SAANZ Conference 2024

Chair: Emily Keddell

Szu-Hsien Lu
Retaining custody as a practice of social justice: What community child protection social workers can do to support parents with intellectual disabilities in Taiwan

Each year, around 80 to 100 parents with intellectual disabilities (PID) are involved with child protection services in Taiwan, and roughly 20 to 25 percent of them face child removal. Several determinants shape these separations, for example, parents’ insufficient parenting ability and cognition, low levels of social support, poverty, and inadequate and inaccessible parenting support. To help PID retain custody or have their children returned from foster care, social workers could explore working more collaboratively with parents and addressing these challenges to improve parenting capacity. In Taiwan, community child protection social workers (CSW) are essential in assisting PID to fulfill this aim because of their long-term and frequent involvement, as the preexisting research suggests that these parents require sustainable and intensive support. This presentation is based on a preliminary analysis of my doctoral research data from twenty-three semi-structured interviews with Taiwanese child protection social workers, three of whom are CSW. I will focus on one CSW's work to demonstrate what supports a parent to retain custody. The presentation will illustrate how CSW can contribute to social justice for PID by reconciling parenting rights and the children's best interests in their practice, as these rights are usually considered contradictory.


Tian Tian
An Exploration of Social Work Intervention in cases of Child Sexual Abuse in a Multidisciplinary Context in New Zealand

The multidisciplinary approach is key to child protection systems globally, with social workers playing a central role in supporting victims and their families. Puawaitahi, established in 2002, was created to strengthen collaboration and streamline child protection investigations and treatment. However, research on multidisciplinary collaboration in New Zealand’s child protection system, particularly from a social work perspective, is limited. This study examines the practical and conceptual challenges of such collaboration at Puawaitahi and explores how collaboration shapes the role of social workers in child sexual abuse interventions. The research included in-depth interviews and focus groups with social workers, police, health, and other professionals at Puawaitahi, alongside observation of 31 multidisciplinary team meetings. Data was analysed using thematic analysis to explore key themes like collaboration processes, communication, working relationships, disciplinary differences, and power dynamics.

This study found that Puawaitahi demonstrated strong multidisciplinary collaboration, featuring an efficient management structure, transparent case-handling procedures, and good information sharing. However, the collaboration was influenced by hierarchical dynamics, with medical professionals leading the process and police and Oranga Tamariki (OT) holding statutory authority at the policy level. Differences in how professionals viewed collaboration, particularly regarding whether the child or the whānau should be prioritized, created tensions. Both statutory and health social workers faced challenges due to their perceived weak professional capital in these collaborations, often adopting passive roles, highlighting disputes over professional knowledge claims. These power imbalances ultimately hindered the effectiveness of the collaboration. This study highlights the structural tensions in New Zealand’s multidisciplinary child protection system, focusing on how power dynamics, professional knowledge, and procedural challenges affect social workers' roles in collaboration. The findings have significant implications for practice, education, policy, and research, with recommendations to align collaborative ideals with real-world practices.

Chair: Liz Beddoe

Ian Hyslop
Abolition, social work and social science

Social work is located in regimes of power and occupies a (more or less) contradictory position within neoliberal western capitalist states like Aotearoa. The concept that there is no exterior to this sociological totality condemns resistant discourse to the realms of complicity with an oppressive socio-economic regime. Abolition perspectives potentially offer way out of this bind by rejecting the status quo and its underpinning logics of carcerality and epistemic hierarchical classification – the ubiquitous ghost of Descartes. The analysis which abolitionist thinking makes available allows for a reimaging and rebuilding of resistant ideas and practices which challenge the place of social work and social science within dominant regimes of truth. It offers a way forward to a world worth winning.


Neil Ballantyne
Emancipatory social science and anti-oppressive social work: The legacy of Erik Olin Wright.

The global definition of social work, as articulated by the International Federation of Social Workers, states that social work is a practice-based profession and an academic discipline that, amongst other things, promotes the empowerment and liberation of people. The knowledge base for social work has a rich history of different theoretical perspectives, frameworks and practice models, some of which directly address aspects of human oppression, discrimination and marginalisation. These approaches can be grouped under the umbrella term of anti-oppressive practice, including anti-discriminatory practice, anti-racist practice, feminist, green and Marxist perspectives. This presentation draws on the work of the US analytical Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright to consider how his concept of emancipatory social science might be applied in the context of anti-oppressive social work. The presentation will focus primarily on a close reading of two of Wright’s publications – Envisioning Real Utopias and How to Be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century – exploring their implications for anti-oppressive practice. I will argue that Wright’s emancipatory social science framework complements existing anti-oppressive social work practice. Its open, flexible, and adaptable nature is inclusive of different political traditions and cultural contexts, including Indigenous perspectives. In these challenging times, emancipatory social science provides a rallying point, a tūrangawaewae (common ground) on which diverse social groups can connect and work collectively to craft real utopias.


