Exploring Humor in Child Welfare Casework


Book Description

Exploring Humor in Child Welfare Casework: Laugh to Get Through It or Cry Forever explores how gallows humor is used among child welfare caseworkers and what the use of humor, and gallows humor, reveals about how employees experience stress and manage their emotions. Caseworkers utilize humor as a method to manage the dilemmas they face in their employment. Humor provides a way for employees to cope with stress and the negative emotions they experience due to these dilemmas. The questions answered within the book are: 1) How do Office of Children, Youth and Families employees (intake department and treatment department) experience humor and gallows humor, and what does that reveal about how they are managing stress and emotions related to their employment? 2) What are the negative and positive effects of the use of gallows humor among individuals, groups, and the organization? 3) Are there any similarities and/or differences in how the intake department and treatment department employees utilize gallows humor? The answers to these questions provide an overall picture of how humor is managed by the individual child welfare caseworker, among groups, and at the organizational level. The authors then provide recommendations for organizational leaders to fully harness the power of humor and minimize the negative components.







Pimping the Welfare System


Book Description

Based on ethnographic research in Contra Costa County, California (CCC), Pimping the Welfare System highlights a welfare program implemented after welfare reform that differed in significant ways from the predominant work first approach implemented by most welfare programs. The book argues that by imparting dominant economic, social, and cultural capital, CCC’s welfare program empowered participants and improved their quality of life and life chances. Successfully transmitting these types of capital, however, was dependent upon the discourses, practices, and pedagogy deployed by welfare workers—as well as the policies, practices, and resources of the welfare program. In particular, CCC’s welfare workers encouraged the acquisition and use of dominant capital (that which is desired by the labor market) by acknowledging and respecting the various types of capital welfare participants already had, and by encouraging participants to make strategic choices about deploying different types of capital. This book calls into question monolithic understandings of economic, social, and cultural capital and encourages a new conceptualization of capital that resists framing poor women as fundamentally “lacking.” In addition, it points to ways welfare administrators and welfare workers can develop more empowering programs even within the confines of federal, state, and local regulations.




Homeless Not Hopeless


Book Description

The importance of moving toward a national policy to end homelessness is crucial. In this striking examination of the roles that homeless people and the U.S. government play in causing and curtailing the escalating phenomena of homelessness, Edna Molina-Jackson asserts that there is a great need to alter the socio-economic structures that generate extreme and entrenched forms of poverty that lead to homelessness. Homeless Not Hopeless explores the role social networks play in the daily survival of homeless Latino and African American men. Using a qualitative research design, author Molina-Jackson observes how these men initiate, participate in, and maintain social networks and how these networks function. The findings support a more empowering view of homeless men as active, rational, and competent actors engaged in negotiating their social world. Members rely on social networks composed of a hierarchy of casual and intimate affiliations. The networks of Americanized Latinos and African Americans facilitate their integration into a subculture of street life, while those of recent-immigrant Latinos revolve around their struggles to find work, avoid deportation, and enlist the support of paisanos.




Intimate Partner Violence


Book Description

Intimate Partner Violence: Clinical Interventions with Partners and Their Children brings into focus an ecological and clinical frame for addressing the resulting psychological effects of intimate partner violence (IPV). Aymer presents a perspective that is often omitted from social science textbooks which are geared to policy practice, tending to expose students to macro-systemic ideas (including criminal justice policies and procedures) relative to IPV. However, this book expands clinical practice pedagogy by reinforcing the need for students to go beyond macro issues in order to deliver competent clinically-based interventions that help partners and their children work through the consequential effects of partner violence. Designed for graduate students in social work, psychology, gender studies and allied mental health programs, it expands the discourse, arguing that IPV is a complex psycho-social-political-relational problem that must be understood from a multi-theoretical perspective. Through case studies, theory, research, and the author's clinical practice wisdom, this text will: increase understanding of how to work clinically with women affected by IPV, increase knowledge of how to work with abusive men, heighten knowledge of how IPV affects children and adolescents, expand knowledge of social and cultural notions, and explore men's role in terms of advocating against gender-based violence.




Restorative Justice for Domestic Violence Victims


Book Description

Restorative Justice for Domestic Violence Victims uses a rich and detailed set of interviews and complementary survey data to make a strong case for introducing restorative justice principles into the existing menu of services for victims of domestic violence. Guided primarily by concerns of victim safety, domestic violence theorists and practitioners have been wary of introducing restorative justice principled programs in the domestic violence arena. While remaining cognizant of safety concerns, Marilyn Fernandez weaves together the theories, concepts, and research in the restorative justice and domestic violence traditions and uses the voices of domestic violence victims to make a case for restorative justice programs. In the process, Fernandez helps readers, academicians, students, and practitioners, understand the complex nature of domestic violence and the lives of its victims.




Doing Engineering


Book Description

The first to systematically compare Caucasians, African Americans, and Asian Americans in engineering, this study of the career attainment and mobility of engineers in the United States tells how these three groups fare in the American engineering labor market and what they can look forward to in the future. The numbers of black and Asian engineers recently have grown at a much faster rate than the number of Caucasian engineers. With a projected steady increase in engineering jobs and demographic shifts, this trend should continue. Yet, recent writings on the engineering profession have said little about career mobility beyond graduation. This book identifies and explores key issues determining whether minorities in the US will attain occupational equality with their Caucasian counterparts. Highlighting implications for theory, policy making, and the future of the profession, Doing Engineering offers important insights into labor, race and ethnicity that will be of interest to anyone studying stratification in a wide range of professional occupations.




Inside Out and Outside in


Book Description

With its simple, respectful, user-friendly tone, the first edition of Inside Out and Outside In quickly became a beloved book among mental health practitioners in a variety of disciplines. The second edition continues in this tradition with chapters revised to reflect the most current theory and clinical practice. In addition, it offers exciting new chapters, on attachment, relational, and intersubjective theories, respectively, as well as on trauma.




Child Welfare


Book Description