Qualitative Social Work

This article combines an autoethnography that was part of the author's graduate schoolwork with a `post-script' written six years later. The autoethnography assignment focused on the personal experience of the writer while illuminating social and cultural contexts. The article's first section recounts a conversation in which complex personal, social and political aspects of disability unfold. The dialogue becomes a springboard for examining research about blindness and rehabilitation. It also prompts self-reflection and an inner examination of individual choice as the author struggled to be seen as `more than her vision'. In the second section, the fluid contexts of knowledge and the knower are made explicit as meanings of `choice' and `living' are re-examined. The author considers the apparent contradiction of needing others to see vision loss and to look beyond it. She also considers her own assumptions about how others relate to disability.

This article considers some of complexities around a feminist imperative of `voice'. It is a reflective dialogue that follows the possibilities and problematics encountered in a social inquiry aimed at creating space for the women who participated to `give voice' as a collective. Our explorations about the ways that these women, diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, come to experience their everyday worlds as they do, involved identifying the social processes and practices shaping their lived actualities. Speaking together and back to the discourses of biomedicine that work to position these women in fixed and universal ways was also central to our researching. That the woman's voice goes largely unheard when spoken from `madness' made such work more urgent. As our navigations of speaking together shows, however, this was not as straightforward as we had envisaged: because the circumstances that produce experiences of oppression are rarely simple, social change efforts to ameliorate inequities will necessarily need to be nuanced. This polyphonic discussion honours the respective contributions to our knowledge-making endeavours, and tells of a project cast in feminism's `with'.

Social workers have always used narratives in the service of their clients. Many of us spend half our days listening to stories and the other half repeating them in one form or another, whether in assessments, in advocating for services or for a more accurate understanding of a client's circumstances. While we excel at this kind of storytelling, we have been held back from using the narrative genre in telling our own story. That story is one that describes the intricacies and variety of social work practice as well as the uniqueness that distinguishes us from other helping professions. For hospital social workers, who have experienced profound change in recent years, it is especially important that we find innovative and interesting ways to convey a richer and deeper understanding and appreciation of our role. The genre of personal narrative allows us to do this in a voice suitable for the task. When narratives are used in this way they can be seen as a tool of advocacy for both ourselves and our clients (Chambon, 2004).

In this article I argue that social work practice is continually informed by not just a corporeal or physical body, but also by an incorporeal body. Incorporeal knowledge. I am interested in how such a body invokes questions about how we theorize (in/through) practice. To examine these questions, I work with the postmodern theoretical stance that the separation of practice and theory in social work is not tenable (Fook, 1996; Fook, 2002; John, 1994; Rossiter, 2000). I narrate effects on my body of trauma work that have been framed by the incorporeal body.

This is an experimental piece that reports on findings from a research project conducted from September to December 2006 on the border between a neighborhood on the east side of Detroit (Jefferson Chalmers) and Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan. The project addresses the stark racial, economic, and physical divides between two proximate communities, and the way that the boundary line between these communities is enacted. Alter Road, serves as this real and infrequently crossed border. The physical barriers put in place to reinforce the imaginary line between East Detroit,¹ and Grosse Pointe Park and the conditions on either side of the border are prominent themes. For social workers, understanding how and why bordering communities remain insular, and the effect of that segregation, is important in understanding human behavior and better appreciating the circumstances from which people come. This qualitative piece illustrates these issues through the eyes of a graduate social work student walking again and again across that boundary.

Relational poetry is a form of poetry inspired by social constructionism. A freestanding poem is responded to via an interweaving of a second poem within the lines of the first. The result is a new poem that is different than either one alone.