Daphne Habibis

How White is Social Work in Australia

Abstract How White is social work in Australia? This paper analyses this question, focusing on social work practice and education. In asking the question, the aim is to open space for debate about how the social work profession in Australia should progress practice with Indigenous people and issues. The paper combines Bourdieus concept of the habitus with “Whiteness” theory to argue that the profession is socially, economically, culturally, and geographically separated from Indigenous people and that the consequences for how social workers engage with their Indigenous clients have yet to be fully explored. Decentring Whiteness requires recognition of epistemological and ontological assumptions so deeply embedded that they are invisible to those who carry them. This invisibility permits White privilege to exist unacknowledged and unchallenged within societal formations. In shifting the focus away from the “Other” to the “non Other”, an examination of Whiteness asks social workers to examine their own racial location and the role of White privilege in their lives. It requires us to go beyond intellectual commitments to antiracism and antioppression, and to make racial issues personal as well as political.

Guarding the gates of the profession: Findings of a survey of gatekeeping mechanisms in Australian Bachelor of Social Work programs

Abstract Gatekeeping is concerned with ensuring that social work graduates meet requisite competency standards for beginning practitioners. The issue which is of particular concern to social work educators within academia and in the field, ultimately has important ramifications for clients, yet it is rarely systematically considered. This paper is the first of two reports on the results of a survey of Australian Bachelor of Social Work programs regarding their gatekeeping mechanisms. The study sought information on the admission criteria to courses, gatekeeping functions associated with field education, and attitudes to counselling out of students for non-academic reasons. It was found that high priority was given to academic criteria at all points in the program, despite acknowledgement in the importance of skills, values and personal qualities. Whilst counselling out for non-academic reasons was used by most schools, few schools had written policies for terminating students enrolment for such reasons. M...

A Framework for Reimagining Indigenous Mobility and Homelessness

This article reports on the findings of a national study on housing responses to Indigenous temporary mobility. Drawing on policy analysis and interviews with Indigenous users and service providers, it argues Indigenous temporary mobility is a largely overlooked area of housing need. Its invisibility is partly explained by its status as a form of Indigenous endosociality whose motives and forms are largely opaque to mainstream services. However, it also arises because of the difficulty of unravelling the relationship between culturally sanctioned temporary mobility, resistance to engagement with mainstream services and involuntary responses to housing exclusion. Lack of attention to the nexus between temporary mobility and homelessness represents a missed opportunity to improve the housing outcomes of this hard to serve population. The article proposes a framework for distinguishing different mobility groups as a first step towards improving early intervention and prevention of Indigenous homelessness.

Australian Housing Policy, Misrecognition and Indigenous Population Mobility

Policy initiatives in remote Indigenous Australia aim to improve Indigenous health and well-being, and reduce homelessness. But they have raised controversy because they impinge on Indigenous aspirations to remain on homeland communities, require mainstreaming of Indigenous housing and transfer Indigenous land to the state. This paper uses recognition theory to argue that if policies of normalization are imposed on remote living Indigenous people in ways that take insufficient account of their cultural realities they may be experienced as a form of misrecognition and have detrimental policy effects. The paper examines the responses of remote living Indigenous people to the National Partnerships at the time of their introduction in 2009–2010. Drawing on interview and administrative data from a national study on Indigenous population mobility, the paper argues although the policies have been welcomed, they have also been a source of anxiety and anger. These feelings are associated with a sense of violated justice arising from experiences of misrecognition. The paper argues this can lead tenants to depart their homes as a culturally sanctioned form of resistance to state control. This population mobility is associated with homelessness because it takes place in the context of housing exclusion. Policy implications include developing new models of intercultural professional practice and employing a capacity-building approach to local Indigenous organisations.

Towards better gatekeeping: Discussion of the findings of a survey of gatekeeping mechanisms in Australian Bachelor of Social Work Programs

Abstract Gatekeeping in social work education is an issue of vital importance, but is rarely systematically researched and debated. This paper summarises the results of a survey of Australian Bachelor of Social Work programs regarding their gatekeeping mechanisms. The results indicated that priority was given to academic criteria throughout the course, despite recognition of the importance of personal qualities and values. Counselling out for non-academic reasons was used by most schools, but few had written policies for terminating students for such reasons. The full results of this study are reported elsewhere (Ryan et al. 1997). The aim of this paper is to discuss these results in order to critically examine gatekeeping in social work programs. A model of the gatekeeping process is presented. The issues examined include gatekeeping within a broader social context, the extent to which non-academic criteria should be applied and how these could be operationalised.

