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Resilience is a term often applied to students of refugee backgrounds having survived traumatic experiences of war, displacement and resettlement; but how is it acquired? To many, it is a function of some inner strength, a perspective that tends to ignore the considerable labour involved in acquiring the skills and capacities to be resilient. This article examines these differing understandings and their implications in working with students of refugee backgrounds in schools in New South Wales, Australia. In particular, it considers the different approaches they elicit and the affective dimensions of these, proffering a view that resilience is reliant on the accumulation of certain affects that sediment into dispositions ensuring a sound foundation for learning.
The reactionary American intellectual Christopher Rufo has made German critical theorist Herbert Marcuse the centre of his campaign to purge the American academy of radical ideas and movements. Marcuse’s ideas have significant influence in contemporary psychosocial scholarship, so attacks on his work may have negative consequences for psychosocial scholars. Rufo’s critique of the influence of Marcuse’s ideas is mostly exaggerated but it contains elements of truth. This article will outline ways in which some of Marcuse’s ideas are echoed in elements of the contemporary left/liberal intellectual and political orthodoxy. We revisit the Fromm/Marcuse debate from the 1950s, and offer an analysis of why Rufo might have picked Marcuse for attack when Fromm might well have been a viable target, as Fromm was in the 1980s when he was famously scapegoated by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind (1987). I then offer an analysis of how Erich Fromm’s alternative psychosocial radicalism can help better defend the psychosocial perspective in mass politics than Marcuse’s framework. Fromm’s framework also offer a theoretical foundation for radical psychosocial studies that can help our field defend itself against the new McCarthyism of Rufo and his allies on the global right who are likely to attack radical psychosocial perspectives in the near future.
Scientific evidence highlights the pivotal role for structural change in pursuit of the sustainability transformation. A particular challenge for research on structural aspects of sustainable consumption and lifestyles, however, is the assessment of their impact. Especially quantifying the impact of structural change remains a serious problem. While some forms of structural change can be quantified, like the rate of building renovations, changes in the energy mix at the production level, or trends in access to health care or education, the impact of other changes such as societal narratives about wellbeing, political campaigns on energy technologies or policies, or the abandonment of the growth paradigm defy easy quantification. This article aims to shed light on potential avenues for quantitatively assessing the impact of structural change drawing on insights gained by a group of international and interdisciplinary research consortia funded by the European Union in the area of sustainable consumption, citizenship, and lifestyles research. It delineates strengths and weaknesses of different approaches, foci and blindspots of associated data types. Thereby, it highlights fundamental decisions that need to be made in research designs, but also important aspects to consider in the interpretation of results. Finally, the article highlights the particular challenges related to assessing the impact of deep political and ideational structures.
We are a pair of women based in the north of England. We came together in 2014 as part of an evaluation of a project that supported women leaving prison. A decade on, we use this space of ‘Voices from the front line’ to reflect on what we have collectively achieved. We share with the reader how and why we came together and how our collaborative work reveals institutional harm and failure. As we have captured elsewhere, and as a central focus of this special issue, the relationship between welfare and criminal justice interventions is complex. Failures in one part of the system can drive harmful intervention in another. Understanding and challenging the interlocking nature of these different forms of institutional power is critical. To do this, we must not only challenge harmful policies and practice but also rethink how we produce knowledge. In this article, we challenge ourselves and the reader to consider what our experience means for policy, practice and research.
The article demonstrates how graphic narratives become a medium for managing inherited emotions in Vietnamese American second-generation works, GB Tran’s Vietnamerica and Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do. Highlighting the intergenerational transmission of emotions in Vietnamese American families through parental stories about the Vietnam War, the article argues that the authors’ attempts to represent these family stories transform graphic literature into a medium for postmemorial emotion work. While drawing theoretical insights from the sociology of emotions, the study employs textual analysis to thematically close read Vietnamerica and The Best We Could Do to understand the graphic strategies that aid emotion work. The graphic recreation of stories, which are narrativised versions of their inherited trauma memories, can offer potential trauma resolution and autobiographical clarity while fostering communal bonding. The analysis finds that in the works, emotion work is facilitated by various literary strategies, such as affective genealogies, affective geographies, affective pasts, and postmemorial re-embodiment. In a broader sense, the study concludes that graphic narrative strategies can aid in postmemorial emotion work for second-generation refugees grappling with inherited trauma, incoherent autobiographical knowledge, and detachment from the community or family.
There are various examples of unethical behaviour in and by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), yet NGOs are perceived as morally good organisations. Drawing on social identity theory and cognitive dissonance theory we develop a conceptual framework to develop a new root cause for NGO unethical behaviour, namely that such behaviour can be explained because of NGO perceived moral goodness. We propose that when mission, morals and people are perceived as morally good within the NGO, this perception can be glorified, creating an NGO halo. We propose that the NGO halo can drive unethical behaviour through: (1) prioritising mission over other organisational considerations, creating an end-justifies-the-means mentality (moral justification); (2) prioritising the NGO’s morals over legal or social norms, motivating the NGO to trump others’ norms (moral superiority); and (3) prioritising the NGO’s people over ethics management, leading to unethical behaviour being dismissed (moral naivety). We discuss our framework’s implications.
Scholarship on social work and human rights is increasingly steering the debate towards praxis and the development of action frameworks. However, these efforts have hitherto not explicitly inquired into how such approaches contribute to transformative change. Addressing this issue, we engage with dialectical critical realism to embed the ongoing discussions in broader theories of change and unravel the transformative potential of human rights discourses. The result is a meta-theoretical model, ‘NAME-IT’, which systematically unpacks how the dialectic between the reality and the promise of human rights can guide social workers towards transformative action. It forwards human rights as a struggle concept and invites practitioners, researchers and educators to name their violations for what they are. This provides guidance to stretch the discourse of human rights beyond the perimeters of neoliberalism and embed it in an agenda fit for critical and radical social work.
The widespread use of the internet has expanded volunteering opportunities, yet motivations driving online volunteers, particularly on suicide prevention hotlines, are not fully understood. This research note based on the multidimensional model of volunteer motivation, analyses data from an online survey of volunteers in Sahar, an Israeli non-profit organisation providing anonymous online support for individuals experiencing emotional distress and suicidal ideation. The research note reveals that the most important motivations of volunteers in online helpline organisations are values, understanding, and enhancement, while career and social motivations are less important and are similar among former and current volunteers. These findings have significant practical and policy implications, aiding organisations in designing effective recruitment and retention strategies for online suicide prevention hotlines.
