Lynn Froggett

Narratives of social enterprise: from biography to practice and policy critique

Biographical methods are commonly regarded as suitable for the narrative study of individual lives. This article, drawing on a psychosocial case study of narratives in a community development setting, demonstrates their potential to make links between interpersonal, organizational and policy domains. The analysis questions the adequacy of notions of ‘social enterprise’ and ‘active citizenship’ to characterize activism, leadership and engagement in disadvantaged communities. By focusing on the intersection of personal and organizational narratives and the dynamic reflexivity of the interpretive process, the article also points to the capacity of biographical methods to enhance professional skills and understanding, and bring a newly dynamic relationship between research, policy and practice.

ARTS BASED LEARNING IN RESTORATIVE YOUTH JUSTICE: EMBODIED, MORAL AND AESTHETIC

Re‐integrative shaming has been a central, but by no means uncontroversial principle of restorative practices within the youth justice system. This paper draws on video data from a creative writing project with young offenders in the context of individuated restorative justice programmes. It presents material from work with a young female offender who has been caught up in violent family relations, committed violent offences and whose fantasy life is also permeated by images of violence. Within an on‐going conversation with a local poet she finds a symbolic form to symbolise destructive sides of the self. The inter‐subjective recognition within the poetry‐writing sessions takes place in a context where the tendency to institutionalised shaming embedded in the youth justice system is temporarily suspended. The paper considers the potential of such processes to facilitate moral learning by fostering guilt, concern and the wish to make reparation.

Instrumentalism, knowledge and gender in social work

Abstract The new public sector managerialism of the 1990s has introduced a profound cultural change within social work organisations. It involves a substitution of knowledge which is primarily instrumental in character for the discursive, interpretive and reflexive knowledge on which social workers have traditionally relied in client-centred practice. This paper draws on perspectives from critical theory and psychoanalysis and argues that, despite the apparent neutrality of managerialist discourse, it is both ideological and gendered. It encourages the construction of rigid socially structured defence systems within welfare organisations and is inimical to the kind of thought which can engage with interwoven emotional and material needs to develop reparative practice. Furthermore it is in danger of undermining precisely those forms of supervision that can sustain professionals in the face of the emotional impact of relationships with distressed and damaged people.

Dance as a Complex Intervention in an Acute Mental Health Setting: A Place ‘In-Between’

Introduction: There is little research on dance in acute mental health settings in the National Health Service. This study evaluated a dance programme in an acute setting. Occupational therapists collaborated with a professional dancer to facilitate the programme. Method: The literature review revealed that studies on the benefits of dance tended to focus on clinical outcomes. This study adopted a mixed-method psychosocial approach. It used the Herth Hope Index with 11 service users. Fifteen interviews were conducted with service users. Five members of staff were interviewed and film-based data were also utilised. Interpretation panels were used to analyse and triangulate findings. Findings: The study found that the value of the dance programme was related to its ‘in-between’ status. Dance connected the inner and outer experience of service users by engaging the creative imagination and translating it into movement. It also contributed to a hopeful but realistic sense of connection between mind and body and to social groups inside and outside the hospital. Conclusion: Dance is a complex intervention, which provides an appropriate challenge for service users in acute mental health settings while contributing to a sense of biopsychosocial integration. As such, it has much to offer contemporary occupational therapy.

Communication, culture and competence in social work education

This paper argues that the managerialist influence on the DipSW has meant that both the models of social work and of social work education that have come to dominance since it was first approved in 1989 are incompatible with the development of anti-racist practice. We explore the potential of reformulating social work as a communicative activity and the implications of this for the education of social workers. We argue that this would require an approach that incorporates three main elements: an analysis of the way in which power and disadvantage is distributed between racial groups and the ways in which this affects their ability to represent their own needs in political debate; an understanding of the ways in which the wider discourses of racial domination find expression in culture; and the development of our understanding of how intrapsychic representations of race and power come to be inscribed in mental life. It is through the interrelationship of these domains that anti-racist practice can become i...