Separate worlds: A discourse analysis of mainstream and Aboriginal populist media accounts of the Northern Territory Emergency Response in 2007

Critical commentary about the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) has included the claim that the media presented a simplistic and stereotyped image of Aboriginal communities at the time of its introduction in 2007, but to date there has been no systematic analysis to support this. This study addresses this research gap through a critical discourse analysis of reportage of the NTER in mainstream and Aboriginal populist print media. The findings reveal major differences in these accounts, with radically different propositions and normative assumptions. Mainstream media were overwhelmingly negative in their portrayal of remote Aboriginal communities, were silent about Aboriginal resistance and portrayed urgent Commonwealth intervention as necessary and heroic. The Aboriginal media provided contextualised accounts of the issues and focused intensely on the human rights implications of the intervention. The findings reveal a concerning racialised divide in representations of the issues facing remote Aboriginal communities in 2007 that helps to explain why the Australian public accepted policies that discriminated against Australia’s First Nations peoples.

A Comparison of Patient Clinical and Social Outcomes Before and After the Introduction of an Extended-Hours Community Mental Health Team

Objective: The aim of this study was to assess the effectiveness of the addition of standard community treatment to a hospital-based service in a regional district of Australia. Method: The study was a naturalistic investigation of a routine clinical service and utilized a longitudinal panel design. Two matched groups of seriously mentally ill patients were recruited, one before the addition of the community mental health team (CMHT) and one after. Each sample was followed up for one year using a semistructured questionnaire and instruments including the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale, the Global Assessment Scale, the Life Skills Profile and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale as well as hospital records. Results: Patients in both groups showed similar patterns of improvements. Although the aims of the new service included reducing in-patient utilization and improving social functioning, there were few significant differences between the two groups. While the number of admissions and length of stay were lower in the post-CMHT sample most were admitted rather than treated in their homes by the CMHT. Conclusion: The study concludes that better outcomes might have been achieved if the aims of the CMHT had been limited to either crisis or rehabilitation interventions, but not both. More attention needs to be paid to the service context in which model programmes are introduced so that new developments can be more closely tailored to the realities of what is likely to be achievable.

Kindness in Australia: an empirical critique of moral decline sociology

A new sociological agenda is emerging that interrogates how morality can be established in the absence of the moral certainties of the past but there is a shortage of empirical work on this topic. This article establishes a theoretical framework for the empirical analysis of everyday morality drawing on the work of theorists including Ahmed, Bauman and Taylor. It uses the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes to assess the state and shape of contemporary moralities by asking how kind are Australians, how is its expression socially distributed, and what are the motivations for kindness. The findings demonstrate that Australians exhibit a strong attachment and commitment to kindness as a moral value that is primarily motivated by interiorized sources of moral authority. We argue these findings support the work of theorists such as Ahmed and Taylor who argue authenticity and embodied emotion are legitimate sources of morality in todays secular societies. The research also provides new evidence that generational changes are shaping understandings and practices of kindness in unexpected ways.

‘Losing my religion’: Managing identity in a post-Jehovah’s Witness world

What is it like to be socialised into the self-contained Christian fundamentalist world of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and to move towards disinheriting that tradition during adolescence? This article considers this question by looking at how a group of young, Australian Jehovah’s Witnesses (JWs), who were born into the religion, make the journey from membership to dissent. The interview data suggest that for these young respondents the roots of disaffiliation lie in disagreement with specific JW practices and the freedom and hedonistic attractions offered by the secular world. It shows how disaffiliation was staged as a dynamic struggle for self as the ex-JWs swung between the secular attractions of freedom and hedonism, and the certainty and comfort of the religious community. Further, the article suggests that parental socialisation and the differences between those born into such movements and converts are important factors in understanding reasons for disaffiliation.

Governing pluralistic liberal democratic societies and metis knowledge: The problem of Indigenous unemployment:

High rates of unemployment among Indigenous Australians in comparison to non-Indigenous Australians have been rendered a public policy problem by successive Australian governments. The solutions are often coercive forms of neoliberal governance. However, where Indigenous people are driven by different motivations, ideas and aspirations in relation to work, Indigenous employment policies face the issue of epistemological dissonance. This article aims to contribute to understandings of unsuccessful Indigenous employment policy outcomes by introducing a new conceptualisation of policy and governance limitations and social action. An overview of governmentality literature is coupled with a review of the concept of metis knowledge – a form of know-how that comes from contextualised, practical experience – and its role in limiting the aims of governance. Indigenous employment policy that governs through pedagogical technologies applied to the Indigenous workforce demonstrates this limitation through its assumptions that the metis knowledge required to become ‘work-ready’ can be transferred unproblematically.