Priscilla Dunk-West

Pedagogy beyond the culture wars: De-differentiation and the use of technology and popular culture in undergraduate sociology teaching

In recent decades there have been various calls for a pedagogical revolution in universities to address a new technology-savvy generation of students. These developments have been met with concern about the postmodern relativizing of educational achievement and accusations of the ‘dumbing down’ of course content. Moving beyond such culture war divisions between orthodox and progressive worldviews, this article outlines how reference to popular culture and utilization of its styles can result in student re-engagement with traditional learning materials and formats. Drawing on focus group interviews with students from an introductory sociology class that incorporated a specifically designed DVD, we outline the individual and societal benefits of a de-differentiated pedagogy that combines traditional rationalist education with more playful forms of learning that directly link with students’ life-worlds.

Socio-cultural risk? Reporting on a Qualitative Study with Female Street- Based Sex Workers

Risk narratives are of increasing importance in contemporary social life in that they help in understanding and anticipating the shifts that characterise our late modern landscape. Our qualitative research explores risk as it relates to violence toward street-based sex workers in a suburban Australian setting. Female street-based sex workers represent a highly stigmatised and marginalised group. International studies report that they experience high levels of sexual violence perpetrated by male clients and our empirical work with street-based sex workers in Adelaide, South Australia concurs with this finding. Despite many creative and specialized skills workers reported drawing upon to minimise the risk of violence to themselves, we argue that a socio-cultural lens is vital to viewing risk in this context. We argue that in order to effect change, risk must be disembedded from increasingly individualized discourses, since it is through the personalisation of risk that violence becomes legitimised as an occupational hazard in street-based sex work.

Understanding Everyday Relationship Work: The Development of a Relationship Maintenance Scale

Relationship maintenance behaviors contribute to the longevity of intimate relationships, yet existing scales are limited. Available measurement tools are primarily constrained to the Relationship Maintenance Strategy Measure (RMSM) and its further revisions. Covering a number of domains, conceptual overlap with other aspects of an intimate relationship (e.g., household division of labor) may exist. Our cross-sectional exploratory study included participants from 60 countries (n=8,162) who completed an online survey. Participants were diverse in their relationship status, age, sexual orientation, and race/ethnicity. From their responses, we developed a parsimonious and brief measure of relationship maintenance (8 items) through exploratory and then confirmatory factor analyses. Results indicated that the Relationship Maintenance Scale (RMS) shows initial evidence of reliability and validity. The RMS may have utility in working with couples and families. Future research should seek to re-test its use with varied samples, such as couples seeking relationship support.

Emotion work and the management of stigma in female sex workers’ long-term intimate relationships

Very little empirical work examines female sex workers’ experiences in sociological detail, particularly within an Australian context. Drawing from a small-scale sample of female sex workers in South Australia, our findings suggest that sex workers’ ongoing negotiations within private relationships represent ‘emotion work’, as described by Hochschild, which was understood as limiting the effect of stigma. Taking the lead from social scripts associated with women’s traditional roles and associated ‘feeling rules’, participants mediated their personal lives as distinct from their professional lives to navigate their way through the complex interplay between identities. This emotion work was manifest in the negotiation of intimacy. Other factors such as partner jealousy, which emerge from dual engagement in intimate and work-related sexual behaviours, were also mediated. These findings point to a broader appreciation of emotion work as dually agential and structured and undertaken by sex workers in both their home and work spheres.

Editorial: Practice, Sexuality and Gender — Intersections in Social Work

Since sexuality and gender are key features of human identity and expression, social work practitioners often develop individualised or field-specific strategies to negotiate these terrains in practice. Some of these conversations ‘in the field’ may not be debated in journals because of the seemingly disparate worlds of academia and practice. When this is combined with the notion that gender and certainly sexuality are often viewed as part of a private sphere wherein professional notions of the self are not welcome, what has the potential to be a rich field of intellectual interest remains marginalised. There is a need to continue to ask questions of one another about our practice and how gender and sexuality are realised. Specifically, this includes asking what the dilemmas are in working with clients when sexuality issues are present. Is the problem one of social structure or are there still taboos in the profession of social work? How do issues of gender and sexuality manifest in differing areas of practice? Does gender matter in the same way that it did prior to the feminisms of the 1980s? These are the kinds of questions that we aimed to address in this special issue of Practice: Social Work in Action. Gender and sexuality are being explored, to some extent, in contemporary social work literature and scholarship about sexuality continues to emerge from a diverse range of disciplines including the sciences, humanities, gender studies and social sciences. It is not surprising then that contemporary thinking in social work has led to theorising about gender and sexuality. In social work literature such a development has meant, for example, an increased appreciation for sexual diversity (Bywater and Jones 2007; Trotter and Leech 2003) as well as theorising sexuality as an ‘everyday’ aspect of the self (Dunk 2007). The turn towards the sexual self in recent social work literature has explored problematic sexual behaviours (Myers and Milner 2007), the issues relevant for neglected ‘diverse’ populations such as gay and lesbian clients (for example, see Thompson 2006 for anti-discriminatory frameworks PRACTICE: SOCIAL WORK IN ACTION VOLUME 21 NUMBER 1 (MARCH 2009)

Measuring Relationship Quality in an International Study Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Validity

Objective: This study reports on the operationalization and testing of the newly developed Relationship Quality (RQ) scale, designed to assess an individual’s perception of his or her RQ in their current partnership. Methods: Data were generated through extended sampling from an original U.K.-based research project, Enduring Love? Couple relationships in the 21st century. This mixed methods study was designed to investigate how couples experience, understand, and sustain their long-term relationships. This article utilizes the cross-sectional, community sample (N = 8,132) from this combined data set, drawn primarily from the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia. A two-part approach to scale development was employed. An initial 15-item pool was subjected to exploratory factor analysis leading into confirmatory factor analysis using structural equation modeling. Results: The final 9-item scale evidenced convergent construct validity and known-groups validity along with strong reliability. Conclusion: Implications for future research and professional practice are discussed.

Sexuality, sexual and gender identities and intimacy research in social work and social care: a lifecourse epistemology

Until now, sexuality has been treated as a specialist topic or area of specialist social work practice. This book cuts across all areas of the discipline. It examines the relationship between sexuality, sexual identities and intimacies and the life course, and showcases a range of issues pertinent to social work through these lenses. It opens up new possibilities for better understanding sexuality in social work, and contains empirical work and theorising about sexuality, intimacy and gender not currently found in a traditional course on life course theory and practice. The chapters position new areas of scholarship in sexuality including trans perspectives, masculinities, bisexuality and the voices of other gender and sexual minority populations within a life course trajectory. Empirical research picks up on the broader public health and well-being agenda with a strong focus on challenging normative theories to promote human rights and justice for marginalised individuals and groups. Sexuality, Sexual and Gender Identities and Intimacy Research in Social Work and Social Care will significantly enhance any core texts on life course theory and practice, anti-oppression and anti-discriminatory theories for professionals. It should be considered essential reading for academics, practitioners and undergraduate and postgraduate students.