SAANZ Conference 2024

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.