Shepard Masocha

Developing mental health social work for asylum seekers: A proposed model for practice

• Summary: This article provides a critique of the epidemiological research that currently informs mental health social work with asylum seekers. Most of the literature that currently informs social work practice with asylum seekers with mental health difficulties comes from psychiatric studies which are largely underpinned by a medical model. • Findings: It is argued that aetiological accounts, predominantly deriving from psychiatry and based largely on biological causation, are untenable. A more comprehensive model is presented, which considers both biological causation and a social perspective and locates the mental health difficulties experienced by asylum seekers in a much wider context. The model is further divided into pre-, post- and migratory stress factors. • Application: The aim is to provide social work with a practical tool to make sense of the mental health difficulties faced by asylum seekers, help in the development of assessment tools, and help multidisciplinary agencies to define the roles and remit of staff as well as contribute towards the development of policy and practice.

Construction of the ‘other’ in social workers’ discourses of asylum seekers

Summary This article analyses how asylum seekers are constructed as an out-group in some of the narratives provided by practitioners who were interviewed as part of a wider research study of social workers’ discourses of asylum seekers. Findings Using discursive psychology, the article identifies interpretative repertoires that were used by social workers in their formulations of asylum seekers as the other. The article explores the linguistic resources that were deployed in these formulations. Applications The article highlights the potential contributions of discursive perspectives to social work research, teaching and practice as it illuminates the pivotal role that language plays within the profession in the construction of subjectivities, and specifically in relation to the protection, perpetuation and normalisation of discrimination.

A ‘Turn to Language’ as a Response to the Shifting Contours of Racist Discourse

Racist discourse has significantly shifted away from the use of overt racial language and has predominantly become a coded and subtle discourse. This article highlights how paying attention the ways in which language is used in its social and cognitive contexts can provide social work with a more robust response to the shifting parameters of racist discourse. It illustrates how using a strand of discourse analysis called discursive psychology can result in an enhanced understanding of the ways in which exclusionary sentiments are couched in contemporary discourses. Drawing on data from a minority of social workers who participated in a wider study that explored the experiences of social workers who were working with asylum seekers in a UK local authority, the article highlights the ways in which exclusionary views can be articulated and legitimated by drawing on culture, instead of race, as a marker of difference. It is suggested that a turn to language can result in significant enhancements to current antiracist frameworks.

Learning to Love Our Voice: Valuing Process and Product in the Analysis of Participatory Radio for Young Refugees

Refugee, migrant and asylum seeker policy, along with corresponding public opinion, are becoming increasingly contentious issues in almost all Western nations. A growing body of literature points to (mainstream) media coverage as having a significant influence on the general public’s negative attitudes towards asylum seekers. It is therefore pertinent that we look to community media that actively involves refugees in its production as an important conduit by which to expand opportunities for alternative discourses on refugee and asylum seeker issues. But it is not only the output, or the product, of this media that warrants attention. It is also important to consider the impact of the actual process of producing community media for people of refugee background as individuals and as broader communities of interest. Heather Anderson and Shepard Masocha demonstrate the value of applying a product/process dual framework in the analysis of community media using the case study of a pilot participatory action research project conducted in Adelaide, Australia. The chapter analyses the pilot as an example of community media, produced for and by refugee communities, through two complementary lenses popular to alternative media analysis – one that considers the process (the participatory role of such activity) as citizens’ media, and the other focusing on product, through contribution to public sphere deliberation.

Bottom-up and inside-out: using participatory methodology to measure the social impact of a radio engagement project with young people of refugee experience

ABSTRACT The divergent and complex nature of the Australian community broadcasting sector complicates any attempt to measure its social impact, as does the general lack of consensus within academic debates on how best to measure, record, and demonstrate the sector’s long-term effects (Jallov 2005). This article focuses specifically on the use of participatory monitoring and evaluation processes as a method for determining the social impact of community radio projects. It draws its findings from a pilot research project that involved the production of a radio series, produced by young people from refugee backgrounds living in Adelaide, South Australia, to investigate how community radio can positively contribute to resettlement experiences. This paper does not report on the findings of the research project itself but rather provides insight into how a bottom-up and inside-out approach, embedded within a participatory action research methodology, can be useful for developing key indicators by which the success of such projects can be measured.

Asylum Seekers in Social Work Discourse

This chapter reviews the emerging social work literature on asylum seekers. It is noted that within this emerging literature there is a paucity of research that focuses on the ways in which asylum seekers are constructed as a social group and the implications for practice. The chapter locates the importance of language and discourse within social work. In so doing the chapter provides further justification for the book’s focus on professional social work discourses of asylum seekers.

Asylum Seekers in Media and Parliamentary Discourses

This chapter explores how the marginalisation of asylum seekers and their subsequent exclusion from the mainstream welfare apparatus and wider society have been legitimated and normalised in media and parliamentary discourses. The media and parliamentary discourses make up part of the wider frames of reference that social work professionals draw on in addition to their specific professional discourses. The chapter demonstrates how asylum seekers are depicted as a problematic out-group, the Other. Interpretative repertoires used in anti-asylum seeking discourses are analysed with specific reference to the linguistic devices deployed in the construction of asylum seekers as an out-group. The chapter demonstrates that xenoracism is not inherent in asylum seeking discourses but rather it is an effect of using specific discursive resources and rhetorical devices. The deployment of such rhetorical devices achieves specific acts, which cast asylum seekers in a negative light without the deployment of an overtly racist discourse. It is in this sense that it is argued that these various interpretative repertoires bear all the hallmarks of the xenoracism in terms of the subtlety of the exclusionary tendencies.

Countering Hegemonic Narratives

This chapter explores how social work professionals counter the hegemonic anti-asylum seeking discourse. It pays particular attention to the specific subject positions that were taken up by practitioners in relation to the dominant anti-asylum seeking discourses. The data analysis revealed a number of interpretative repertoires, which were utilised by social workers to provide counter narratives to the dominant ways of portraying asylum seekers. Within these interpretative repertoires various linguistic strategies were employed by social workers interviewed in their attempts to deconstruct and reconstitute asylum seeking service users. The chapter demonstrates that by engaging in these discursive acts, social workers were able to portray positively not only asylum seekers but also the profession as a whole. The social workers’ dissenting voices were able to reject the inevitability and sense of ‘expectation’ that the kind of treatment asylum seekers receive was necessarily part of being an asylum seeker. By engaging in such discursive acts and taking up specific subject positions, the practitioners were able to foreground the humanity and individuality of asylum seekers. From an advocacy standpoint, the chapter underscores the importance of social work being actively involved in discursive acts that constitute those particular groups’ identities.

Construction of the Other

It can be argued that the professional and institutional contexts in which social workers are located make it very difficult for practitioners to blatantly express what might be perceived as oppressive, discriminatory, exclusionary, racist or prejudiced views. As such, there are very limited spaces for the expression of what might be construed as prejudiced or pejorative views in relation to a marginalised social group like asylum seekers. This chapter focuses on those narratives in which a minority respondent position was taken up. This chapter considers how negative representations of asylum seekers can be constructed within such limited spaces in the highly constrained and regulated ideological area of social work practice. The chapter demonstrates how such oppositional discourses are rhetorically organised and positioned within such restricted and heavily regulated contexts. It highlights discernible patterns in those few instances in which social workers’ discourses negatively positioned asylum seekers and rationalised their continued marginalisation and/or exclusion from mainstream British society. This chapter takes an interest in the discursive strategies that were deployed to formulate such negative views of out-groups. It demonstrates how such negative formulations were presented as reasonable and justified while simultaneously protecting the interlocutor from potential accusations of being prejudiced.