SAANZ Conference 2024

Chair: Donna Baines

Liz Beddoe, Eileen Joy, Laura Chubb and George Guild
Delusions of neutrality: “Abortion should be illegal (but I am) non-judgemental despite disagreeing with the decision”

Social workers represent diverse identities, values, and beliefs, playing a critical role in helping service users to obtain information and resources needed to make important life decisions including those pertaining to abortion. Abortion is considered by many to be a controversial issue however social work scholarship in recent years has focused on positioning abortion rights as essential to reducing health inequalities.
In Aotearoa, New Zealand abortion has been decriminalised and our study sought to explore social workers’ knowledge and beliefs about the legislative change and how they manage their responses when supporting people who are considering terminating a pregnancy.

This presentation will draw on a qualitative survey that explored the thoughts, beliefs, and the meaning-making that social workers engage in when they consider abortion in their professional practice, following changes to the abortion law in Aotearoa New Zealand. The survey was completed by 122 participants with 14,000 words in open responses related to abortion. These data were explored within a reproductive justice theoretical framework using thematic analysis. While reported views varied from strongly anti-abortion to strongly pro-choice many social workers noted a clash between personal and professional values in relation to abortion. Generally, regardless of their stated personal positions participants called on professional ethical principles such as self-determination, neutrality and being non-judgemental to reconcile any tensions. Our findings suggest that social workers would benefit from more learning opportunities focused on the development of a more nuanced understanding of reproductive justice in order to be able to position abortion as health care.


Eileen Joy and Suzette Jackson
Patriarchal motherhood discourses in social worker talk about mothers who use substances

Patriarchal motherhood discourses affect all women (even those who choose not to mother) by comparing them to an often impossible and idealised version of mothering. Patriarchal motherhood discourses represent an essentialised version of mothering, one which is deeply gendered and perpetuates inequality..

The presentation draws from a doctoral study that included interviews with child protection social workers (n=24) in Aotearoa. Critical discourse analysis was used to see how social workers upheld and/or resisted notions of patriarchal motherhood when talking about their work with mothers who use substances – mothers who are considered by many to be among the most deviant. Findings suggest that social workers predominantly used patriarchal discourses to position their practice as child-centric while leaving the mother with little support. Some practitioners resisted these discourses by articulating narratives including a more structural and intersectional analysis. These findings suggest that social workers need to think differently about motherhood and mothering through adopting a matricentric, intersectional and decolonised approach to their work with all mothers. This work includes recognising broader family networks and intergenerational oppressions in the lives of mothers who use substances.


Natalie Femia
Social justice as sustainability: A post-structural critique of 'burnout' in social work.

In the current context of biomedical neoliberalism, to be a social worker in the mental health field is to be constrained by paradigms of individualism, hyper-managerialism, professionalism, pathologisation, and structural inequities. Inability to be complicit with these constraints can be pathologised as ‘burnout’. Drawing on preliminary findings from qualitative interviews and arts-based body-mapping, this research critically explores the concept of ‘burnout’ in this work, and suggests a complex relationship between perceptions and experiences of ‘burnout’ and the aforementioned constraints. These findings further suggest that this relationship is mediated by close or distant social work values and ethics, and whether people (‘clients’) are positioned through relationality or othering. This research demonstrates hopeful possibilities for strengthening values and ethics of social justice in particular as a method for resisting current constraints, sustaining social workers, and prioritising relationality and solidarity with people (‘clients’).

Chair: Shayne Walker

Donna Baines and Bindi Bennett
Rankings, Ruling and Reproducing Inequities: Critiquing the Knowledge Production of Social Work’s “Top 100 Scholars”

Reflecting on an article authored by Hodge and Turner (2022) that ranks the “top” 100 social work scholars, this paper presents a multi-layered critique of the tradition of using bibliometrics to generate “knowledge” and competitive global rankings of individual social work faculty members, departments and universities. We raise concerns regarding the transformation of neoliberal metrics into social work research questions and projects, and then solidified into competitive, martketised knowledge about social work and its scholars. We argue that through this process, inequity and neoliberalism are normalized and legitimized and we are further distanced from social justice, decolonisation, and equity. Drawing on the literature, we show that racism, colonialism, classism, sexism and geographic inequity are reproduced by the article and the pursuit of these kinds of competitive rankings. The paper concludes by suggesting alternative assessments grounded in community participation and social justice, and aimed at expanding equity and social justice.

Emily Keddell, Shayne Walker, Andrew Rudolph
Protecting whakapapa: collaboration, power and prevention in initial child protection decision-making.

Acknowledgement: We acknowledge Tai Timu, Tai Pari as joint partners in this project, particularly William Kaipo, Jonette Chapman, Jude Hughes, Dave Ashby and Karen Hale.

