UiS Open Journals (Univ. of Stavanger)
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Give me five! PerSpektiv - Per’s Pective, en petit til PS!
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Becoming a social worker: Personal and professional identity formation among social welfare officers in Ghana
Get PDFDespite being the subject of numerous research, professional identity in social work remains an important yet contentious concept. The aim of this article is to contribute to the literature on professional identity in social work by reflecting on the mutual development of the personal and professional identities of social workers in Ghana. Interviews were conducted among 20 social workers in two regions of Ghana, the northern and central regions. The evidence shows that the identity of social workers is shaped by two major factors – the statutory legal regime in which they operate, and the professional principles they apply in their work. Understood within the frame of social identity theory, the narratives of the social workers indicate how identifying with the professional group bestows distinctiveness and a change in personal identity. This change is reflected in their attitudes and value judgements of previously taken-for-granted socio-cultural practices. But while they firmly identify with the state and the professional principles, the social workers actively attempt to build local authenticity into their professional practices
Alternative Forms and Approaches to Operatic Practice in Australia
Get PDFThis timely research presents an excerpt of my analysis of opera and operatic practice in Australia in 2021. The aim of the broader research is to interrogate the sustainability, viability and evolution of the Australian operatic field. Situated during the globally recognised Coronavirus pandemic era, this qualitative research project was conducted over the period 2018–2021. The fieldwork component of the research is an investigation conducted through long-form interviews with a selection of the central figures in the operatic field in Australia today. This excerpt is from Chapter 8, Part III Stories We Tell: Making and Staging Opera in Australia. I examine how and why repertoire opera is being reframed, and who is taking the lead in this reframing, juxtaposed with the personal and societal cost of performing unexamined extant opera works and perpetuating the ‘opera gaze’. The vision and division of the operatic field is deconstructed in an exploration of contemporary Australian opera and contemporary practices, fictional ritual spaces, and explorations of gender, Aboriginal opera and decolonising the postcolonial operatic lens
HIP as a Creative Tool for Performance Design: Investigating the Performance Practice of Satie’s Mélodies to Challenge the Stereotypes of the Classical Recital
Get PDFIn the 20th century a wave of experimentation and discussion hit most artistic disciplines. As pianist-researcher Mine Dogantan-Dack points out, classical music has been slow to join in. Although composers have been experimenting with the musical language, classical music performance as an artistic practice has relatively stayed untouched. In the area of vocal music, the traditional recital format with the singer standing by the piano is THE standard. In my doctoral research project, I aim to challenge and explore alternatives to this traditional format. I start by investigating the original performance practice of Satie’s mélodies to then design three different performances of this repertoire using various artistic methods and theoretic concepts. The first one is based on the approach known as historical informed performance (HIP). Satie’s mélodies are little known and seldom performed. They are also difficult to appreciate at a first hearing: incredibly short, condensed in their simplicity, lacking catchy melodies and with obscure texts. My hypothesis is that the standard way of performing them, as a static vocal chamber music recital, doesn’t suit them and makes it in fact harder for the public to appreciate them. Investigating the original performance practice then became a way to rediscover other aspects of the music, beyond the dogmas of the score, and to find inspiration for creating alternative modes of presenting classical vocal chamber music. In this paper I retrace my use of HIP as a creative tool for designing performances of classical music
Self-employment and disability: the case of support for starting a business in Sweden
Get PDFIn many countries, self-employment has become a common strategy for achieving inclusion in the labour market. Studies show that the occurrence of self-employment depends not only on individual motives, but also on existing policies and support. In Sweden, labour market measures to include people with disabilities are primarily organized to achieve inclusion through traditional forms of employment, though one tool offered by the Swedish Public Employment Service is Support to Start a Business. One part of this support is exclusive to people with disabilities. Although the Swedish Public Employment Service is responsible for this specific support, they collaborate with both external state-funded and non-profit actors who assess applicants’ business ideas.
Drawing on the methodological approach of institutional ethnography, this article explores how the in-house frontline workers and external actors describe their professional roles, how they make decisions and what the chain of action looks like at multiple sites. Nine representatives from the various organizations that people can meet with when trying to start and run their own business have taken part in semi-structured interviews.
