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Questions continue to be asked about the ability of many parents with a learning disability (PWLD) to support their children. Relatedly, in countries including Australia, the US and the UK, significantly more children are removed from PWLD than children whose parents have no additional needs. This article draws from qualitative interviews with a sample of professional social care employees in the north-west of England to better understand their experiences of and responsibilities in work alongside PWLD. Findings include the exploration of understanding learning disabilities and offering appropriate support, completing assessments, receiving adequate training and support from supervisors, engagements with courts of law, and the removal of children. As a possible challenge to increasingly dominant biomedical and risk-averse discourses, the article also considers the feasibility and limitations of utilising rights-based and communitarian ethical frameworks for understanding the support needs of PWLD from a social work and social care practitioner perspective.

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Climate change and its disproportionate impacts on vulnerable groups have prompted the social work profession to become increasingly involved in environmental justice issues. Academic discourse on environmental social work has surged in the last decade, but limited studies examine its implementation by practitioners or information dissemination by professional organisations. Translational research highlights the crucial role of professional associations in informing practitioners of new scientific discoveries and practice paradigms. This qualitative content analysis compares a small selection of articles and podcast episodes published through the professional associations of social workers in the US (the National Association of Social Workers) and Germany (the Deutscher Berufsverband für Soziale Arbeit e.V.), respectively, focusing on environmental social work and its implications for the social work profession. The findings suggest that publications from both countries use similar arguments for proving the relevance of climate change issues for the profession but diverge considerably in their focus on how environmental social work should be applied.

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The concept of matching refers to the process of selecting a family foster home to fit an individual child in placement. Matching is important for the quality of care, as the carers need the necessary resources to meet the child’s needs. Failure in matching can have negative consequences, such as a ‘breakdown’. The aim of this article is to explore the social workers’ practice when matching children and foster carers to ensure the children will receive good care and avoid a placement change. The article uses a qualitative approach and is based on interviews with 31 participants. Social workers and managers at municipal social services, as well as consultants, were interviewed about their work. The professionals reflected on what aspects they perceive as most important in matching and what challenges they encounter that complicate the process. Narratives of successful matches often focused on the characteristics, competence and experience of the foster carers to meet the needs of the children. Some of the challenges highlighted were time pressure and a lack of family foster homes to choose from. This means that professionals have to compromise and prioritise what is most important in relation to the needs of the child.

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The impacts of human activity on ecosystems are increasingly evident through ecological degradation and climate change. Despite this, in many jurisdictions across the world, action to address and curtail destructive human activities is slow and resisted at all levels. In this article, we suggest that this resistance is connected to deep ecological grief. We introduce a dual approach to understanding ecological grief, using concepts of unprecedented and unacknowledged grief. Unprecedented grief is felt in response to the loss of our ecosystems and unacknowledged grief connected to the anticipated loss of lifestyle necessary to curtail destructive human behaviour. Drawing upon an ecosocial work praxis, this article then explores how we can use these understandings of ecological grief to take action and make radical changes to prefigure healthier relationships with each other and our ecosystems.

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Many marginalised communities have long-standing food-growing traditions, yet the climate crisis imperils global food security and disproportionately impacts marginalised communities. Increasingly, researchers posit that networks of decentralised peri-urban agriculture can strengthen food security. In this qualitative study, I ask: what can we learn from marginalised agrarian traditions that might be useful to those marginalised communities in collectively surviving climate change? To answer that question, I conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 23 marginalised food growers and community leaders in the deindustrialised city of Ypsilanti, Michigan, USA. I find that growing food helps to build resilience to food insecurity and climate change but is difficult because of land injustice. Policy and practice implications include the need for the following: (1) housing justice; (2) proactive planning in areas that are expected to serve as climate refuges; and (3) reparations and land rematriation to address the disparate impacts of climate disaster in marginalised communities.

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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.

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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.

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Social work is a very young profession in Hungary. Radical social work exists despite the fact that in the eyes of the current authoritarian ‘hybrid’ regime, the ‘Global definition of social work’ is also radical. Its ideas are primarily popular among young people and those who criticise the conceptual framework of aid, as defined by the governing party. In practice, non-governmental organisations, with their own approach, provide services.

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An inherent element of capitalism is the creation of refugee crises, and states’ imperialist policies are one of the main reasons for the ‘refugee crisis’, as we have recently seen happening again with the Palestinian population. Simultaneously, states’ social policies and the human rights approach frequently do not promote people’s needs and human dignity. All these are inextricably linked to social justice and are the main concerns of social work. This article briefly mentions the housing policy in Greece for refugee young adults. It also presents the collaboration between the Greek Social Workers Action Network and collectives and the media to promote public intervention. Moreover, it introduces an alternative/critical form of claiming rights through advocacy and activism as a tool for shaping social policy from below. Specifically, we reveal advocacy practices opposing legislation to remove the right to an extension for health reasons for young formerly accompanied minors staying in shelters.

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