Within report-investigate child protection institutional structures, decisions are made by state child protection workers about reports that are made to them by other professionals and citizens. Initial decisions have significant consequences, as they can result in protection for children and increased coordination of support services, as well as intrusive, stressful and harmful interventions. They are also the entry point for the start of inequities within the system most notably for Māori. The harm of unwarranted removals, as part of colonial impositions and assimilationist processes are well documented. One consequence of the institutionalisation of statutory child protection systems in colonised countries is that power, decision-making, processes and what is considered relevant knowledge have traditionally been defined and controlled by the state. De-centralising decision-making, a key aim of both statutory and Māori agencies in the reforms of 2019 – 2023 in Aotearoa New Zealand, aims to help address inequities for Maori, reduce care entry, and improve prevention service access. This talk describes an evaluation research project of a de-centralised decision-making triage
process, which operates collaboratively between Oranga Tamariki (state child protection) and community-based social workers from a range of Māori organisations led by Tai Timu, Tai Pari. The aims of the research are to understand the barriers and enablers of this new form of decision -making according to key participants. Of particular interest is its e]ects on power dynamics, the co-construction of risk, and access to supports. This talk will describe the process of building a research partnership between university and community organisations, the methods used, and emerging findings.


Shayne Walker, Lashana Lewis, Natalie Paki Paki, Paula Toko King, Hunia Te Urukaitia Mackay
He aha te korero o to puku!

What wells up from your belly, how do you ‘go with your knowing’ in the child protection process with tamariki, rangatahi and whānau Māori. This presentation is the result of a three year research project with Te Hou Ora Whānau Support Services Otepoti (THO) that examined the key practice elements in indigenous led child protection processes with tamariki, rangatahi and whānau. The outcomes are five pou – the “foundational underpinnings of both good practice and good partnerships” and seven takepū - the “preferred ways, fashioned by Māori thinking and rationale, of engaging with others” (Pohatu, 2013, p. 13). Kaimahi, various community and NGO stakeholders, rangatahi and whanau provided thier stories, dreams and pūkōrero (well-informed, speaking with authority, articulate) regarding ‘what worked’ and ‘what doesen’t’ work for them. These ways of thinking, behaving and acting form the core of practice in THO a kaupapa Maori organisation that has been operating for over 40years. Their aim is to have transformative relationships that result in tangible and real rangatiratanga for those they work with. They can do what they like with 7AA in Wellington but the waka has already sailed Māori and their allies know and can evidence what works!

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.

Chair: Neil Ballantyne

Emily Keddell, Sarah Colhoun, Pauline Norris, Esther Willing, Donna Cormack  
Where do big data come from? The social production of child protection ‘reports of concern’.

The rise of big data creates opportunities for research in child protection, particularly through the use of linked datasets. These sets can be used to track patterns of system contact, and construct relational and predictive models. Ethical concerns with algorithmic prediction decision aids are well known, but there has been less consideration of the social processes that contribute to the production of key data points within linked datasets. This talk presents findings from a study of child protection reporting decisions that become ‘reports of concern’ data. Through interviews and focus groups with school, NGO and police staff, and whānau who had been reported, we found a wide range of sources of variability within the social processes leading to reports. Sources of variability include the effects of policy change over time, different policy interpretations, personal values, responses to the high threshold for acceptance, (some make more reports, some fewer), interpretations of what abuse consists of, access to alternatives to reporting, and differences relating to role type and experience. Families and whānau noted that false reports can be made that cannot be expunged, and significant diversity within the family situations leading to reports. Thresholds for reporting are highly influenced by the acceptance threshold, which itself reflects wider debates about the role of the child protection system,
prevention policy orientations, and inequities for Māori. Tracing the social pathways of data provenance highlight that reports data are not neutral, cannot be considered internally coherent data points, and do not reflect either abuse incidence, nor a uniform level of community concern. The implications for inequities and predictive models will be discussed.

Stephen Parker
Technological risks for the sociology to come

The use of technology in social work promotes conservatism because technological “solutions” are “trained” using data drawn from “what has gone before”, not “what is to come”. The state-of-the-art in social work is increasingly drawn from “evidence-based studies”, a defensive model relied on in medicine, partly because it is a defence to litigation. Whilst individual social workers can be dynamic and creative in attempts to deliver social justice, trained AI models are not able to identify structural biases, or to be reflexive. Their true value is thus more restrictive than bureaucratic social work models acknowledge. Regardless, technology is used in many modern social work models, from predictive technologies identifying “risky” families, to tracking devices via smart technology, and staff monitoring devices. Flagging risks based on these technologies still requires human input and human input, in a predictive sense, must work on theoretical knowledge rather than empirical evidence. Although theory presented as established knowledge has its own risks, the risks of drawing conclusions from risks flagged by technology has flagged bias, coercion, and disempowerment of vulnerable groups.

