The nature and culture of social work with children and families in long-term casework:Findings from a qualitative longitudinal study

Social work in the United Kingdom is preoccupied with what social workers cannot do due to having limited time to spend with service users. Yet remarkably little research has examined what social workers actually do, especially in long-term relationships. This paper draws from an ethnographic study of two social work departments in England that spent 15 months observing practice and organizational life. Our findings show that social work some of the time has a significant amount of involvement with some service users and the dominant view that relationship-based practice is rarely achieved is in need of some revision. However, families at one research site received a much more substantial, reliable overall service due to the additional input of family support workers and having a stable workforce who had their own desks and were co-located with managers in small team offices. This generated a much more supportive, reflective culture for social workers and service users than at the second site, a large open plan "hot-desking" office. Drawing on relational, systemic, and complexity theories, the paper shows how the nature of what social workers do and culture of practice are shaped by the interaction between available services, office designs, and practitioners', managers', and service users' experiences of relating together

White noise : a critical evaluation of social work education’s engagement with whiteness studies

Literature about whiteness and white identities has proliferated across the social sciences and humanities over recent years. However, there has so far been only a small amount of writing in social work, almost all concerned with social work education, which has attempted to make use of ideas developed in this body of literature. This paper summarises the major themes examined in the field of whiteness studies and discusses two broad critiques of approaches to the topic, concerned with the reification of whiteness and the reflexive focus of much work in this field. It then evaluates social work education’s engagement so far with these concepts and finds that, while social work education literature has started to discuss whiteness, it has not so far considered critical approaches to whiteness studies and has not engaged with recent, more situated and nuanced work about whiteness, such as studies that are concerned with performativity. The paper makes some suggestions about how whiteness studies can be used in social work education to enable more complex understandings of race and power

Knowledge/ignorance and the construction of sexuality in social work education

This paper explores how systems of knowledge about sexuality in social work operate alongside systems of ignorance—ways of not knowing sexuality or not knowing parts of it—which work to exclude particular ideas, behaviours and groups of people. It uses discourse analysis of literature aimed at social work students in order to examine how these systems manifest themselves in social work education. The paper analyses the following aspects of dominant discourses about sexuality and lesbians and gay men in this literature: -demands for greater visibility of lesbians and gay men; -the positioning of internalised homophobia as the defining feature of lesbians’ and gay men’s oppression; and -the ways in which not knowing lesbian or gay experience is constructed as an objective position. The paper ends by suggesting ways in which sexuality might be understood differently in social work education contexts

Building heteronormativity: the social and material reconstruction of men's public toilets as spaces of heterosexuality

This paper concerns changes in the spatial structure of British public toilets for men over the last ten years from secluded, indistinctly public/private spaces towards open, largely public structures. It examines a number of past and present toilet spaces in the British city of Manchester using spatial syntax analysis to consider how spaces have been adapted and policed differently in order to reduce opportunities for sex between men. It considers howthese changes relate to shifts in the legislative context and in planning and policing initiatives away from explicit homophobia towards policies of inclusion of certain sexualminorities. The paper concludes that the way in which inclusion and a post-homophobic context have been expressed through legislative changes and planning and policinginitiatives in relation to public toilets has led to a more explicit heteronormalisation of public spaces. The discussion relates to current debates in cultural geography about the consequences of greater participation of sexual minorities in public and issues of surveillance, control and privacy in public spaces

How does race work in social work education? Everyday racial logics, distinctions and practices in social work qualifying programmes in England.

This article presents findings from a study which explored the everyday ways race works on social work programmes in England. The study focused on how race was spoken about and conceptualised, how people were categorised and ordered according to race and the social interactions where race was understood by participants to be significant. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight social work lecturers and nineteen black social work students at two universities in England, to explore the following topics: classroom-based and practice learning, assessment and feedback, interactions between students and between students and educators, and university and practice agency cultures. Data were analysed using thematic analysis and the following themes identified: the routine interpellation of black students and communities in terms of absolute cultural differences, black students’ everyday experiences of marginalisation, hostility and othering, and the racialisation of black students in judgements made about their academic and practice performance. The article concludes that social work education must engage more deeply with contemporary theorisations of race and culture, and that social work educators need a reflexive understanding of how notions such as diversity, equality and universal academic standards are put into practice in ways that marginalise and devalue black students

Nomenclature of prokaryotic ‘Candidatus’ taxa: establishing order in the current chaos

In the mid-1990s, the category ‘Candidatus’ was established for putative taxa of as yet uncultivated prokaryotes. The status of ‘Candidatus’ is not formally included in the rules of the International Code of Nomenclature of Prokaryotes. Thus, ‘Candidatus’ names do not have standing in the nomenclature. Curated annotated lists of ‘Candidatus’ names (not including phyla) have been published since 2020. By April 2021, about 2700 names of ‘Candidatus’ taxa had been published. The International Committee on Systematics of Prokaryotes recently rejected proposals to allow gene sequence data as nomenclatural types. An alternative code for naming uncultivated microorganisms (the ‘SeqCode’) is now being developed for naming the majority of prokaryotes that are as yet uncultivated. In the opinion of the author, there is no need for such a code, as the existing system, with nomenclature quality control also for ‘Candidatus’ names, fulfills the needs. Computer programs such as GAN which generates large numbers of correctly formed names from the short lists of Latin and Greek word elements and Protologger that produce descriptions directly from genome sequences will become important in the future for automated naming and description of large numbers of ‘Candidatus’ taxa from metagenomic and single cell genome data. However, the formation of interesting and meaningful names is encouraged whenever possible

Oesophageal epiphrenic diverticulum: an unusual presentation and review.

Epiphrenic pulsion diverticula are rare and often asymptomatic. We describe a case presenting in an unusual fashion, and review the controversy over the management of this condition with regard to the requirement for myotomy and antireflux surgery. We believe that both procedures are necessary, but believe that both procedures are necessary, but optimal management strategies are unlikely to be resolved as the rarity of the condition precludes largescale prospective studies