Based on lengthy ethnographic fieldwork in Southwest China, this article unpacks how precarity and migration have deeply shaped young migrant workers’ understanding and experiences of friendship. The precarious work and living conditions compel young migrants to put more emphasis on the instrumental aspects of friendship, in which they deeply value friends’ help and practical support, which also intertwine closely with the emotional aspects of friendship. High mobility does not mean that migrants are not able to form and maintain ‘meaningful’ social relationships; rather, it is friends’ support and help which sustain migrants’ precarious and highly mobile ways of living. This article also discusses the burdens and risks that are associated with such friendship practices, and how, despite these ‘dark sides of friendship’, young migrant workers still largely rely on their friends to survive and keep going in the city.
Women face multiple barriers during political recruitment and representational processes. Concomitantly, a burgeoning scholarship has revealed the existence of various obstacles to elected office faced by disabled people. While studies have examined the intersections between gender, race and class, we know little about how the intersection between disability and gender shapes people’s experiences. This article provides an exploratory case-study analysis of the UK. We centre the perspectives of disabled women in our analysis, drawing upon qualitative interviews undertaken with 41 disabled women candidates, politicians and party activists, as well as participant observation of online events organised to discuss disabled women and elected office. Three themes emerged from this research: first, disabled women feel that they are perceived as ‘not up to the job’; second, disabled women are ‘othered’ during recruitment processes; and, third, hyper-visibility experienced by some, but not all, disabled women can be experienced positively but mainly negatively.
The article begins by presenting the collection of Die Antike, found in Freud’s library in London. By examining the contents of some articles by Werner Jaeger, the famous classicist author of Paideia, and at the same time contrasting his ideas with those of Freud’s Moses, one can perceive the position that the two authors took during the political upheavals in the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis. Questions about historical construction, temporality, language and political ideologies are addressed. With this, Moses and Monotheism emerges as a deeply political text, linked to a psychoanalytic social structure different from that proposed in Totem and Taboo.
In Sweden, the gap between prosperity and poverty has increased over the last three decades. As a result, groups of youth are forced to live a strictly limited life in segregation and poverty. Youth living in these circumstances are often viewed as being at risk. The purpose of this article is to investigate how different professional groups – specifically, police officers, social workers and school health teams – talk about and describe the risks that young people face when growing up in disadvantaged urban areas and the various measures taken to deal with those they define as ‘youth at risk’. The results point towards how being at risk is made intelligible in relation to specific socio-spatial and institutional contexts. However, there is an overall tendency to individualise and situate problems within the youth themselves, thus making young people growing up in disadvantaged urban areas responsible for their own vulnerability.
This article aims to explore how children are exposed to emotional demands in the transition from kindergarten to school. Psychosocial research and Hochschild’s work provide the underlying theoretical inspiration for the study. Hochschild’s concepts are used to frame the emotional demands children experience in everyday life in kindergarten and school, settings that can be seen as a workplace, albeit for children. Hochschild’s concepts and researchers inspired by her are often referred to when the work-life of adults is being studied, also when exploring stress and burnout at work. My study shows how children react to the emotional demands in their everyday lives in and across kindergarten and school and indicates that the emotion work they perform can sometimes cause emotional dissonance for children, just as it does for adults. The empirical basis for the discussion and conclusions consists of participatory observations conducted with children in the transition from kindergarten to primary school in the context of the Danish welfare state.
This article delineates the importance of critical social work understanding and engagement in social policy analysis and practice. Using a Marxist lens, we initially explore the context of globalisation and its challenges, and locate the contradictions inherent in capitalism for social policy, especially in a Latin American context. Our analysis considers the current capitalist and COVID-19 crisis, before reviewing the withdrawal of social policy in the reproduction of the workforce. We use Brazil as an example because, along with other Latin American countries, it has never witnessed the consolidation of government-supported, universal and comprehensive social policies to meet the needs of the entire population. We conclude that we continue to face a clash between capital and labour, which sets most global workers, especially those of underdeveloped countries, in a precarious, if not life-threatening, situation, and we highlight the importance for social work to engage critically with social policy.
The article emphasises the challenges in the implementation of gender equality-focused policies in military missions and demonstrates the backlash these policies can create in everyday social interaction in military missions. A qualitative method of thematic analysis was used to study 17 in-depth interviews with former civilian and military personnel in the International Security Assistance Force and Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan. The discursive exploratory analysis displayed that normative masculine constructions foster an environment in which women are perceived as: a threat to the unit they are part of; disruptive to male bonding in the unit; an objectified body; and an essential part of the successful mission in Afghanistan. Gender equality-focused policies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization face resistance in implementation because they threaten resources perceived greatly important in the organisation: normative masculine constructions. The military fails in attempts to manage diversity, and the military culture further values and reinforces sameness.
The neo-liberalisation of social work has been heavily criticised, with value conflicts and different interpretations of the purpose of social work being key aspects of this. However, little research has considered the impact of the neo-liberalisation of social work on an individual level, understanding how this ideology impacts day-to-day practice. This article uses the imposter phenomenon as a proxy issue to understand the impact of neo-liberalism on social workers. Factors that contribute to, and diminish experiences of, the imposter phenomenon are identified, and links are made between these and the key aspects of neo-liberalism. Through establishing the impact of the imposter phenomenon on individuals, strategies to overcome this are suggested. However, it is argued that without structural and ideological development, the tensions within social work will remain.
This article explores how boredom emerged as a central threat to Americans’ sense of well-being in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing upon media coverage from a range of sources, I ask: What do responses to the COVID-19 pandemic reveal more generally about the way boredom has emerged as one of the central dis-eases of modern life? Why has free time become something that increasingly generates intolerable anxiety? In what ways can studying responses to the COVID-19 lockdown help us trace larger transformations in the social construction and subjective experience of time? The article argues that while many Americans experienced boredom as a form of social death engendered by the deroutinising aspects of lockdown life, responses to the COVID-19 pandemic also reveal the way boredom has emerged as a form of psychic alienation permeating the very core of American society. Drawing upon insights from psychoanalytic theory, I will ultimately propose that our dis-ease with free time may be linked to a growing incapacity to fantasise as more and more of our mental lives are colonised by the digital infrastructures and extractive imperatives of our 24/7 society ().
Drawing on qualitative interviews and focus groups with 35 community leaders, this article investigates how community leaders understand norms of care for older people in Zambia. I ask what leads older people in Zambia to receive good care from family. The findings show that across both rural and urban settings, respondents related profoundly powerful norms of reciprocity in both family and community care, with older people viewed as reaping what they have sown in terms of religious and economic contributions throughout their lives. The study raises challenging questions from a rights-based perspective as to who is deserving of care.