Olivia LaMontagne
Macro Social Work Practice in Aotearoa

Despite the ethical and professional obligations for social workers to contribute to social change, macro social work practice in Aotearoa is marginalised by managerial approaches in social services under a neoliberal context. Social change and social justice are often discussed as ideals in social work, but the practical aspects of macro social work are less known. Drawing on survey results from one hundred and twenty-three social workers, this presentation identifies the types of macro social work tasks that social workers do, as well as the opportunities and barriers for macro social work in a variety of practice settings. By identifying how and why social workers practice macro social work, implications will be explored as to how to meet the challenges of macro social work in practice settings and beyond.

Chair: Liz Beddoe

Binhua Chen
Raising Critical Consciousness in Social Work through Theatre of the Oppressed

Since the rise of radical and critical social work, social workers have been expected to critically analyse and act in response to structural problems challenging service users. Over the years, the concept of critical consciousness, developed by the popular educator Freire, has gained the attention of social work scholars. However, current research has focussed more on its aspect of critical reflection, and there is still a gap in how to cultivate critical action. Influenced by Freire, Augusto Boal developed the Theatre of the Oppressed (TO), an approach which he called a ‘rehearsal of the revolution’. The TO may be instructive in how we can move beyond the cognitive level of critical consciousness in the process of consciousness-raising. Based on my experience facilitating TO workshops with practitioners and service users over the last five years in China, this paper will present TO’s potential for developing critical consciousness and action in social work.


Lauren Devine
“Processing People”

The state’s role and purpose in categorising individual vulnerabilities is opaque. Vulnerability has many causal factors, from intrinsic (e.g. ageing, disability, illness, race, culture, diversity) to extrinsic (e.g. abuse, neglect, discrimination, injury, poverty). Hyper-managerialist approaches to health and social care provision rely on categorisation to ration and deliver restricted services, failing to acknowledge categorisation historically served to ration and restrict rights. As a function of categorisation, the phenomenon of “labelling” is entrenched across social work, medicine, psychology, psychiatry, and criminology. The labels perform a heuristic function enabling agencies to assess and deliver appropriate services, but also enable state agencies to assess and restrict individual autonomy and freedoms. The research presented in this paper uses Rose’s historical lens technique “using history rather than grand theory as a way of taking apart the self-evidence of the present.” (1987). This illustrates the opaqueness in the space between formalised categorisation and coercion.


Natasha Mariette
Reforming Adult Protection in BC: The Imperative for Social Work Leadership

This paper examines the adult protection framework in British Columbia (BC), Canada and argues that social work engagement is imperative at all levels of policy and practice to achieve a human rights and socially just approach to adult protection. Adult abuse, neglect, and self-neglect is a social justice issue with devastating consequences including loss of dignity, physical and psychological harm, premature admission to facility care, financial loss, and even death. Responses to adult abuse, neglect, and self-neglect vary across jurisdictions internationally and nationally. Within Canada, each province and territory are responsible for determining its own model of adult safeguarding. In BC, the Adult Guardianship Act (AGA) designates seven agencies to respond to reports of adult abuse, neglect, and self-neglect and are unable to seek support and assistance on their own. Despite the existence of adult protection legislation, the current model in BC experiences significant challenges in protecting vulnerable adults. These challenges stem from a disconnect between macro, mezzo, and micro levels of adult protection work. Effective adult safeguarding requires collaboration and coordination across all levels. Social workers' expertise in direct service provision, understanding the complex bio-psycho-social-spiritual factors that create and perpetuate vulnerability to abuse, neglect, and self-neglect, and commitment to creating systemic change makes social work leadership crucial in transforming adult protection work in BC. Active social work engagement and leadership across macro, mezzo, and micro levels of adult protection is needed to ensure a socially just approach to adult protection in BC.

