Anti-racist social work in a 'post-race society'? Interrogating the amorphous 'other'

Anti-racist social work is at a crossroads: while on the one hand, racial binaries such as black/white, us/other and slave/master can be useful political tools to understand institutional racism, current contexts of multiculturalism raise questions about the continued relevance of race as a category for analysis. 'Newer' forms of racialised identities are emerging that need to be incorporated into a broader conceptualisation of non-colour-based race theory. In this article, these contradictions are explicated through a phenomenological study of embodied reflections on race, ethnicity and self-identity among social work students. Frantz Fanon's 'fact of blackness' provides an epistemic guide to this phenomenological study, providing a multi-layered examination of social work students' experiential accounts of their embodied identities, their colour, race, blackness, whiteness and sexuality and what this means for self-identity. Tentative student discourses provide powerful insights into the urgent need for a radical turn in (re)locating culture and race studies in the social work curriculum

Self-identity, embodiment and the development of emotional resilience

This article is made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund. Copyright @ The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Association of Social Workers. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Recent social work reforms in the UK have highlighted the need for social work practitioners to be empathetic, reflexive and resilient. Current literature defines resilience as the individual's adaptive response to adversity, stress-resistant personality traits and the ability to ‘bounce back’, yet the processes by which resilience is developed remain underexplored. The stressors associated with training to be a social worker particularly necessitate such an investigation. This study adopts a phenomenological approach to explore social work students' lived experiences of managing emotion and developing resilience. Emotion is constructed as a relational concept, developed within intersubjective space and as an embodied experience. Findings indicate tensions in student narratives around the expression of emotion and ‘being professional’. Critical incident narratives reveal often overwhelming difficulties experienced by students, prior to and during the social work programme. A variety of coping strategies were adopted including active resistance, spirituality, critical reflection and social support. Narratives as ‘discourses-in-the-making’ highlight embodiment as a valuable analytical lens by which emotional conflicts are experienced, deconstructed and resolved through the process of integrating the personal and professional self. Spaces to develop emotional resilience within the social work curriculum are discussed

Brexit logics: Myths and Facts- A Black Feminist Analysis

On June 24, 2016, the UK voted to leave the European Union in a landmark referendum result. The ‘Brexit’ vote along with Trump’s presidential election in America, the Turkish referendum, the French election and the rise in far-right groups more globally, have been underpinned by certain populist ‘logics’. This comment seeks to agitate these Brexit logics through a Black Feminist perspective that refocuses current debates on power and the intersectional politics of gender, race and class

Material intimacies and Black hair practice: Touch, texture, resistance

This article explores the socio-materiality of Black hair care practice as an affective surface through which we can understand Black women’s experiences of intimacy and belonging. Texture of hair has often been overlooked in the examination of racialised presentation, even as shade or skin colour has been over-determined. By paying attention to the centrality of touch in negotiating grooming practices in Black hair care, a multi-layered appreciation of the material entanglements in Black intimacies can be explored. Hair is more than part of the body, it is both highly visible, as well as intensely personal and political in terms of the ways it is worn and seen by the observer. Drawing on a sensory ethnography of Afro hair salons in the UK and biographical narrative analysis, this article explores Black women’s relationships with their hair in everyday life, alongside a parallel reading of the classic text “Cassie’s hair” by Susan Bordo. This layering of narratives allows for a new form of listening to emerge, an attunement that forefronts the habitual practices of hair dressing and hair making as ways of ‘becoming black’. In every twist, braid and weave, these biographies highlight the intimate entanglements by which the ambivalence of black belonging is negotiated. Touch in particular, both nurturing and hostile, represents an important socio-cultural ritual through which collective belonging is experienced: evoking memories of inter-generational and transnational intimacies with black communities in another time and another place. This paper offers a novel way of reimagining the role of affect in understanding collective intimacies and sustaining black identity in diasporic contexts

Brexit Logics: Myth and Fact - A Black Feminist Analysis

On June 24, 2016, the UK voted to leave the European Union in a landmark referendum result. The ‘Brexit’ vote along with Trump’s presidential election in America, the Turkish referendum, the French election and the rise in far-right groups more globally, have been underpinned by certain populist ‘logics’. This comment seeks to agitate these Brexit logics through a Black Feminist perspective that refocuses current debates on power and the intersectional politics of gender, race and class

Health beliefs and carer burden in first episode psychosis

BACKGROUND: Carer burden is high during First Episode Psychosis (FEP) and evidence suggests that this is a predictor of poor long-term outcome. However our understanding of factors associated with higher burden is poor. We propose that carers’ cultural backgrounds and health belief models will influence their perceived burden of care, over and above that explained by severity of illness. METHODS: Patients with FEP and their primary Carers were recruited from the Early Intervention Service. Patients and Carers completed a range of validated measures, self-report ethnicity and demographic information together with the Multidimensional Health Locus of Control and Caregiver Burden Inventory. RESULTS: Significant correlations were found between carer burden and health beliefs, which differed by ethnicity and gender. High physical burden was experienced by Black carers with an external locus of control; time restrictions and emotional burden correlated with an external locus of control in Asian carers. For White carers, external locus of control correlated with time dependence burden. In all ethnic groups female carers experienced more time dependency, physical and developmental burden. No significant correlations were found between patient measures of severity or duration of illness and carer burden. CONCLUSIONS: The type of burden experienced by carers differed between gender and ethnicity and was related to their health belief models. Thus the explanation and understanding of illness appears to be more salient than simply a patient’s severity of illness when considering the development of carer burden. Interventions to tackle high carer burden, and thus expressed emotion to improve outcome in patients, may need increasing focus here

