Imagined, prescribed and actual text trajectories: the ‘problem’ with case notes in contemporary social work

Drawing on a text-oriented action research ethnography of the writing practices of UK-based social workers, this paper focuses on a key but problematic aspect of everyday, professional textual practice – the production of “case notes.” Using data drawn from interviews, workshops, texts and observation, the paper locates case notes within social work everyday practice and explores the entextualization of three distinct case notes. The heuristic of imagined, prescribed and actual trajectories is used to track specific instances of entextualization and to illustrate why the production of case notes is a particularly complex activity. A key argument is that in the institutional imaginary, and reflected in the institutionally prescribed trajectory, case notes are construed as a comprehensive record of all actions, events and interactions, prior to and providing warrants for all other documentation. However, they are in actual practice produced as parts of clusters of a range of different text types which, together, provide accounts of, and for, actions and decisions. This finding explains why case notes are often viewed as incomplete and raises fundamental questions about how they should be evaluated. The complexity of case notes as an everyday professional practice is underscored in relation to professional voice, addressivity and textual temporality

Economies of signs in writing for academic publication: the case of English Medium “National” Journals

The centrality of publishing in academic journals to academic knowledge work globally is largely taken as a given. Publishing is a defining aspect of scholars’ labour in the academic world, tied to both current and possible future material conditions in which they/we work. The aim of this paper is to focus on one part of this knowledge work, the production of English medium “national” journals in local contexts where English is not the official or widely used medium of communication yet where English, in a global context, is increasingly viewed as the “academic lingua franca.” The paper begins by outlining the longitudinal study from which this focus emerged, followed by a discussion of case studies of four English medium “national” journals in the field of psychology located in four southern and central European national contexts: Hungary, Slovakia, Spain and Portugal. I argue that a focus on the specific phenomenon of EMN journals brings into sharp relief the nature and workings of the dominant knowledge economy and also illustrates the ways in which some of the key ideological values, including a market model of academic knowledge production, are to some extent being challenged. A goal of this paper is to explore this particular fragment of the academic knowledge making world—what scholars are doing, why and under what conditions —to illustrate the need for closer scrutiny of the practices surrounding academic production and to open up debate about what kind of practices we want to be involved in and why

Writing in professional social work practice in a changing communicative landscape (WISP)

Professor Theresa Lillis, Maria Leedham and Alison Twiner are carrying out the first national project on writing and recording in social work: WiSP - Writing in professional social work practice in a changing communicative landscape. Alongside the project advisory panel, chaired by Lucy Gray, they are working to ensure findings can be used for informing education and training, as well as professional and institutional policy making

Resistir regímenes de evaluación en el estudio del escribir: hacia un imaginario enriquecido

Resumen Este artículo se enfoca en el imaginario (Castoriadis, 1987) predominante en la investigación sobre el escribir y se pregunta, en particular, cómo los regímenes de evaluación ejercen orientaciones analíticas sobre este fenómeno. El artículo retoma algunos extractos de tres proyectos de investigación: uno sobre el escribir académico de los estudiantes (Lillis, 2001); otro sobre el escribir de los académicos para la publicación (Lillis y Curry, 2010) y un último sobre el escribir profesional de los asistentes sociales (Lillis, 2017). Los objetivos del artículo son, primero, ilustrar el enfoque evaluativo-normativo sobre el escribir que se hace evidente en las prácticas de asunción en de los regímenes de evaluación, por parte del profesor, del evaluador y del inspector. En un segundo momento, argumentar que algunas categorías analíticas utilizadas a menudo en la investigación sobre el escribir pueden reflejar características de los regímenes de evaluación y llevar a un reconocimiento equivocado en lugar de iluminar lo que está pasando. Por último, el artículo busca defender el valor de un enfoque de orientación etnográfico particularmente de un enfoque que resalta trayectorias de textos y personas⎯a la hora de ‘abrir’ los imaginarios de la investigación y de hacer visibles dimensiones clave de los fenómenos que estamos explorando. [Resisting Regimes of Evaluation in the Study of Writing: Towards a Richer Imaginary] Abstract This paper puts the spotlight on the dominant ‘imaginary’ (Castoriadis 1987) governing writing research, focusing in particular on the way in which evaluation regimes shape analytic orientations towards writing as a phenomenon. Drawing on data from three different research projects- student writing ( e.g. Lillis 2001), scholars’ writing for publication (e.g. Lillis and Curry 2010) , writing in professional social work (e.g. Lillis, 2017)-the paper has three objectives: 1) to illustrate the normative evaluative approach towards writing evident in practises of uptake within the evaluation regimes, that is by teacher, reviewer, manager/inspector; 2) to signal that some widely used analytic categories/frames used across writing research traditions may mirror features of evaluation regimes and lead to a misrecognition, rather than an illumination of what is going on; 3) to illustrate the value of ethnographically oriented approaches, in particular work which explores writing through a focus on trajectories (of texts and of people) for opening up our research imaginaries and for making visible key dimensions to the phenomena we are exploring