Chair: Ian Hyslop

Bindi Bennett and Donna Baines
Emancipatory Decoloniality as Leadership in Social Service Organisations: Insights from Indigenous and Anti-Oppressive Yarnings and Approaches

Around the globe, there is a growing demand for leadership in resolving longstanding social injustices experienced by Indigenous peoples. As part of a larger, international study, this article draws on early findings from yarnings/qualitative interviews to contribute to theorising Indigenous leadership in social service organisations. Within our research design, the team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers consciously centre Indigenous ways of being, knowing and doing in order to build emancipatory, decolonising theory and practice. The analysis in this article identifies Indigenous social justice leadership in a number of overlapping forms including: Indigenous-centered/cultural centered ways of being, knowing and doing; intersectional identities; partnerships; and envisioning for all. The article concludes with further early theorising and calls for future research to delve more deeply into Indigenous leadership as it develops in resistance to new conditions, including the far-right push-back against human rights and equity, and the constraints of neoliberalism.

Katheryn Margaret Pascoe
Examining the potential for employing a Delphi Panel for social work research in competitive and constrained contexts

Supervised student placements are central to social work education and there is substantial literature outlining the important role of practice educators in work integrated learning, including the need for training. This presentation reports on the use of a Delphi Panel to answer “What are the potential opportunities and limitations for delivering a national training program for social workers supervising student placements (Practice educators) in Aotearoa New Zealand?”

A Delphi panel provides a systematic process for engaging a varied group of experts and professionals in a structured, iterative research design. Best suited for exploratory research, Delphi panels are used to commonly used in policy and educational research to gain insight through a series of sequential questionnaires accompanied by response summaries. The presentation will provide a critical discussion of the methodological decisions and how Delphi panels may be harnessed in social work, policy and welfare research. A Delphi panel provides the opportunity for dialogue amongst a range of stakeholders where panellists can share without apprehension of revealing their identity to other participants. This method can help facilitate fair and equitable communication by reducing the risk of an individual dominating discussion or voices going unheard as can happen in focus groups. This is particularly relevant for contentious topics or competitive contexts. Limitations include inhibited ability to follow-up on nuances and restricting discussion to a linear process which can exclude full participation from individuals and cultures which value transparent, dynamic and cyclical dialogue. Additionally, conceptualising consensus is questioned in knowledge production and what is considered expertise for participation.


Neil Ballantyne
A practice-oriented approach to doing lively document analysis: Analysing documents on the datafied border in Fortress Europe.

Document analysis is a taken-for-granted aspect of many research projects where documents are considered textual repositories of content and investigated for their insights into human discourse, organisational behaviours or policy priorities. During analysis key, recurring concepts and categories are abstracted from a corpus of documents and subjected to quantitative content analysis – sometimes using text mining – or, more commonly in social work research, qualitative thematic or discourse analysis. Recently, Kristin Asdal, Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Oslo, advocated for a practice-oriented approach to document analysis. This strategy resonates well with actor-network theory and adopts a material-semiotic perspective on document analysis. In this context, documents are considered textual or semiotic in the sense that they convey meaning, but also as material artifacts in two senses. They are material objects in and of themselves. They are doubly material to the extent that social and natural phenomena are brought into documents to work on them: turning objects into issues or acting to quieten controversies. The interplay between the material and semiotic reveals documents to be lively players in forming or closing issues. In this presentation, I will illustrate the value of a practice-oriented approach to document analysis by discussing its application to a case study of the work of the Data Justice Lab at the University of Cardiff. I focus on some research outputs by the Lab highlighting the impact of data-driven systems and artificial intelligence on refugees and asylum seekers at the European border.


Xiaohang Yang
A Comparative Research of Value Conflicts in Social Work Education for Chinese Mainland Students in China and New Zealand

Social work is a crucial global profession, but its education and practice are heavily shaped by national contexts. Social work programmes have to balance integrating international standards with adapting to local cultural contexts. This can lead to value conflicts for students who are adjusting to different educational systems.
My PhD research aims to investigate the value conflicts experienced by Chinese Mainland students in social work education in China and New Zealand. A review of literature reveals that in Aotearoa New Zealand, Te Tiriti o Waitangi and a commitment to human rights and social justice form the basis of bicultural social work education. However, Chinese Mainland students often find it challenging to understand these Māori concepts and Western social work values. Social work education in Mainland China is based on Western social work models that emphasise individualism and social justice, which can conflict with traditional Confucian values of familism and collectivism.
This presentation outlines the value conflicts experienced by Chinese Mainland students in social work education and highlights the challenges of globalisation and indigenisation within social work education. It can encourage dialogue between social work education systems in China and New Zealand.