UiS Open Journals (Univ. of Stavanger)
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Master narratives and narratives as told by people with mental health and drug problems
This article examines the role of master narratives in self-narratives told by people with both mental health and drug problems. It is based on stories told by people who have both mental health and drug problems. However, their substance abuse has become their most dominant characteristic in their lives. The storytellers or the interviewees attempt to describe their background, their experience and what they call churning thoughts, while their stories are also infiltrated and dominated by master narratives about the drug abuser
Trust-development in Danish and Norwegian Integration Programmes
In this article the aim has been to challenge ‘integration’ as a concept and to explore integration practices in Denmark and Norway. The purpose is to analyse how trust can develop within integration practice. The article is based on a comparison between theories about inclusion/exclusion, assimilation, integration and trust/distrust, and between the Danish and Norwegian integration practices. These two countries provide an introduction programme, which has been developed as a means to integrate immigrants into the labour market and society. In accordance with these programmes language training, social studies and work practice are provided for mainly non-Western immigrants. However, the comparison between Denmark and Norway shows that the introduction programmes are both similar and different, and in this article the discussion focuses on how these two practices in many ways can be more than simply integrating
Social Problems in the Russian Army within the Framework of Social Work
This article aims at describing social problems we find in the Russian Army. The research has allowed us to get a ranging of servicemen`s social problems: housing, material maintenance and hard-earned money, realization of social guarantees, life conditions and problem of relationships within families, time-limit, the regulation of life, restricting the freedom, humiliating treatment of juniors and bullying. Unsolved social problems of servicemen may also cause that people who are going to protect the country from danger, may become threats themselves. The Russian army consumes a great amount of resources. Recently mass media has put these issues on the public agenda. Focus in article is also to give a picture of how social workers work to solve social problems in the Russian Army
Social care going market: Institutional and cultural change regarding services for the elderly
Over the last two decades or so, major Western societies have remoulded the institutional set-up by which they are deailing with social risks related to frailty during old age. While the 20th century had brought a transnational tendency towards the establishment of elderly care ‘going public’, the proliferation of more market-based services brings confusion into the societal norm-set underlying the aforementioned tendency. Marketisation has placed the emphasis on economic values engrained in liberal worldviews, leading into a new welfare culture that devaluates universalism and reemphasises the sovereignty of the individual. However, the new cult of the individual produces contradictory signals. Drawing on an encompassing study on the ‘culture of welfare markets’ in elderly care provision, covering two (post-)liberal and two (post-corporatist) welfare regimes (Canada, Britain; France, Germany), the paper looks at these fuzzy developments in order to assess the cultural embeddedness of what can be referred to as the mixed economy of elderly care. The analysis, charting major patterns of both institutional change and public communication around it, elucidates that we currently are facing a permanent struggle between liberal values and (renewed) elements of the ‘going-public-agenda’ proliferating over the 1970s and 1980s, that is, a hybrid and ‘nervous’ cultural configuration in which senior social citizenship remains an issue, albeit on precarious foundations
Åse Vagli: Behind Closed Doors : Exploring the Institutional Logic of Child Protection Work
Reflections from challenges of working with HIV/Aids affected and infected orphans in Malawi
Karen Healy uses the term reflection in action to refer to processes of refining knowledge in action so as to promote new ways of responding to the problems we encounter in practice. Thus, social work entails working with different people with different non routine challenges that needs reflective action to be dealt with effectively. The importance of reflection in social work cannot be overtly emphasised. After experiencing an emotional circumstance or situation, in reflecting, and through these experiences we can ably find valuable options for professional development. This process is very much in line with critical incident method. This method is described as both an emotional and cognitive process, proceeding from lower to higher levels of reflection, from analysing the experiences to conceptualizing new knowledge
Åse Vagli: Behind Closed Doors : Exploring the Institutional Logic of Child Protection Work
The challenges of doing gender research in developing countries: Focus on Malawi
We aim to illustrate how the tenor and character of the initial importation of the concept of gender into the Malawian context continues to impact, construct, and pose challenges to the study of gender in Malawi. Ultimately, we argue that complex and ethnographically grounded approaches to studying gender in Malawi may serve as a corrective to a long legacy of conceptual imperialism that has ramifications for both the researched and researchers in Malawi