This book studies welfare systems in Europe and beyond from the standpoint of women in vulnerable positions in society. These systems are under major transformations with new models of service delivery and management, austerity measures, requirements for cost-effectiveness, marketization, and the prioritization of services. Divided into three parts: Welfare service systems (not) responding to vulnerable situations of women Women’s encounters with the welfare service system Contradictions of informal support this book considers the experiences and encounters with the service system of women in poverty, homeless women, women with substance use problems, women sentenced of crime, girls and young women in care, and refugees and asylum-seeking women. Drawing upon research and critical discussions from Finland, Canada, Israel, Slovenia, Spain and the UK, this book provides new empirical findings and critical insights, and a valuable resource for the academics and students in social work, social policy, sociology and gender studies, but also for policy makers and professionals in social and health care.

This book provides an account of the experience of a multifaceted system-change programme to strengthen the capacity of Ireland’s statutory child protection and welfare agency in the areas of prevention, early intervention and family support. Many jurisdictions globally are involved in system change processes focused on increasing investment in services that seek to prevent children’s entry into child protection and welfare systems, through early intervention, greater support to families, and an increased emphasis on rights and participation. Based on a four-year in-depth study by a team of University-based researchers, this text adds to the emerging knowledge-base on developing, implementing and evaluating system change in child protection and welfare. Study methodological approaches were wide ranging and involved a number of key stakeholders including children, parents, social workers and social care workers, service managers, agency leaders and policy makers. Since the change process involved an agency-university partnership encompassing design, technical support and evaluation, the book also contributes to understandings of the potential and limits of such partnerships in the child protection and welfare field. Uniquely, the book gives voice to the experience of both agency personnel and academic in the accounts provided. It will be of interest to all scholars, students and practitioners in the areas of child protection and welfare.

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online. Taking a sociological approach, the authors of Appearance as Capital examine physical appearance as a normatively regulated form of capital and explore how it is possible to accumulate and convert capital based on physical appearance.

This book provides new and empirically grounded research-based knowledge and insights into the current transformation of the Russian child welfare system. It focuses on the major shift in Russia’s child welfare policy: deinstitutionalisation of the system of children’s homes inherited from the Soviet era and an increase in fostering and adoption. Divided into four sections, this book details both the changing role and function of residential institutions within the Russian child welfare system and the rapidly developing form of alternative care in foster families, as well as work undertaken with birth families. By analysing the consequences of deinstitutionalisation and its effects on children and young people as well as their foster and birth parents, it provides a model for understanding this process across the whole of the post-Soviet space. It will be of interest to academics and students of social work, sociology, child welfare, social policy, political science, and Russian and East European politics more generally.

Home is a complex and multifaceted concept. This book revisions how ‘home’ is used in social work literature by showing how it is positioned as being discursively represented, materially experienced and embodied, and multiply imagined as symbolic and existential. Drawing on multidisciplinary understandings of 'home' and intersectionality, it analyses the privileging and disadvantaging social policies and complex interactional practices that contribute to one’s sense of home including homelessness, mobility and the politics and complexities of homeownership. Providing social workers with practice considerations for different areas of social work, this book analyses how to makes and build a sense of home and community belonging for a broad range of client groups. It will be of interest to all academics and students of social work, sociology, public policy, housing policy, gender studies and human geography.

This edited collection explores and illustrates the nature of research for social justice. Drawing on a diverse range of social research projects, it sets out what a rights-based approach to research looks like, why this framework matters and how we can translate them into operational research.

The Future of the Arctic Human Population seeks to explore the challenges of Arctic migration, immigrants, and refugees and how integrated societies can be developed. Moreover, it discusses disparities between regions on policies and their implementation. This book explores how cross-border cooperation is needed to provide innovative solutions to migration challenges such as cultural differences, acceptance, and integration into local communities, and joining the labour market. It examines whether there are regional differences in well-being among immigrants in Arctic countries. The book considers how we can build and model integrated societies, and what tools and measure can be used to assess inclusive and resilient societies.

Interdisciplinary in perspective, this book explores contemporary struggles around ‘identity politics’ in Europe, offering a unique glimpse into contemporary tensions and paradoxes surrounding identities, belonging, exclusions and their deep-seated gendered, colonial and racist legacies. With a particular focus on the Nordic region, it provides insights into the ways in which people who find themselves in minoritized positions struggle against multiple injustices. Through a series of case studies documenting counter-struggles against racist, colonialist, sexist forms of discrimination and exclusion, Transforming Identities in Contemporary Europe asks how the paradigm and politics of the welfare state operate to discriminate against the most marginalized, by instating a naturalized hierarchy of human-ness. As such it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in race, gender, colonialism and postcolonialism, citizenship and belonging. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book seeks to trouble taken-for-granted assumptions of anthropocentrism and humanism in social work - those which perpetuate human privilege and human exceptionalism. The edited collection provides a different imaginary for social work by introducing ways of thinking otherwise that challenge human exceptionalism. Social work is at heart a liberal humanist project informed by a strong human rights framework. This edited collection draws on the literature on affect, feminist new materialism and critical posthumanism to critique the liberal framework, which includes human rights. Disrupting the anthropocentrism in social work which positions humans as an elite species at the centre of world history, this book develops an ethical sensibility that values entanglements of humans, non-human life and the natural environment. The book provides new insights into environmental destruction, human-animal relations, gender inequality and male dominance, as well as indigenous and settler/colonial issues and critical and green social work. It will be of interest to all scholars and students of social work, community development, social policy and development studies more broadly.

This book is about 20 young unaccompanied refugees who have sought refuge in Europe and how they experience and try to navigate their new situations, including their contacts with social workers, friends and family members left behind. The book contains stories of powerlessness and frustration from being held under suspicion, from meeting authorities and abstract people of power from "the system," or from constantly being categorized in a static category of "the unaccompanied child." It contains stories of human meetings characterized by thoughtfulness, reciprocity and listening. This book also explores the experiences of meeting social workers as a young migrant in Sweden. The narratives depict how social workers can often reproduce powerlessness and frustration among the young people, but also how there are those social workers who provide something else through the act of listening. By extension, this is a book about society, about how important it can be to reframe people and to listen to their stories, needs and wills. Demonstrating the importance of listening to the stories of young refuges, this title will appeal to students, researchers, community workers and social workers interested in migration, race and ethnicity, youth studies, social work, sociology, anthropology, pedagogy and health.