Social Work, History and Research
The general aim of the group is to provide a forum to bring together scholars with areas of interest in issues related to history, archival research, and social work research. This includes the history of all aspects of social work as well as the history of research in social work. Social work is a rather young profession derived from a broad range of social developments in the last centuries. Therefore, the group intends to incorporate within it the research undertaken by various disciplines that are engaged in historical research on social work, social work research and welfare production. It is an interdisciplinary forum. Archival research, oral history approaches, as well as historic visual material analysis play a pivotal role in this context to explore the various historical facets of social work and research within it. Hence, our group regards methodological reflections on the respective research strategies indispensable to advance social work historiography. In line with the goals of ESWRA, we emphasize the ongoing interconnection of developments in social work across national boundaries in Europe and beyond. This transnational perspective places special emphasis on the flows and translations of knowledge, practices, theories and policies influencing historical developments in countries across the globe. These translations reflect that social work as an important field of social development that is located in a conflictive space, with numerous actors, contrasting interests, and power differentials that are documented, archived, and interpreted in various ways. Our group considers itself as an open forum for these diverging approaches to the history of social work and social work research.
Conveners:
Dr. Darren Hill, Leeds Beckett University, D.Hill@leedsbeckett.ac.uk
Prof. Susanne Maurer, University of Marburg, maurer@staff.uni-marburg.de
Prof. Darja Zaviršek, University of Ljubljana, darja.zavirsrk@fsd.uni-lj.si
ssue: SIG Event, Pre-Conference of ECSWR in Munich/Germany, 2025
The Social Work, History and Research SIG Call for Papers
Deadline: 15th December, 2024 (Feed back: before 31st December, 2024)
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly: Embracing the complexity of Social Work History.
The Social Work, History and Research group would like to invite you to submit an abstract for our Special Interest Group pre-conference meeting on March 12th 2025.
The Focus of the special Interest Group (SIG) will be to explore the concept of (idealised) historical narratives and positionality within social work.
There is a tendency to address social work either as a ‘good’ (‘helpful’, ‘supportive’, even ‘emancipatory’ and ‘empowering’) practice and focus f. e. upon the ‘progressive’, ‘innovative’ or ‘radical’ kernel within social work traditions. On the other hand social work can be strongly problematized by reconstructing its disciplinary and violent aspects (‘the bad’ and ‘the ugly’ side of social work’). It is important to recognise that social work history and its associated personalities, institutions and policy landscape are more complex and refer (at least) to the dual narrative of ‘care and control’.
We would welcome papers that explore these tensions by addressing f. e. the following themes:
The SIG event will be divided into two parts with one section looking explicitly at the main theme of the call, and the second part looking into other aspects of social work history/historical research and its methods. We encourage every interested participant to share their proposal with us.
The deadline is: 15th December 2024. We look forward to receiving your proposals.
Please send your proposals to: Darren Hill, D.Hill@leedsbeckett.ac.uk
Paper Submission Guidelines.
The oral paper presentation may be authored by an individual or by a group. The abstract should explicitly mention its relation to the main theme or otherwise. The abstract submitted should be 500 words or less. More information about the abstract is provided below. The following guidelines for all kinds of presentation are advisory. If you think there are good reasons to amend them, please feel free to do so.
If your abstract is for a presentation based on one or more empirical research projects, it could include the following:
Conclusions and implications: description of the main outcome(s) of the study and implications for practice, policy or further research.
