Critical Realism and Emancipatory Social Work Research. Theoretical and Methodological Reflections on Action Research and User Participation.

Analytical research on societal mechanisms and structural inequalities is more urgent than ever. Given that social work ought to be consistent with the broader purposes of the profession, the question of how and to what extent research can contribute to the realization of human rights and social justice is important. Participatory research is relevant for social work research on political and emancipatory issues but challenging to implement in practice. In the 2024 SIG, we wish to focus on several topics, closely related to critical realism´s vision of an emancipatory social science, where participation, transformation, normativity, interdisciplinarity, and ethics are central. We want to take a closer look at action research and specifically focus on how a critical realist perspective can underpin and guide the change that action research seeks. Action research may allow focusing on structural mechanisms more than on individual explanations of the most wicked problems of our time.

The SIG will also encourage exposing and discussing other methodological approaches, traditions, and practices using critical theories, for example from research in social work in public services, integration of immigrants, child and family care, elderly care, and other research fields. We want to highlight both the opportunities and challenges of emancipatory research and discuss the researcher’s role as an active reformer and the modified role that such a position presupposes and challenges.

We welcome presentations of a broad spectrum of research in social work to this full-day seminar.  We hope for attendance from researchers interested in theories of science in general and who are curious about the potential of action research and critical realism. We welcome presentations of ongoing or finalized work – as well as research that has not yet started.

Send your abstract of a maximum of 300 words to the convenors by March 18th. Acceptance of abstracts will be sent by March 20th. Please get in touch with us for questions or if you wish to discuss your contribution.

Best wishes from the SIG convenors,

Monica Kjørstad (monica@oslomet.no)
Anu-Riina Svenlin (anu-riina.svenlin@jyu.fi)
Didier Boost (didier.boost@uantwerpen.be)

Please find the preliminary program below:

User Involvement and the Digitalization of Services

In this pre-conference we will elaborate on the main conference’s theme – technological innovations and how it may impact on research, practice and education. How are service users affected by the increased use of digital tools? How is their interaction and encountering with services influenced in the era of digitalization? Does digital tools for meeting and assisting users influence their feeling of being included, recognized, or do they miss the ‘face-to-face’-meeting in real life etc.? Are special ethics and values contested when social work practice is carried out in a context where technological tools mediates the interaction between the stakeholders? How do the digitalisation in education and in research affect our collaboration with service users?

We will meet and share research findings and theoretical/conceptual ideas about these topics in our SIG event. As announced in the call, the first half of the day will be organised in collaboration with the SIG for Social Work Practice Research. Our two SIGs share many interests and partly overlap. This is reflected for example in the research’s aim of giving voice to all stakeholders (including silenced voices) and the use of research methods where co-creation is carried out and approached in various ways.

PROGRAM

Transformative Learning – All Involved Can Learn

Scientific knowledge should feed social work practice and, on the other hand, the knowledge present in practice should also feed science. Conducting social work practice research is in many cases not only a means to inform practice and policy by answering a research question (achieving a knowledge goal) but also to help improve social services and bring about change, to develop concrete tools and products and to learn with those involved. Conducting research is therefore always a sharing and learning experience, not at least for the researcher.

Learning can be attained by giving stakeholders a role in research. Although practice research does not necessarily coincide with participatory research, aiming for a higher level of participation of stakeholders from practice -users and providers, policy and education is a logical choice to better serve Social Work purposes. This may include diversifying the designs and methods used, and making more use of the strengths in mixed methods designs. The goal of learning can also be an explicit goal in a research project. Research then serves as a didactic tool.

A model for clarifying the different modalities of learning in research is that of Markauskaite & Goodyear (2017). They present research as a rich environment in which learning can take place in five directions:

1. Up: by connecting practical experience to theory;
2. Inward: by learning more about one’s own person and professionalism;
3. Forward: by developing new acting knowledge for future action;
4. To the side: by becoming more skilled in mutual cooperation, often across disciplines;
5. Downwards: by becoming more solid because there is better insight into contextual limitations
   and own preferences and to learn better from daily experiences.

The first half day of the event will be co-organised with the service user involvement SIG, and the second half day of the event will be independently organized by the SWPR SIG. Details, please see the following.

