Maxine Jacobson

Just Practice: Steps toward a New Social Work Paradigm

The 21st-century challenges to social justice, human rights, and citizenship posed by transnational capital, growing global inequality and social exclusion, and multiple forms of violence confront the limits of the social work imagination and call for creative and critical interventions that focus on social justice. In this article we contend that the dominant theoretical approaches to social work practice are inadequate, and we consider the possibilities and limitations of alternative approaches informed by critical social theory. We argue for the Just Practice Framework, a social justice-oriented approach to social work, as a corrective to current models.

Toward Reconstructing Poverty Knowledge: Addressing Food Insecurity through Grassroots Research Design and Implementation

Some researchers are advocating an alternative approach to poverty research, one that recognizes peoples lived experiences as major contributions to a comprehensive understanding of poverty and sustainable community solutions. This article describes a community-based participatory research project whose primary objective was to address local food insecurity in a northwestern community in the United States. Grassroots research design strategies informed by a steering committee of people with limited income and research findings are presented. Implications from the study for shifting the discourse on poverty knowledge are discussed.

The Faculty Meeting: Practicing Social Justice-Oriented Group Work

Social group work scholars and practitioners have begun to locate and recognize important sites for thinking about and practicing social group work as increasing evidence demonstrates its diminishing importance. This article identifies faculty meetings as a significant site for integrating social group work more fully into departments and schools of social work and helping to achieve the professions social justice mission. Challenging the meaning of the faculty meeting and thinking of it as a faculty group is a necessary prerequisite to realize this goal. A set of principles is presented and next steps explored to reclaim and reinsert the value of social group work for the profession today.

Breaking Silence, Building Solutions: The Role of Social Justice Group Work in the Retention of Faculty of Color

In spite of their many diversity initiatives, predominantly White colleges and universities have a poor track record in the recruitment and retention of faculty of color. This article unpacks the White privilege inherent in barriers to retention by focusing on three standards commonly used to make promotion and tenure decisions: teaching, service, and scholarship. A story of two Native American women faculty members denied academic advancement at a predominantly White university 30 years apart illustrates the White racism that underscored these decisions. Approaches to social justice group work are suggested for addressing the retention of faculty of color in the future.

From pariahs to partners: How parents and their allies changed New York City's child welfare system by Tobis, D.

David Tobis tells the story of New York City’s child welfare system over the past two decades and sheds some hope that bureaucratic institutions with historically entrenched patterns of crisis and reform can be changed. Although a number of elements converged to help create changes in the system, the participation of parents as advocates, community organizers, and policy makers is viewed as the major impetus. For those who know the child welfare system well and its intractability, the results are unprecedented. In 1992, there were close to 50,000 children in foster care in New York City. Twenty years later, there were 14,000. In the final sections of the book, Tobis appraises what changed over the past 20 years, what remained the same, and strategies to sustain change over the long haul. Tobis comes at the topic of child welfare from his direct involvement in New York City organizations that help keep families together, support the hiring and training of parents as advocates for other parents ensnarled in the child welfare system, and fund projects to reform the system. His beliefs are strongly grounded in children’s rights and the rights of parents to receive help and assistance first before removing children from their homes is the only option. He approaches the analysis of the child welfare system through a broad sociological lens. For the past three decades, Tobis’s work focused on helping to create a movement of organized parents and their allies to disrupt what he refers to as the “rollercoaster pattern of child welfare”— the cycles of crisis and reform that have been the hallmarks of the child welfare system since its inception. Tobis points to the racist and classist biases underpinning child welfare policies and programs that fuel the rollercoaster ride. He views the battle to reform the child welfare system through a civil rights lens. To be effective, this orientation demands building broad-based community alliances that cut across single issue organizing. Tobis describes New York City’s child welfare system in the early 1990s—a system enormously expensive to operate and entirely devoid of parents’ participation as experts on their own lives. The power to define and shape the system was located primarily in the hands of a few entrenched