Chair: Liz Beddoe

Poulamee Guha
Can Intersectionality be Hybrid and multidirectional?’ Embedding Reflexive and critical narrative methodologies in feminist multicultural social work research in the context of post-colonial transnational migration.

Globalisation has resulted in large-scale high-skilled migration of Indian professionals over the last few decades. The gendered dimension of the phenomenon is less explored and the female spouses in this process of migration remain largely invisible. The ‘Trailing spouses’ occupy a contradictory, gendered positioning within the Indian diaspora, creating complex intersectionality. I have argued in my thesis that gender structures within the family, diaspora community and state policy create an invisible vulnerability for the female trailing spouses. As neoliberal discourse shapes our social work service systems, the need for critical social work practices seems urgent. Critical social work approaches in social work are diverse but share a common commitment to both personal and structural change.

A qualitative transnational study employing in-depth interviews and narrative methods for data collection has been conducted as part of my PhD Thesis in New Zealand, Australia, the USA and the UAE to explore this phenomenon. The study analysed narratives of trailing wives via a critical feminist epistemological framework. My findings indicated complex Intersectional subjectivities experienced by the women in their gender, class, ethnic and national identities. Using intersectional post-colonial and transnational theories within social work, I have presented my theories, to open debates about the conceptualization of gender. The use of a critical feminist perspective for this study has allowed me to focus on the subtle nuances and detailed descriptions that are necessary to understand gender ideologies and practices in the everyday interactions of families. the relevance of social constructionism as a perspective within the overarching paradigm of intersectional feminism holds meaning in my research. I focused on developing methodological processes that support giving significant attention to subjective, socially situated, and multi-faceted experiences. As a critical narrative inquirer whose research design is premised on the values of social constructionism and feminism, my personal, academic, and professional history are inseparable from my identity as a researcher, and, correspondingly, my identity as researcher informs my engagement with participants and my analysis of the data.
My thesis emphasizes that social work increasingly encompassing multicultural practice in the context of culture and mental health, should adopt a focus on gender that occurs within various settings. My research has guided my recommendations for future research and action on the issues addressed in my thesis, including gender-sensitive visa policies, further organizational support for spouses of skilled migrants, evolved and active role of diaspora communities and further research through specific and cross-comparative feminist studies to comprehensively understand the challenges and pathways to change. The transnational nature of the profession demands greater accountability regarding inclusion, sustainability, safety and discrimination.


Soma Chatterjee and Virginia Stammers
Pedagogy of crossings: Reflections on teaching for mobility justice in social work

A prevalent practice in social work is to teach about migration under the instrumental and managerial framework of social work for immigrants and refugees. In contrast to this project of training professionals to work with immigrants and refugees, this presentation advocates for reorienting social work pedagogy to ‘mobility justice’. A heuristic device, ‘mobility justice’ is our conceptual framework to place social work teaching at the crossroads where migrant and Indigenous lives and struggles meet, dialogue and diverge. This, we argue, will shift our disciplinary (mis)understanding of justice for immigrants from the tedious rhetoric of settlement and integration, and instead, allow ‘mobility’ to stand for ‘sovereignty’ and ‘freedom.’ Most crucially, such a framework will help develop and deepen social work understanding of migration in conjunction with, not in separation from, Indigenous, place-based justice. This presentation will build on a comprehensive review of social work literature, specifically its fault lines in regard to migration, and our own teaching/learning experience in schools of social work in Canada. We will draw from a series of experiential education activities conducted in the city of Toronto, a place of contact and crossings for migrant and Indigenous peoples, albeit globally known only for its mobile andmulticultural diaspora. We will end with an invitation to our educator colleagues across settler colonial sites to join in conversation about teaching for mobility justice.


Rebeccah Nelems
Challenging Individualist Approaches to Youth Gang Prevention: The Case of Victoria, BC, Canada

This paper explores a Canadian case study in which it is argued that the individualist structure of institutional approaches to youth resilience and youth programming are directly contributing to the failure to address surging rates of youth gang exploitation in BC’s capital. Although local actors have collaborated across agencies, jurisdictions and geographies for ten+ years to deliver cost-efficient, effective (88% success rate), wraparound youth gang prevention programming, funding is being reduced as youth gang exploitation reaches an all-time high, compounded by the growing epidemics of opioids, homelessness, youth mental health, sexual and online youth exploitation. Whilst the literature argues that youth gang prevention programs across the country are challenged by the chronic lack of funding, this research explores the ways in which this scarcity is generated by the fundamental misalignment between individualist institutional approaches to youth resilience and programming, and the relational, youth-centred approaches that a social ecology approach entails. Drawing on relational and critical sociological theory, I present the initial stages of a community-based, inter-agency research project that uses relational, decolonizing methodologies to bring community actors and agencies together, to transform individualist institutional approaches and funding practices towards advancing youth-centred, social ecology approaches to the youth gang exploitation crisis.