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Working with cultural diversity, and specifically asylum seekers and refugees, is an emerging field of practice in Scottish social work, little covered in social work education. This chapter explores approaches to the integration of migrants broadly and specifically within Scotland. The chapter is contextualised within cultural social work, working with difference, and developing a sense of place and wellbeing to achieve sustainable and inclusive cities. The Indicators of Integration Framework (Ager and Strang, 2004), a relational approach to integration, and the Capability Approach (CA) (Sen, 1999) are used to frame and conceptualise the work. Some of the challenges and tensions that are emerging within Scottish social work with asylum seekers and refugees are discussed, these include: (1) balancing working with UK government immigration legislation and Scottish welfare legislation; (2) social work practice with asylum seekers and refugees being located within mainstream practice; and (3) a lack of preparedness for working with cultural diversity and the complexity of issues associated with supporting migrants to transform the unfamiliar into the familiar. We call for re-imagining working with cultural diversity through an approach that is inclusive of a migrant’s evolving sense of place and belonging.
This article provides an innovative reading of the relationship between social work and the regulatory bodies mandated to register and regulate it, which has hitherto remained largely untheorised. It achieves this by utilising Hegel’s illustrative tale of ‘lord and bondsman’. This narrative outlines the development of consciousness through dialectical struggle. We argue that the relationship of domination and servitude that has developed between the profession and the regulators is incapable of delivering a satisfactory self-consciousness for either. For the social work profession, consciousness is limited to an enforced ‘being-for’ the regulatory bodies, which appropriate the ends of practice through the labour of the profession. For both to achieve full self-consciousness, each must transcend itself and the other through a dialectical movement in which each is simultaneously ‘negated’ and ‘preserved’. The article highlights ways in which social work can more courageously address its own historical development within such a struggle.