Morning Session (9am-12noon): Joint Seminar with the Special Interest Group for Service User Involvement

The other half of the day will be a joint meeting with the SIG Social Work Practice Research. There we will discuss the ethical questions about GDPR, procedures and digitalization, related to practice research. We think about concrete items, we are all struggling with:

• Data protection regulations and how GDPR are met and handled in different national contexts when it comes to research where service users, practitioners etc are required to have an active part in research, as co-researchers and in partnerships with conventional researchers.
• The procedures and requirements of the ethical commission. Are they adapted to the specificities of social work practice research with the involvement of service users?
• Digitalization in our research processes – pitfalls and opportunities for the inclusion of service users
• Tension between two logics: rules/procedures/protocols (protection and rights) versus making connection and relationship-based research.

This joint meeting will be facilitated by the World Café method, focusing on dialogue, participation, and interaction. By this we kindly invite all participants with an interest in these topics to join this stimulating and challenging event!

Afternoon Session (1-3.30pm) : SWPR SIG on ‘Transformative Learning’  

• We invite participants to share their experiences about how they address and shape learning in their work.
• Abstracts are not necessary to join in. We ask participants to prepare by reflecting on their experiences of transformative learning together.
  
  • Describe your learning experience – who is learning and what is learned in your research project?
  • Facilitation of learning – how do you make the desirable learning possible, what models do you base on, and challenges faced by educators.
  • What are your inspirations in promoting ‘transformative learning’ in social work practice and research?
• The output of the activities has the potential to build/to construct a new framework together.

Webinars ahead of Vilnius

In a series of activities, the SIG Social Work Practice Research explore how the learning component of practice research can be further strengthened; how to reinforce the opportunity for all stakeholders (including the SW researcher) for learning during and after the research. The following questions guide the content of the meetings: What’s in it for the different participants (empowerment)? What is the relation between learning and change (how to create impact?). What learning theories are informing Social Work Practice Research. How is new technology helpful in facilitating the learning and change in SWPR.

Two webinars are organized ahead of the annual meeting during the ECSWR. In these interactive sessions, in addition to engaging speakers, there will be plenty of room to interact and share experiences, best practices and failures. And thus, also learn together as a result.

• Webinar 1 has as its topic: Teaching practice research through partnerships with field educators, social work, communities and university, Laura Yliruka.
• Webinar 2 has the focus on mutual learning with students in social work education (BA and MA) Bas van Lanen (the Netherlands) is keynote speaker.

Organizing committee:

• Elke Plovie, University of Applied Sciences UC Leuven-Limburg (Belgium)
• Sara Serbati, Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Pedagogy and Applied Psychology, University of Padova (Italy)
• Sui Ting Kong, Department of Sociology, Durham University (UK)
• Simone Boogaarts, HAN University of Applied Sciences (the Netherlands)

Conveners:

• Catrine Torbjørnsen Halås, Department of Social Science, Nord University (Norway)
• Martine Ganzevles, HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht (the Netherlands)

SIG Page

SIG page

Exploring creative, ethical, and innovative research, policy and practice with adolescents across Europe

This pre-conference event will comprise a full day workshop focussing on shared interests in research, policy, and social work practice with adolescents. We would warmly welcome both current SIG members alongside anyone else interested in joining us on the day and hope that the meeting will allow us to continue ongoing discussions regarding shared substantive interests related to creative, ethical, and innovative research and practice with young people at risk of harm.

This is the first year we will hold a day-long workshop for the SIG and we have planned a full schedule of activities to learn from and with each other. In the morning we’ve invited someone from Lithuania’s Youth Culture Digital Archive (acronym JAUKA), to come and share with us. The archive, created by multi-disciplinary researchers at Vilnius University, houses hundreds of examples of youth informal cultural creations from the Soviet era to present day. We hope this will be an opportunity for us to experience learning together, as a group of researchers who share a love of learning about- and learning from-young people. 

In the afternoon, we will spend time exploring shared research interests and potential collaborative projects through the lens of two key questions: 

1. Social work with adolescents: aligned to or at odds with the ethics of the profession? 
2. What are the most pressing issues facing adolescents in receipt of social work support (or who are engaged in social work research)?

If you have any questions about the SIG, please contact Kristi Langhoff at k.e.langhoff@sussex.ac.uk

SIG page

Theme of Social Work Geographies, Or, The Place/s Of Social Work 

Social work takes place in an array of contexts including in government offices, private homes, streets, community centres, prisons, courts, hospitals, schools, care homes, clinics, parks, virtual rooms, phonelines and many more. The place of social work is distinct to each encounter as place is a production of the social, material, and temporal (Massey, 2005; Thrift, 2008). Since Lefebvre (Lefebvre, 1991a, 1991b) we know that space is always political and that its politics operates at the intersection of the material and social (Amin, 2012; Amin and Thrift, 2013). Place is an event that cannot be reduced to a single representation (Lorimer, 2005; Thrift, 2008) and is always more than human. The social work literature however evinces a persistent dichotomy between social and physical place (Akesson, Burns & Hordyk, 2017), and our scholarship has yet to establish a conceptual grounding for exploring power and place (Ratliff, 2019). An exploration of social work geographies, or the places of social work, can therefore offer insights into the politics of social work events and how these are shaped by their material and organic facets as much as by human action and intent.

