scholarly journals FROM ETHICAL CHALLENGES ON THE SOCIAL WORK FRONTLINE TO JOINT ACTION FOR A NEW ECO-SOCIAL WORLD

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (5) ◽  
pp. 8
Author(s):  
Rory Truell ◽  
Sarah Banks
Author(s):  
Jeane Anastas

An aspect of proposing a definition of a science of social work is defining the domains that it should or could address. Critical realism calls for examining and critiquing the social arrangements that frame our science and our knowledge. Like social work itself, it aspires to be an emancipatory project. The concept of embodiment from philosophy of mind is introduced; it suggests that a mind, whether the same or different from a brain, is embedded in the organism, the social world, the cultural world that includes the historical, and the ecological world. This framework has implications for understanding how we know and what we need to know. Embodiment is a concept that can be used in defining the scope and concerns of social work science.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-41
Author(s):  
Bhagya Hithaishi Jayawardana ◽  
K Nanayakkara

Ethical practice is fundamental to any practiced based profession including social work. The social work profession is a diverse one with a mission to promote wellbeing and quality of life for vulnerable people. Despite serving the society it’s also central to promoting social work Ethics to maintain the professional standards and lessen the ethical issues and dilemma’s faced in day today practice. Ethics are really important to any profession, yet a necessity for those rooted in and human services. In the Sri Lankan context, it is disheartening to see how social workers have lost their professional identity with the absence of a professional code of ethics in place. A qualitative research approach was followed to explore and describe the key ethical challenges faced by the social workers in Sri Lanka. Survey method, in-depth interviews and key informants interviews were utilized and analyzed based on purposive sampling method. The data were categorized based on different themes. The finding proves that there is no proper guideline to be followed for the practitioners, particularly in situations of ethical dilemmas and conflicts. Most of the Human Service Organizations have their own set of rules with lesser focus on the code of ethical conduct. The unethical practice unintentionally promotes the malpractice leading to scenarios where organizational set of rules violates the client’s self determination and confidentiality. Although most of the upcoming social work graduates are made aware of the importance of maintaining an ethical conduct, when they join the work force as social workers they face many constraints due to absence of a formal code of ethics. This has resulted most of the social workers not having any obligations to continue an ethical practice  hence their practice is inevitably not much embedded in ethics. Thus the study provides an outlook on the ethical challenges faced by the social workers specially working in different sectors in Sri Lanka.


Table Lands ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 35-50
Author(s):  
Kara K. Keeling ◽  
Scott T. Pollard

In The Tale of Mr. Tod, The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan, and The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, or, the Roly-Poly Pudding, Potter uses quintessential British foods—pies and puddings—to motivate the plot, shape the characters, and create a social world. The chapter uses period cookbooks by Mrs. Beeton and Eliza Acton to understand the preeminence of puddings and pies in British cooking. To take into account Potter’s representations of class and setting, the analysis considers British rural and urban cultures, the food-related problems of poverty, and period-applied social work theory. In these tales of failed pies and puddings, Potter represents food as strategic in a fictive world where characters must be alert to the constantly changing ways that food shapes the social landscape. Potter uses food to show the complexities of the real world within her stories, acknowledging the hidden violence of social relations.


2003 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
HARRY FERGUSON

Questions concerning what it means to be a human agent and the capacities of those who receive welfare services to reflect upon and shape their lives, and the kinds of social conditions which create opportunities for such ‘reflexivity’, have begun to move to the centre of social policy and social work analysis. Using empirical evidence drawn from a study of child and woman protection, this paper argues that, contrary to claims that the concept of self-reflexivity as developed in the work of Beck and Giddens is of little relevance to marginalised citizens, in late-modernity the socially excluded are using social work and welfare services in creative ways to critically engage in life-planning, to find safety and healing. However, the data suggest that much greater specificity is needed in relation to the areas in which it is possible to act to change and develop the self and the social world in late-modernity. The paper argues for a complex theory of agency and reflexivity in welfare discourse which takes account of the intersection of structural disadvantage, intervention practices and personal biography and how people adjust to adversity and cope with toxic experiences and relationships in their lives. This helps to account for the limits to the capacities of agents to reflect and know why they act as they do and their capacities to act destructively, as well as providing for an appreciation of the creative, reflexive welfare subject.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
David E. Scharff

Enrique Pichon-Rivière, a pioneer of psychoanalysis, worked and wrote in Argentina in the mid-twentieth century, but his work has not so far been translated into English. From the beginning, Pichon-Rivière understood the social applications of analytic thinking, centring his ideas on "el vinculo", which is generally translated as "the link", but could equally be translated as "the bond". The concept that each individual is born into human social links, is shaped by them, and simultaneously contributes to them inextricably ties people's inner worlds to the social world of family and society in which they live. Pichon-Rivière believed, therefore, that family analysis and group and institutional applications of analysis were as important as individual psychoanalysis. Many of the original family and couple therapists from whom our field learned trained with him. Because his work was centred in the analytic writings of Fairbairn and Klein, as well as those of the anthropologist George Herbert Mead and the field theory of Kurt Lewin, his original ideas have important things to teach us today. This article summarises some of his central ideas such as the link, spiral process, the single determinate illness, and the process of therapy.


This book examines the way schizophrenia is shaped by its social context: how life is lived with this madness in different settings, and what it is about those settings that alters the course of the illness, its outcome, and even the structure of its symptoms. Until recently, schizophrenia was perhaps our best example—our poster child—for the “bio-bio-bio” model of psychiatric illness: genetic cause, brain alteration, pharmacologic treatment. We now have direct epidemiological evidence that people are more likely to fall ill with schizophrenia in some social settings than in others, and more likely to recover in some social settings than in others. Something about the social world gets under the skin. This book presents twelve case studies written by psychiatric anthropologists that help to illustrate some of the variability in the social experience of schizophrenia and that illustrate the main hypotheses about the different experience of schizophrenia in the west and outside the west--and in particular, why schizophrenia seems to have a more benign course and outcome in India. We argue that above all it is the experience of “social defeat” that increases the risk and burden of schizophrenia, and that opportunities for social defeat are more abundant in the modern west. There is a new role for anthropology in the science of schizophrenia. Psychiatric science has learned—epidemiologically, empirically, quantitatively—that our social world makes a difference. But the highly structured, specific-variable analytic methods of standard psychiatric science cannot tell us what it is about culture that has that impact. The careful observation enabled by rich ethnography allows us to see in more detail what kinds of social and cultural features may make a difference to a life lived with schizophrenia. And if we understand culture’s impact more deeply, we believe that we may improve the way we reach out to help those who struggle with our most troubling madness.


2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Irvine

What is the role of imitation in ethnographic fieldwork, and what are its limits? This article explores what it means to participate in a particular fieldsite; a Catholic English Benedictine monastery. A discussion of the importance of hospitality in the life of the monastery shows how the guest becomes a point of contact between the community and the wider society within which that community exists. The peripheral participation of the ethnographer as monastic guest is not about becoming incorporated, but about creating a space within which knowledge can be communicated. By focusing on the process of re-learning in the monastery – in particular, relearning how to experience silence and work – I discuss some of the ways in which the fieldwork experience helped me to reassess the social world to which I would return.


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