The analysis identifies different institutional practices that overlap when people with disabilities apply for support to start their own business: one focusing on the efficient allocation of resources, and the other on the individual’s social and financial welfare by protecting the individuals these organizations meet with from risks connected to economy and health. These two practices reflect a long-standing conflict between control and support in objectives within both labour market policy and social work. This support of self-employment for people with disabilities is organized by actors who traditionally have not been studied in research on social work
Decolonizing curatorial ways: Curating from Sámi perspective
Get PDFThe paper explores multiple perspectives on curating indigenous art and builds upon the case project of the nongraduate program for Sámicurators and its part realized in autumn 2022 at the SámiCenter for Contemporary Art in Karasjok. The curatorial ways are discussed from a threefold perspective: decolonizing curatorial practice, nonhierarchy of narratives, and pluriversal curating. The findings outline the main tools applied, such as the involvement of Sámicurators and scholars, nonindigenous scholars working with Indigenous art, the use of the lecture, presentation, and experience formats, and language use. The value of the project was in the unfolding of a broad perspective of what curating Indigenous art and research can be
The use of vignettes in an international comparative social work research: In-practice and on-practice reflections on practices
Get PDFThe aim of this article is to reflect on the strengths and challenges in qualitative comparative research on personal social services. The specific methodological approach that these reflections emerge from is the application of case vignettes in focus group interviews with social workers, working in different welfare regimes.
We describe the process of vignette construction and implementation in focus group interviews, and relate this to findings in a large international project with researchers and data from Chile, Mexico, Norway, Sweden, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Ireland and the UK.
Findings reveal that some globally spread professional norms prevail when they are applied locally, while others are more formed through welfare systems with strong contextual norms and legal and socio-economic barriers. Furthermore, the project showed that to use case vignettes and focus groups, in order to compare ‘social work’ in its totality between countries, is really difficult. It appears more fruitful to use such research methods to compare subsectors and sub-disciplines instead of social work as a whole. The strength of the data retrieved from the study is that it makes it possible to separate information on actual practice from information on principles and system norms, thus providing in-practice and on-practice reflections
Questioning and Listening: An Attempt to Investigate Voinha’s Migration Journey
Get PDFIn this essay I analyze how the artifacts of questioning and listening became resourceful in the procedure of excavating the personal and political reasons behind the migration journey my maternal grandmother Voinha (who turned 100 years old on April 08th 2021 and passed away on March 06th 2022) embarked on in 1945 from Ananindeua and Belém (Amazon rainforest region) to Rio de Janeiro (BR); and further, my own immigration journey from Latin America to the Middle East and on to northern Europe, fifteen years ago. How coupling questioning with listening allowed an oppressed woman to speak for herself, fostering in this way dramaturgies that brought awareness to feminist empowerment as a means to tackle the colonial and patriarchal ways in which the Brazilian national identity, among many others, is constructed.
The writing style is mainly anecdotal and based on conversations I had with Voinha on different occasions. The recordings of our last in-person encounter on September 15th 2018 became the foundation for the performance Feliz Aniversário, created primarily as a way of giving Voinha agency in telling her own migration journey. Excerpts of this audio and video footage will be further analyzed alongside this essay.
The methodology adopted is autoethnography with the intention to offer nuanced, complex, and specific knowledge about particular lives, experiences and relationships (Adams, Jones, Ellis 2014). Within autoethnographical methodological tools, I delve on reflexivity with the aim of troubling the relationship between researchers ‘selves’ and ‘others’ and offering a re-examination of the paradigm modernity/coloniality as simultaneously shaped through specific articulations of race, gender and sexuality (Lugones 2007). The final intention is to analyze how turning back to my ancestors’ and my own experiences, identities, and their socio-political implications; how analyzing them according to gender and queer theories and from a decolonial perspective, could potentialize my current practice focused on autobiographical performance.
One last important point to be acknowledged is my role as an artist-researcher examining the complex ethical and creative processes of working with intimate family memories, observing the growing necessity of developing dramaturgies of care and resistance (Malzacher 2008)