots of inequity and violence. This article explores divergent CrC scholarship regarding CrC theory and practice; provides an in-depth review of inconsistencies within the CrC “action” domain; and, in an effort to resolve discrepancies within the existing CrC literature, presents a new construct—transformative action (TA)—and details the process of TA development. Comprising three hierarchical levels of action (critical, avoidant, and destructive) for each level of the socio-ecosystem, TA serves as a model for community-based practitioners, such as those working in the fields of social work and public affairs. The authors argue that transformation is necessary to deconstruct the social institutions in the United States that maintain and perpetuate systemic inequity, creating dehumanizing consequences. Through critical TA, community workers can make visible hidden socio-structural factors, such as institutionalized racism and White privilege, countering the historic trend of community workers acting as tools of social control—that is, socializing individuals to adapt to marginalized roles and accept inferior treatment; maintaining and enforcing the status quo; and facilitating conformity with inequitable societal norms and practices. The authors also discuss the implications of community-based TA practice.


1969 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 20-35
Author(s):  
Frank L. Beach

Internal migration is a growing social phenomenon of today's America: a third of the United States population live in a different state from the one in which they have been born. This, however, has been a constant aspect of the American experience. The author of the present essay analyzes in an historical perspective the growth of California from 1900–1920 under the impact of the westward movement. The social, economic and political implications of the California development are the main features of this paper.


2020 ◽  
pp. 119-140
Author(s):  
Joel Thiessen ◽  
Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme

This chapter deals with political and civic engagement, once more comparing the actively religious, marginally religious, and unaffiliated. In terms of political engagement, the focus is on the many ways individuals are or are not politically active, including who they vote for. Discussion is similarly given to volunteering and charitable giving habits, such as if people volunteer or donate money (or not), how frequently and where they volunteer or give, and motivations for volunteering and giving. The chapter concludes with some possible social and civic implications on the horizon for those in the United States and Canada, should religious nones continue to hold a sizeable proportion of the population.


Author(s):  
Rong Chang ◽  
Sarah L. Morris

This chapter describes how the first author, Rong, has experienced stereotyping as a Chinese female immigrant and doctoral student in America, as her experiences typify the experiences of the model minority. Drawing from Rong's personal journal reflections, the authors use autoethnography as the methodology to present her lived experiences as research. Through reflections on Rong's own understandings, this writing seeks to connect individual experiences to larger social, cultural, and political conditions of the United States (Ellis, 2004). The authors recount four different personal encounters with stereotyping in Rong's local community and in the process of pursuing higher education, and discuss the psychosocial impacts resulting from this type of discrimination. Through this work, the authors seek to contribute to the discourse of the social problem of stereotyping for the so-called “model minority.”


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