"It is a concise book that holds riches: life stories about overcoming insecurities and fears, making sense of the world, making choices, taking chances and giving voice to those who struggle after learning themselves to find their own. ... The authors address students and to those interested in pursuing social work. Educators and practitioners are also expected to find value in this book." (Anca Mihai, European Journal of Social Work, Vol. 25 (1), 2022)

Foreword: Emeritus professor Viviene E. Cree, MA BA PhD FAcSS Emerita Professor of Social Work Studies

Introduction (Preface or new Ch. 1? TBD): Linda Lane & Michael Wallengren-Lynch

Chapter One: The importance of narratives by Linda Lane & Michael Wallengren-Lynch

In the introductory chapter, the authors draw out broader background issues that the book will cover. Starting with a brief discussion of the development of social work education and practice in Sweden, the chapter links the emergence of the profession to international social movements that sought to understand, combat, and eradicate social problems. The aim of the chapter is to provide a context upon which the narratives can be understood; i.e., to link them to theories, methods, and practices. In the chapter, the authors argue that narratives as a method of enquiry have distinctive features that make it useful for generating new insights in social work practice. The chapter concludes with brief introductions to the other book chapters and identifies which social work theories and practices they relate to.

Chapter Two: We Live In A Political World: Between Needs and Money by Kristina Alstam

This chapter outlines a classical conflict within the domain of social work; that between clients exposing a need and budget cuts regulating or de-emphasizing that very same need. Beginning with a personal memory of having turned down a vulnerable elderly client’s application for a place in a residential home, the chapter continues to expose this conflict through examples taken from the domain of social work for the elderly and that of schooling. The author argues that the way we institutionally deal with the needs of the elderly and that of children in certain aspects seem to conflate; especially notable in the way that needs are made to be reduced in the face of financial austerity. Closing with a discussion about how these matters may position the research field of social work, the chapter asserts that practitioners and academics need to join forces to combat this false dichotomy. The chapter furthermore argues that a large part of the responsibility for that task lies with the academy, which is outlined as an important agent in the undertaking to educate future social workers, to arm them with the necessary skills to accomplish the disclosure of the ideology that urges us to make do with what we have.

Kristina Alstam has a PhD in Social Work and is currently engaged as a researcher and lecturer at the Department of Social Work at the University of Gothenburg. Her field of interest revolves around issues of social class and the redistribution of resources, discourses about families and parenting as ways of mediating a commonsense understanding of social class, and the manner in which ideologically connoted discourses about welfare regimes and austerity cut-backs are circulated, defended, and contested within the domain of social work. She has also directed attention towards questions close to social work practice, such as prevention/promotion programs or social work in the interface between supervision and community work in disadvantaged residential areas.

Chapter Three: A day in the life of a school counsellor by Michael Wallengren-Lynch

This chapter starts with the author’s reflections on his school time and fast forwards to the current time of recently moving to a new country and setting up a new life. The chapter explores his role as a school counsellor by presenting ‘artefacts’ from that time. The role of reflection is important for the author, and the chapter offers the reader an example of how this author connected his own narrative with the role of school counsellor and the profession of social work.

Michael Wallengren Lynch has a doctorate in social work from the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom. He has practiced social work from 2004 to 2015 and since then has worked as a lecturer at the department of social work, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Chapter 4: The Problematic Labor Market Situation of Immigrants to Sweden - Consequences and Causes by Björn Gustafsson

This chapter describes the immigrant population and discusses how immigrants in the Swedish labor market are faring. It reports that as a category immigrants nowadays are not employed to the same extent as native-born persons. The weak employment situation is not limited to the first generation of such immigrants but also applies to their children even if native born. However, the employment problems are concentrated among persons from LMICs, who by physical appearance and name are distinguishable from the majority. The author discusses several consequences of this situation. These include a larger use of social assistance and disability pensions than among natives, as well as increased pressure on the public sector budgets. The weak employment situation of immigrants also has led to many of them living in less-advantaged neighborhoods, aggravating problems of residential segregation which has far-reaching social consequences.