Our event this year includes six contributions exploring the geographies and places of social work:

• Mapping young people’s neighborhood nature places towards sustainable well-being and social inclusion: Implications for social work
  James Obeng, Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) & University of Jyväskylä
• Social (work) places in carceral settings
  Julia Emprechtinger & Marina Richter, HES-SO Valais-Wallis, Switzerland
• Geography of social work: Social planning as a contribution to territorial stigmatization?
  Marius Otto, University of Applied Sciences Landshut, Germany
• Virtual research with children of migrant parents in rural China during COVID-19: Constructing a multidimensional sense of place
  Shuang (Daisy) Wu, Susan P. Kemp, and Allen Bartley, University of Auckland, NZ
• Representations of place and land in undergraduate social work textbooks in settler Canada
  Tina Wilson, University of British Columbia, Canada
• Talking in place – Walking interviews as a method for ecosocial work research
  Verena Fisch, Glasgow Caledonian University, Scotland

SIG page

Pre-Conference Title. A Future Where Children’s Rights are Protected

Professionals worldwide are struggling with fulfilling their children’s rights obligations and acting in line with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. When speaking about children’s rights in practice this goes into both child participation (known as article 12 in the UNCRC), but also issues related to the other articles: definition of a child (article 1), best interest of the child (article 3), care (article 7), protection (article 19, 33, 34), education (article 28), play (article 31), recovery (article 39).  There is a myriad of challenges in everyday social and child welfare and protection work with children and their families trying to enact these legal obligations.

As a recently created SIG group, we want to surface, discuss, and explore some of these challenges to expand and deepen practical, research and theoretical developments in the field. This year, given the conference theme of ‘Envisioning the Future’ we want to focus on the ever-quickening pace of modernity and its impact on children’s rights.  As researchers, practitioners, policy makers and PhD students, we want to be able to respond with agility and flexibility to the future challenges of participation, protection, and inclusion. As a SIG we therefore want to be future orientated so a particular focus this year given the conference theme will be placed on identifying current and emerging threats to children’s rights and how we as a SIG can respond to these challenges.  During the pre-conference event we will therefore focus on identifying and critically exploring future research, practice, and policy priorities so we can shape the research, practice, and policy agenda for the incoming year. This will enable us to set achievable targets in terms of areas for collaborative research topics and identifying possible funders. We can also discuss and agree possible papers for publication, share practice responses to modernity and discuss how we can influence policy developments across Europe.  Further extension of this modernity discourse will be to discuss the possible use of technology, immersive video, and artificial intelligence as possible emerging tools to enhance participation, protection, and inclusion. 

The general aim of our SIG in Vilnius therefore is to provide a forum to bring together international scholars, policy makers, research students, managers, and practitioners interested in issues related to children’s rights in practice across various organizations (public and non-governmental) to examine the challenges of modernity, envision the future of children’s rights across Europe and produce research led solutions. 

Preliminary Agenda

Dr. Paul McCafferty p.mccafferty@qub.ac.uk corresponding author.

(On behalf of the Children’s Rights in Practice SIG: Participation, Protection, Inclusion)
Dr. Esther Mercado,
Dr. Inger Sofie Dahlø Husby.
Lecturer Wendy Eerdekens.

SIG page

Agenda for the Gerontological Social Work SIG event.

• Welcome with introductions and overview of the ENGSW SIG
• Updates on SIG activity
• Short papers: Social Work with Older people
• Research updates from SIG members and mapping of research interests
• Visibility of GSW
• SIG activity for the year ahead
• AOB

SIG page

Preparing and Sustaining the Social Work Workforce. Research on Critical Issues and Challenges in International Social Work Workforce Contexts. 

Contact details and affiliation:

Paula McFadden, Ulster University, Northern Ireland  p.mcfadden@ulster.ac.uk, 
Pia Tham, Uppsala University, Sweden  pia.tham@uu.se, Maija Mänttäri-van der Kuip, University of Jyväskylä, Finland  maija.manttari@jyu.fi 

SIG page