Our Social Work publishing features books and journals that help to address issues arising from poverty, inequality and social injustice.
The list includes monographs, textbooks and practitioner guides, series, including Research in Social Work co-published with the European Social Work Research Association, and the Critical and Radical Social Work and European Social Work Research journals.
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Social Work
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Researching with Care applies feminist care ethics to reimagine research as a caring practice. If we care about what we research, do we recognise that others care in different ways and for different reasons? What does this mean for the way we research, who we research with and what we seek to achieve as a result? Drawing on their own and others’ direct experiences of undertaking participatory research in particular, the authors consider all stages of research, from inception – how we think about research questions, through the ways we work with collaborators and those we are researching – to impact – what legacy do we seek to leave behind us? Applying Fisher and Tronto’s definition of caring they consider research as one of the ‘things we do’ to help us live in the world as well as possible. Thus, they argue for research to be conducted in a way that enables the pursuit of justice and wellbeing. This means recognising the injustices arising from research that does not acknowledge different types and sources of knowledge, and the harms done when researchers do not care about ‘research subjects’. The authors adopt a multi- and post-disciplinary approach and explore the contribution of indigenous scholars and people with lived experience in developing caring research practices.
The book concludes by offering personal reflections on how the ethics of care has become significant for the authors. They recognise the intersection of personal and political in the way they seek to expand and improve their understanding of the world. Caring about the issues we research includes taking responsibility for contributing to repairing harms and enhancing justice. What this means in practice must relate to particular contexts: whether that be working with indigenous researchers experiencing the impact of colonialism, with old people who we can recognise as our future selves, or with people living with mental health difficulties we may never experience. In these (and other) diverse contexts the ethics of care can offer a guide to how we research and how we make sense of research data. The authors set out a series of questions that can be helpful in approaching research with care. They cite a poem by a Māori researcher that warns of the harms uncaring research can do. They emphasise the importance of attentive listening as well as space for conversation and storytelling. The book ends with reflections on the urgency of caring research practices in current circumstances of climate crisis, pandemic and worsening inequalities.
Traditional approaches to research emphasise methodological questions about data collection and analysis rather than approaching research as a relational practice. This chapter starts to explore what researching with care means in practice through focusing on the different relationships it is necessary to develop and sustain when carrying out research. The authors identify troubles they have experienced as researchers that centre around relationships with those whose lives they were researching or those with whom they have carried out research. Different types of relationships are involved: with co-researchers, with commissioners or funders as well as with those being researched. The issues involved are political as well as personal and impact both what gets researched and who is involved in this. Gilligan’s foundational work on care ethics is reviewed to both highlight ways in which a lack of voice or invisibility in research can generate harms, and as a basis from which to argue the potential of care ethics in revealing the nature of those harms and offering a framework within which they might be repaired. Authors argue that ‘researching with’ has the potential to generate solidarity.
This chapter discusses the origins of the authors’ commitment to caring research in experiences of conducting participatory research with users/survivors of health and social care services, and in discovering feminist care ethics. It offers a brief introduction to the ethics of care and the way in which this has been taken up by researchers working in many different contexts and disciplines who are concerned with the relationship between care and justice, and the necessity to hear different voices. This introduces the importance of thinking outside the boundaries both of disciplines and fields of study in order to encompass the interdependencies of human lives and the more-than-human world. Authors note the harms done by focusing on methodology to the exclusion of caring ethics. The chapter outlines the book structure.
This and the following chapters draw on conversations with ethics of care researchers as well as the authors’ own experiences. An introduction to this part of the book introduces these researchers. Discussions are structured by the stages of research, starting with the initial phase of how we identify and frame the research we plan to do. ‘What do you care about?’ can offer a useful way in to conversations that stimulate ideas and priorities. Providing space for storytelling and careful listening is important. Conversations with other researchers revealed both personal and political motivations to research. There were examples of ways in which doing research stimulated understanding of why things mattered to people as researchers, and of care ethics helping to enable personal reflections on new experiences, including growing older. These experiential impacts have informed the way in which researchers try to care about others they research with, as well as the issues they research. The different contexts in which researchers work and the different relationships they have with the topics raise complex questions about how we achieve epistemic justice through our work.
What are the implications of caring about the things we research? How does that affect how we research, who we research with and what we do with our results? Proposing what Tronto has called a ‘paradigm shift’ in research thinking, this book invites researchers across disciplines and fields of study to do research that thinks and acts with care.
The authors draw on their own and others’ experiences of researching, the troubles they encounter and the opportunities generated when research is approached as a caring practice. Care ethics provides a guide from starting out, designing and conducting projects, to thinking about research legacies. It offers a way in which research can help repair harms and promote justice.
Tronto’s analysis of the phases of care and the principles associated with them offer a way of analysing different practices that can be understood as caring. Here the authors consider what attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness and solidarity mean in the context of doing research. The importance of the different perspectives from which to consider what these mean in practice is emphasised. For example, the attentiveness that is the starting point for care requires us not only to notice problems needing investigation from the perspective of service providers, but what service users identify as priorities. And this may mean being open to shifting our focus as research develops. It is important to be attentive throughout the research process in order to be able to respond to ethical dilemmas that may arise, and to recognise the importance of previously unacknowledged issues. As a research project develops responsibilities and competences can be developed and shared among those involved. Caring research requires a capacity to recognise the way people are responding to taking part, and generates the potential to build solidarities among those differently positioned in the research process. This is particularly important in generating positive legacies from research.
New Populism is not so much about content but, rather, the feeling of aggrieved entitlement in search of content. This condition, established in Part II, requires a different understanding of cause than that used in class-forward accounts. This chapter introduces an alternative, non-linear model of cause, which asks how (on what energy) rather than why (for what reason). What animates New Populism, and how does it move—the body, and from one body and place to another, changing as it does so? Put simply, whose feeling is aggrieved entitlement; on whose behalf is it felt? The chapter suggests that this highly infectious feeling prefers the name of ‘The People’ to its own. It outlines the book’s claim that aggrieved masculinity is the beating heart of New Populism. Dominant manhood, wronged and endangered, is its animating figure.
This chapter checks the portrait rendered in the previous chapter for anti-populism, a condescending response to ‘The People’ that basically proves their point. Situated in the January 6 US Capitol insurrection, it takes a closer look at the ‘we’ who critique New Populism. Anti-populism is rejected as oblivious to its own implication in populism; namely, it induces aggrieved entitlement in the act of critiquing it. The chapter calls everyone to reflect on their participation in New Populism. Countering the usual depiction of populist uprising, it introduces the notion of downrising to reveal the fuller scope of contributors and complicities. Even the left plays a role, when casting ‘the base’ (rank-and-file supporters) as the new ‘white trash.’ In step with the mask-ulinity episode in Chapter 4, the chapter rereads the Capitol riot as evidence of the increasing communicability of feeling. Sensations of aggrieved entitlement are more in charge than most care to admit.
The work of Parts I and II bear fruit in Part III, which revisits the cause of New Populism. Most analysts point to socioeconomic and demographic changes as the decisive stimuli for the populist surge. This chapter systematically unravels that analysis of cause in three turns. It challenges economic (class-mainly), socioeconomic (a combination of class and cultural marginalization), and socioeconomic ‘plus’ (racial and religious resentments) explanations. Even when expanded beyond its reasonable limits, the concept of class cannot well explain New Populism. Class-forward analysis, any assessment that leads with socioeconomic unrest, breaks down.