Invisible bodies and disembodied voices? Identity work, the body and embodiment in transnational service work

This article explores the linkages between identity work, the body and embodiment in transnational call centres. Identity work, defined as the masking of national identity to imply proximity to the western client, provides an opportunity for the analyst to examine workplace embodiment in a global context. Qualitative data from an ethnographic study of two global outsourcing firms in India (2010-2012) explicated these processes. Narrative accounts suggest that call centre workers are routinely made aware of the body as a target of discipline, for instance in training; by working on their own bodies (including posture, dress, voice modulation and other forms of body regulation); by working on the bodies of others (through voice-based interactions) and by using embodied images of Americans to contextualize the service provided. In this way, the western client is visualized by the Indian call worker through corporeal imaginaries that concomitantly construct, subvert and resist the West-Rest dichotomy in service relations. Far from being disembodied, this study demonstrates that the body is central to global service work

Race, embodiment and later life: Re-animating aging bodies of color

This theoretical essay examines the intersections between race, ethnicity and old age from an inter-disciplinary lens. Drawing on cultural gerontology (especially embodied aging studies) and post-colonial perspectives on aging, it explores how an emphasis on the body and embodiment can serve as a conceptual lens for understanding racialized aging bodies. A tentative framework for analysis is proposed. The concept of exile explores how bodies of color and older bodies are denigrated through the hegemonic (white, youth-centered, masculinist) gaze. Re-animation can take place by transcending double-consciousness: ‘seeing beyond’ the dominant gaze. Othering and otherness are explored in relation to both raced and aging bodies. The limits of ethnic aging are scrutinized at an epistemic level, simultaneously informing, and obscuring the understanding of lived experiences of racialized ethnic minorities in old age. Visible and invisible difference provide a way of unpacking the simultaneous hypervisibility of older (female) bodies of color, and their invisibility in institutional and policy discourses. De-coloniality is considered, by exploring ways to resist hegemonic power through embodied ways of knowing. This article concludes by exploring how recent methodological innovations – especially the visual and sensory turn- can offer new ways of understanding the lived experiences of aging bodies of color

Left ventricular dysfunction with preserved ejection fraction: the most common left ventricular disorder in chronic kidney disease patients

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a risk factor for premature cardiovascular disease. As kidney function declines, the presence of left ventricular abnormalities increases such that by the time kidney replacement therapy is required with dialysis or kidney transplantation, more than two-thirds of patients have left ventricular hypertrophy. Historically, much research in nephrology has focussed on the structural and functional aspects of cardiac disease in CKD, particularly using echocardiography to describe these abnormalities. There is a need to translate knowledge around these imaging findings to clinical outcomes such as unplanned hospital admission with heart failure and premature cardiovascular death. Left ventricular hypertrophy and cardiac fibrosis, which are common in CKD, predispose to the clinical syndrome of heart failure with preserved left ventricular ejection fraction (HFpEF). There is a bidirectional relationship between CKD and HFpEF, whereby CKD is a risk factor for HFpEF and CKD impacts outcomes for patients with HFpEF. There have been major improvements in outcomes for patients with heart failure and reduced left ventricular ejection fraction as a result of several large randomized controlled trials. Finding therapy for HFpEF has been more elusive, although recent data suggest that sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 inhibition offers a novel evidence-based class of therapy that improves outcomes in HFpEF. These observations have emerged as this class of drugs has also become the standard of care for many patients with proteinuric CKD, suggesting that there is now hope for addressing the combination of HFpEF and CKD in parallel. In this review we summarize the epidemiology, pathophysiology, diagnostic strategies and treatment of HFpEF with a focus on patients with CKD

‘Post-race’ racism in the narratives of ‘Brexit’ voters

Although a growing body of scholarship seeks to understand the motivations behind the ‘Brexit’ vote – including that which centralises explorations of racism, nationalism and post-colonialism – little consideration has been given to the ways in which ‘post-race’ racisms underpin the narratives of Leave voters. This article draws on data generated through 13 semi-structured interviews to examine the subtle and subterranean ways in which xeno-racism is articulated in the accounts of some Leave voters in the Greater Manchester city of Salford: a city that saw a higher percentage of the electorate (56.8%) vote to leave the EU than the national average (51.9%). Whilst restricting immigration was a key motivator of Leave voters in our research, interviewees vehemently rejected accusations of racism. Instead, couching their views in seemingly non-racial ways, they framed their concerns about immigration as a ‘legitimate’ response to a victimised whiteness. Thus, in discussing our data, we argue that far from living in a ‘post-racial’ epoch, racisms continue to thrive through new modes of articulation. These new racisms emerge from the shadows at key times, such as the EU Referendum, and refashion themselves in ways that are considered more palatable than the older (explicit) racisms of past