Social Work
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The Healing Journey
Intimate Partner Abuse and Its Implications in the Labour Market
The Healing Journey offers a startling analysis of intimate partner abuse and its negative effects on women’s earnings, education and vocational training as well as in the labour market itself.
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Failure to Protect
Moving Beyond Gendered Responses
Failure-to-protect policies and practices are intended to better ensure the safety and protection of children. But as this book demonstrates, these policies actually increase danger for children – and for their mothers.
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International Social Development
Social Work Experiences and Perspectives
This edited collection offers a range of the current theoretical concepts and perspectives that shape international social development today. Utilizing examples from actual social workers in regions such as Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, International Social Development brings together scholars who are engaged internationally in social development work aimed at addressing poverty, gender inequality, sustainable livelihoods and food security. The first of its kind in Canada, International Social Development will assist students in building critical knowledge, learning methods to mitigate post-colonial attitudes and developing practical skills essential to doing social work in an increasingly interconnected and globalized world.
With greater populations across the globe becoming increasingly vulnerable to the effects of poverty, environmental degradation, globalization and urbanization, the need for social work professionals to adopt practices that address such complex social issues is dire. With this need in mind, the early chapters of the book conceptualize and discuss the general objectives and various models of international social development, with particular attention paid to Canadian aid organizations and the concept of gender in international social research and practice. Subsequent chapters highlight specific international social work projects from around the globe, dealing with discriminatory practices in tsunami-affected South India, food security in Brazil and gender equality in rural China, making this book a well-rounded introduction for students unfamiliar with international social development and a primer on pressing issues for social work professionals already working in the field.
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Stand Together or Fall Apart
Professionals Working with Immigrant Families
Immigration is an important topic that continues to appear in news reports across Western countries. However, few reports examine what adjusting and integrating into a new country means for immigrant families. The traditional strategy employed by social workers, teachers and other social service practitioners is decidedly Euro-centric and treats immigrants as if they have little cultural or community-based means of integrating of their own. Judith K. Bernhard argues that immigrants have deep cultural, familial and communal resources to aid their integration and that these resources need to be tapped by social workers, teachers, counsellors, settlement workers, early childhood educators and child and youth care workers alike. Providing several alternative, integrated, research-based programs that combine cultural resources, traditions and family dynamics, Stand Together or Fall Apart will help practitioners to better understand the struggles of immigrants and thus be better able to assist them as they adjust to life in a new country.
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Kaandossiwin
How We Come to Know
Indigenous methodologies have been silenced and obscured by the Western scientific means of knowledge production. In a challenge to this colonialist rejection of Indigenous knowledge, Anishinaabe researcher Kathleen Absolon examines the academic work of fourteen Indigenous scholars who utilize Indigenous worldviews in their search for knowing. Through an examination not only of their work but also of their experience in producing that work, Kaandossiwin describes how Indigenous researchers re-theorize and re-create methodologies. Understanding Indigenous methodologies as guided by Indigenous paradigms, worldviews, principles, processes and contexts, Absolon argues that they are wholistic, relational, inter-relational and interdependent with Indigenous philosophies, beliefs and ways of life. In exploring the ways Indigenous researchers use Indigenous methodologies within mainstream academia, Kaandossiwin renders these methods visible and helps to guard other ways of knowing from colonial repression.
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Behind the Rhetoric
Mental Health Recovery in Ontario
Recovery has taken the mental health world by storm. In clinics, hospitals, community organizations and governments across North America and Europe, recovery rhetoric is everywhere. Its message of hope is catchy, its promise of wellness long overdue and its claims (somewhat) substantiated. But where did this new vision for mental health come from and what does it really mean for a system long unbalanced? Focusing on Ontario’s mental health communities, the book is the first to take a critical look at recovery’s talk and texts. Using Foucault’s analyses of discourse, it is also the first to go behind recovery’s rhetoric of hope and responsibility, re-theorizing mental health recovery in Canada.
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Leaving the Streets
Stories of Canadian Youth
Youth between sixteen and twenty-four are considered the fastest growing segment of the homeless population in Canada. While much has been written about street engagement and street culture, little attention has been paid to how youth move away from the street. Giving prominence to the voices of the street youth themselves, Leaving the Streets explores the attempts of street youth to exit street life, examining the motivations and challenges, as well as the supports and barriers that aid and hurt the youth through this process. From shelters and programs to mental health and drug use, this book examines the services that are available, and those that should be available, to help street youth find housing, income and the strength needed to start a new life.
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Aski Awasis/Children of the Earth
First Peoples Speaking on Adoption
The adoption of Aboriginal children into non-Aboriginal families has a long and contentious history in Canada. Life stories told by First Nations people reveal that the adoption experience has been far from positive for these communities and has, in fact, been an integral aspect of colonization. In an effort to decolonize adoption practices, the Yellowhead Tribal Services Agency (YTSA) in Alberta has integrated customary First Peoples’ adoption practices with provincial adoption laws and regulations. Introducing this unique agency, the authors outline the history of First Nations adoptions and, through an interview with a YTSA Elder, describe the adoption ceremonies offered at YTSA. Themes that emerged from interviews with adoptive parents and youth who have been adopted through this new integrated practice are also explored, and important recommendations for policy and practice in First Nations adoption are offered.
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Ontario Works–Works for Whom?
An Investigation of Workfare in Ontario
This book is an institutional ethnographic investigation of the Ontario Works program and the problems that it creates in the lives of people on social assistance. Ontario Works is a work-for-welfare program that was implemented in Ontario in 1996 as part of the neoliberal restructuring of the welfare state. The book shows that Ontario Works has not, in reality, been used to help people on assistance and rather has been used as another means of facilitating an attack on them, while providing subsidized and cheap labour for companies and social agencies.
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Wicihitowin
Aboriginal Social Work in Canada
Wícihitowin is the first Canadian social work book written by First Nations, Inuit and Métis authors who are educators at schools of social work across Canada. The book begins by presenting foundational theoretical perspectives that develop an understanding of the history of colonization and theories of decolonization and Indigenist social work. It goes on to explore issues and aspects of social work practice with Indigenous people to assist educators, researchers, students and practitioners to create effective and respectful approaches to social work with diverse populations. Traditional Indigenous knowledge that challenges and transforms the basis of social work with Indigenous and other peoples comprises a third section of the book. Wícihitowin concludes with an eye to the future, which the authors hope will continue to promote the innovations and creativity presented in this groundbreaking work.