MAKING SENSE OF TOM: SEEING THE REPARATIVE IN RESTORATIVE JUSTICE

This paper considers the contribution of a creative writing project to restorative youth justice though a case study in which a young offender is filmed working on a one‐to‐one basis with a poet over a number of weeks. The restitutive and reparative dimensions of restorative justice are identified and the article shows reparative processes at work through transcribed extracts of video data. The analysis is informed by a psycho‐societal perspective which attends to the dialogue around social roles and identities and the intersubjective process of the sessions. It considers the liminal role of the poet in relation to the youth justice system and the moral community which surrounds the young man in question. Conclusions from short‐term case‐based studies are necessarily tentative and must await larger longitudinal studies. However, the material presented here shows how in using the position of the artist to good effect, the poet succeeds in helping the young offender find a language in which he begins to develop self‐reflective capacity, moral responsibility and hopes for a better future.

Object relations in the museum: a psychosocial perspective

This article theorises museum engagement from a psychosocial perspective. With the aid of selected concepts from object relations theory, it explains how the museum visitor can establish a personal relation to museum objects, making use of them as an ‘aesthetic third’ to symbolise experience. Since such objects are at the same time cultural resources, interacting with them helps the individual to feel part of a shared culture. The article elaborates an example drawn from a research project that aimed to make museum collections available to people with physical and mental health problems. It draws on the work of the British psychoanalysts Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion to explain the salience of the concepts of object use, potential space, containment and reverie within a museum context. It also refers to the work of the contemporary psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas on how objects can become evocative for individuals both by virtue of their intrinsic qualities and by the way they are used to express personal idiom.

Imagining transitions in old age through the visual matrix method: thinking about what is hard to bear

Dominant discourses of ageing are often confined to what is less painful to think about and therefore idealise or denigrate ageing and later life. We present findings from an exploratory psychosocial study, in a Nordic context, into three later-life transitions: from working life to retirement, from mental health to dementia and from life to death. Because, for some, these topics are hard to bear and therefore defended against and routinely excluded from everyday awareness, we used a method led by imagery and affect – the Visual Matrix – to elicit participants’ free associative personal and collective imagination. Through analysis of data extracts, on the three transitions, we illustrate oscillations between defending against the challenges of ageing and realism in facing the anxieties it can provoke. A recurring theme includes the finality of individual life and the inter-generational continuity, which together link life and death, hope and despair, separation and connectedness.

Exploring the bio-psycho-social

This diverse collection of papers presents work from a number of different fronts. They originate from an adventurous approach to cross-disciplinary dialogue in the form of a seminar organised around a common focus. However, in themselves they represent such diversity as to offer some difficulties of organisation and comparison. Each was presented as a response to the seminar’s focal theme of emotional learning, although some address the issue more directly than others. The authors do not as a group share a clear conceptualisation of emotional learning – nor would they seem even to concur on a single definition of emotion. The question remains, therefore, of what is the nature of the emotionality involved in the learning process. A key feature of the seminar as a whole is in a sense the juxtaposition within and between the papers of the biological, psychological and social. This juxtaposition suggests a question which is not explored in any detail in the contributions: where is the distinction, if any, between complex socially embedded emotions and their organismic substrate in the individual human mind or brain? The diversity of this collection reflects the fact that across different disciplines and in different empirical fields and areas of practice, concepts of emotional labour, emotional work and emotional learning are gaining currency, and new projects of theorising and investigating the emotions are being defined. It is evidence of the vigour of this activity that only one of these papers (Shuttleworth) stands explicitly in the territory of psychotherapeutic work, which has been – and in some fundamental ways must remain – both at the core and at the leading edge of the study of emotion. The psychoanalytic tradition from which Shuttleworth comes has provided a self-sufficient and profound account of emotion as it is generated, experienced, and communicated, and intensive clinical work offers unique opportunities to examine where emotions come from and how we manage them. Eur. J. of Psychotherapy, Counselling & Health Vol 5 No 3 September 2002 pp. 321–326

Offender-based Restorative Justice and Poetry: Reparation or Wishful Thinking?:

Increasingly, arts-based interventions are being implemented as a means of engaging young offenders, resulting in a public debate over the value of such projects. Whilst there is evidence that many Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) throughout England and Wales endorse such approaches, the processes by which they may benefit young people and have the potential to change attitudes to offending remain under-theorized. In this article we examine a YOT-related creative writing project that embraces an offender-based restorative justice model that depends on a reparative mind-set. We argue that such arts-based projects are complex and potentially far-reaching in their effects.