Caribbean social work education conference, Curacao, July 2013 - photos, links

Willemstad - Dutch-style capital of Curacao

Conference reception

Lena Dominelli

Gary Bailey

Hans van Ewijk

Aldene Shillingford

 Here are some pictures of my visit to the 11th biennial conference of the Association of Caribbean Social Work Educators (ACSWE), this July in Curacao, a beautiful southern Caribbean island. The speakers included Lena Dominelli, author and former President of the International Association of Schools of Social Work, Gary Bailey current President of the (American National Association of Social Workers, and many more from Europe, north America, the Caribbean and South and Latin America. The conference subject matter was about how social work can make a difference.

Janet Brown was presented with the 2013 Caribbean
Distinguished Social Work Educators Award.

You can see information on the conference website: Link to Conference website

Link to some photos of the conference at the website.

Letnie Rock, President ACSWE

Janet Brown

Videos of the presentations are promised. I took photos of the conference, and you can see and download by using this link to my Flickr site.

If you want to go far, go together

An image from the Social Work and Health Inequalities Network: www.warwick.ac.uk/go/swhin

Thoughtfulness depends on coffee

Is this a universal for social work?

Revolting social workers: workload pressures are universal and we should express concerns.

Social workers are revolting again, it seems. Here is a press report about Whitinsville (a small town somewhere in Massachusetts), where there social workers are protesting about high caseloads. See: banners and marches.

Does this mean that the stereotype of social workers all being oppressive agents of the state is wrong? Or the stereotype that they're  all left-wing radicals is right? Or is it just producer interests dominating the local government concern for getting on with the job?

You can stereotype all such actions, and the press report from the Milford Daily News only gives the practitioners' side: obviously someone where has a good eye for press relations.

But whatever, professionals are entitled to make the case for adequate resources, and it's right that the public should be aware of their failure to pay enough taxes to support services that if they thought about it most people would think are necessary. It's a worldwide (and continuing) problem, but that doesn't mean that when it comes up (again and again and again) we should just accept the imposition of uncaring niggardliness in providing serviecs, which need to be thoughtful, flexible and responsive to need.

Link to the press report

Should social work be entwined with other services or a powerful specialism? Cambodia and the world needs to decide

A short item in an American daily covering Cambodia covers an international social work conference there. As with a lot of the rest of the wold, there is concern about the government not really knowing about social work, and therefore not organising services appropriately.

Tracy Harachi, a university of Washington academic who is working on developing training there, comments:

“Social workers should not just operate within the department of social affairs, they need to be integrated across various government departments such as health and education…but [the government] hasn’t yet understood that social work needs to interact in this way,” Ms. Harachi said.

 And in that she's raising a universal issue for social work, which has swung backwards and forwards in the UK, too. Should you be scattered as a secondary interest across all the services, such as housing, health and education, where good social work could make a contribution? Or should you be concentrated in one place, where you can get professional support and a political base for influencing other services?

There's no simple answer to this issue. When I came into social work,the UK was losing its separate specialist services and being accumulated into one social services department in local government seemed like final recognition for the profession and its value. But now we've been reorganised into separate children and adult services, with the advantage of focus. The medical profession often complains that they can't get the social services for their patients that they want (sometimes because they want too much control from a medical point of view) and that services cannot be coordinated between health and social care. Yet integrated into healthcare services, it requires a strong social worker to command respect and support from medical and nursing colleagues whose eyes are mainly on other priorities and who find social work puzzlingly concerned with social relations rather than getting them the resources they want for their patients.

The reality is that social workers will never be in quite the right place. But we need to work on social  cohesion whatever the priorities of everyone else.

Link to Cambodia Daily article

Proud to be a social worker

Keep calm and call a social worker

Western social work must stop saying that non-Western social work has nothing to teach us

Anish Alex's occasional brief articles on various issues in critical social work this month connects with Western models of social work in non-Western countries. He is commenting on what I have called the 'internationalist' view of the development of social work. In my book The Origins of Social Work: Continuity and Change (2005, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), I argue that the internationalist view (that there is one stream of the development of social work, deriving from the Western 19th century industrialisation, of which models of practice such as social development are variations) is a historically incorrect analysis. Later, Gurid Aga Askland and I argued that the internationalist view is an aspect of postcolonial globalisation: a cultural domination of less powerful cultural ideas by Western thought. (Payne, M. and Askeland, G. A. (2008) Globalization and International Social Work: Postmodern Change and Challenge. Aldershot: Ashgate). I have recently written an article for a journal which has not yet appeared arguing that forms of macro social work such as social development and social pedagogy clearly emerge from their source cultures, and are developed in differing welfare regimes according to cultural and policy thinking in different nations. I will post a citation to this article if it is accepted and appears.

It is now widely accepted that it is inappropriate to attempt simply to transfer Western social work to other cultural and policy settings, and Anish Alex proposes that each country needs to be aware of the cultural and policy sources of its own social work, and make appropriate adaptations to incoming ideas. Askeland and I argue that this is not just a responsibility of non-Western countries. Western educators and writers must go further than acknowledging this, but have a duty to prepare resources that are capable of adaptation to alternative cultures.

Western social work also has a duty to learn about those adaptations and new ideas and change Western social work to reflect knowledge and understanding emerging from non-Western cultures. Otherwise, we are just saying that non-Western cultures have nothing to teach us.


Link to Anish Alex's brief article

American lack of international perspective

I occasionally put clips of things that I want to comment on and do not connect well with my blogs on my Clipboard site. In this case, it's an American educational website that claims to list '20 social workers of our time' and manages not to mention anyone outside the US. Not much of a perspective there.

Link to 'Clipboard' comment.

End-of-life care course for generalist social workers in Serbia

The European Association for Palliative Care reports on the development of a social work course on end-of-life in Serbia; it's a two-day course for non-specialised social workers. It's part of a bigger project to develop what I hope will be end-of-life care rather than palliative care in Serbia. There is currently one hospice.

My view is they should go for developing community health and social care that helps everyone who is approaching death, not just focusing on the medical preference for providing palliative care only for people that they have diagnosed as immediately dying. So it's good to see training for generalists, rather than specialists.

Link to the EAPC Report.

Alcohol use - start from what is good for humans, not the interests of alcohol sellers

One of those grey European documents on important topics, this time on a WHO European region plan for responsing to alcohol misuse and what European countries should be doing until 2020. A particular concern for 'heavy drinking' occasions, binge drinking to you and me. Lots on marketing etc. Although underage drinking appears in several of the sections, it's a pity there's no comprehensive plan directly aimed at preventing young people from getting into unhealthy alcohol use.Too much on managing the markets.

But we should never cut the economics off from the human. Plans should start from what is good for human beings; what is good for people selling alcohol should come a very long way behind.
Here's the link.