A case study of a research-based collaboration around writing in social work

This paper discusses an ongoing research-based collaboration between an academic literacies researcher and a lecturer in the field of Social Work aimed at exploring the nature of everyday writing in social work. The paper outlines the key principles of the methodology adopted—a text-oriented ethnography—and discusses the extent to which this methodology is facilitating a collaborative partnership towards meeting three interrelated goals: the empirical goal of building rich descriptions of writing in everyday social work practice; the ideological-epistemological goal of challenging a deficit discourse on writing (and writers); and the interventionist goal of working with institutions to harness writing in productive ways to learning and professional practice. Central to this methodological approach is an attempt to build a three-way conversation between the fields of 'new' literacy studies, in particular academic literacies; the discipline of social work education; and social work agencies/practitioners. We outline the methodology and foreground some key congruencies across these fields which are helping to facilitate successful collaboration

Quelle relation entre l’écrit académique et l’écrit professionnel? Une étude de cas dans le domaine du travail social [What is the relationship between academic writing and professional writing? A case study in the field of social work]

Beaucoup d'étudiants, dans l'enseignement supérieur, suivent des cours à orientation professionnelle. Cet article se focalise sur un projet d’« ethnographie de texte », concernant l’écriture des assistants sociaux pendant leur formation et sur leur terrain professionnel, avec cinq assistants sociaux comme co-chercheurs. L’article examine les ressemblances et les différences entre l’écriture pratiquée dans les cours universitaires et dans le travail quotidien. Une conclusion importante de la recherche est qu’en général on ne prête pas suffisamment d’attention pédagogique à l’écriture – tant aux textes qu’aux pratiques – que les assistants sociaux doivent produire dans les contextes professionnels

Augmenting Agent Platforms to Facilitate Conversation Reasoning

Within Multi Agent Systems, communication by means of Agent Communication Languages (ACLs) has a key role to play in the co-operation, co-ordination and knowledge-sharing between agents. Despite this, complex reasoning about agent messaging, and specifically about conversations between agents, tends not to have widespread support amongst general-purpose agent programming languages. ACRE (Agent Communication Reasoning Engine) aims to complement the existing logical reasoning capabilities of agent programming languages with the capability of reasoning about complex interaction protocols in order to facilitate conversations between agents. This paper outlines the aims of the ACRE project and gives details of the functioning of a prototype implementation within the Agent Factory multi agent framework

Discourse, practice and power in adult learning reform in England and Wales, 2000-2014

This analysis of the exercise of power in and behind some of the important discourses in adult learning reform in England and Wales, 2000-2014, examines how the early narrowing of the concept of what constituted (publicly funded) lifelong learning – controlled through increasing entralisation of adult learning reform discourses - was to affect the conduct and course of described adult learning reforms, through the exercise of centripetal government power - and outlines some implications for current adult learning reform discourses. The author adapts an approach outlined in ‘Technologies of Truth’ (Heikinenn, et al. 2012) to reveal one distilled ‘catalogue of possibilities’ from ‘KPS’ analyses of ‘Knowledge’, ‘Power’ and ‘Subject’ relations, within the discourse of each ‘Public Work’ report recontextualised for this doctoral study; analyses the operation of (individual and institutional) subjects within those discourses and how discoursal subjects were constituted; calls on Foucault and Fairclough’s thinking and approaches to discourse analysis and on Blommaert’s work on ‘scales’ (Blommaert 2006), ‘indexicality’, ‘stratification’ and ‘text and context’ (Blommaert 2005) to further subject the results of KPS analysis to detailed questions concerning the discourses and their control. ‘KPS’ analysis shows repeated, observable patterns of discoursal control: Government (and those in its orbit), constrained the adult learning reform discourses described, ‘‘centering’ control over each discourse, narrowly circumscribing and stratifying lifelong learning and who should be publicly funded to pursue it; with contrasting government positions and approaches to establishing qualifications frameworks in Wales and England. What does this analysis mean for understanding how discourse in adult learning reform is controlled now? The author suggests (at least) a detailed analysis of recent and current discourses associatedwith Apprenticeships in England, scrutiny of key texts and guidance documents, further adapting the (Heikinenn, et al. 1999) approach, using ‘linguistic technique to answer social-scientific questions’ (Blommaert 2005: 237)

EviPlant: An efficient digital forensic challenge creation, manipulation and distribution solution

Education and training in digital forensics requires a variety of suitable challenge corpora containing realistic features including regular wear-and-tear, background noise, and the actual digital traces to be discovered during investigation. Typically, the creation of these challenges requires overly arduous effort on the part of the educator to ensure their viability. Once created, the challenge image needs to be stored and distributed to a class for practical training. This storage and distribution step requires significant time and resources and may not even be possible in an online/distance learning scenario due to the data sizes involved. As part of this paper, we introduce a more capable methodology and system as an alternative to current approaches. EviPlant is a system designed for the efficient creation, manipulation, storage and distribution of challenges for digital forensics education and training. The system relies on the initial distribution of base disk images, i.e., images containing solely base operating systems. In order to create challenges for students, educators can boot the base system, emulate the desired activity and perform a "diffing" of resultant image and the base image. This diffing process extracts the modified artefacts and associated metadata and stores them in an "evidence package". Evidence packages can be created for different personae, different wear-and-tear, different emulated crimes, etc., and multiple evidence packages can be distributed to students and integrated into the base images. A number of additional applications in digital forensic challenge creation for tool testing and validation, proficiency testing, and malware analysis are also discussed as a result of using EviPlant.Comment: Digital Forensic Research Workshop Europe 201