Furthermore, the author also discusses factors explaining the weak employment situation of immigrants to Sweden. Drawing on empirical research, the author suggests that some explanations for the low employment rate of immigrants in Sweden are linked to characteristics of the immigrants: periods of residency, education, language skills, and health. There are also possible explanations that relate to access to networks used in the job search. Supplementing this, there are explanations that focus on the demand for foreign-born labor. Empirical research indicates that employers use the name of the job applicant when screening applications and that it pays off for immigrants to change their name to a native-sounding one. Still another type of explanation deals with the fact that minimum wages are relatively high in Sweden and therefore certain immigrants are not attractive to employ. The weak situation on the labor market for many immigrants can also be the outcome of bad policy or policy implementation. Finally, there is the issue of admission policy to integrate immigrants into the Swedish labour market and has been one of the largest political issues in Sweden for some time.

Björn A Gustafsson has a PhD in Economics and is now professor emeritus at the Department of Social Work, University of Gothenburg. He is also a research fellow at the Institute of Labor (IZA), Bonn, Germany. His research covers the distribution of income, poverty, and the situation of international migrants in Sweden. Since the 1990s, he also has taken part in the Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP) and studied earnings, income, poverty, and ethnic minorities in the People's Republic of China.

Chapter 5: Tackling the paradoxical nature of social work by Tobias Davidsson

This chapter highlights some paradoxes within social work and deals with the question of how social work research and teaching can address these. The point of a departure is a personal account of the author’s gnawing feeling of unrest, stemming from certain clashes between his professional social work experiences and his ideas of how the social world functioned and was ordered. The chapter examines how these conflicting feelings became manageable and even a starting point for serious reflection, once critical social theory was introduced to the author. Applying critical theories of power, discipline, and political economy was instrumental in transforming the sense of a dissonance within the author to redirect the analytical gaze towards the historical and political nature of social work. This, in turn, led to a research focus on the paradoxes of social work. In the chapter, two distinct ways of researching this problem is accounted for: 1) the interconnectedness between social work and capitalism, exemplified by a study of how contemporary workfare policies in Swedish early-21^st century draws on and refines arguments and assumptions that guided the problematizations of Swedish poor relief in the period 1847–1875; 2) the concept of social exclusion, exemplified by a number of research studies where the political conceptualisation of exclusion is critically scrutinized, and another study that proposes an alternative analytical framework, where social exclusion is conceptualised as dynamic actor-oriented processes based on given times and spaces, initiated and carried out by specific actors acting out of certain motives. The chapter ends with a reflection of how the paradoxes of social work can be communicated to social work students, in order to help future social workers to incorporate the paradoxes to work with them.

Tobias Davidsson, PhD in Social Work, is currently employed as a university lecturer at the Department of Social Work, University of Gothenburg. Originally, a social worker working with family treatment, Davidsson defended his thesis ‘The rationality of poor relief. A genealogy of the work strategy under capitalism’ in 2015. His main research areas are social exclusion and control, the political management of poverty, and labour market policies.

Chapter Six: “Using Anti-Oppressive Practice (AOP) to Promote Social Inclusion in Social Work Education” by Linda Lane

This chapter contributes to ongoing discussions of social work education by examining the potential for anti-oppressive practice (AOP) to enhance teaching of social work education and practice. The challenge is to integrate AOP as a pedagogical practice in teaching. In this chapter, the author discusses her journey to teaching and reflects upon how teaching has troubled but also enriched her life. Beginning in her youth, the author attempts to tease out those moments of insight as a student, researcher, and in her teaching career that have led her to adopt an anti-oppressive practice in her pedagogical approach to teaching. The author discusses what an anti-oppressive teaching approach is, and its potential to enhance can contribute to social work education and her experiences of using AOP to reduce stigma and increase inclusion in the classroom. The author thinks that the use of AOP is of particular importance in the field of social work where it is our duty as lecturers to prepare the next generation of social workers to work with marginalized people in modern societies increasingly characterized by uncertainty and change.

Linda Lane is Senior Lecturer with a doctorate in Economic History from the University of Gothenburg. Originally, from the USA, her research focuses on international studies of work and family life, empowerment, disability in higher education, and sexual harassment. She has held teaching/research fellowships at TISS in Mumbai and IGNOU in Delhi.

Chapter Seven: World-making: Stories and the power of radical imagination by Zulmir Bečević

Stories are everywhere, and we are all storytellers. Storytelling has a fundamental function when it comes to how we understand, interpret, and mediate our experiences of the world. It is hard to think about the life as lived without at the same time thinking about the narrative about it; life as lived and life as told connect one another. Continuously putting experiences into words, telling and re-telling each other who we are, where we come from, how we look at the world and why, what we think, feel and long for, is a part of a universal and timeless human activity and a distinct feature of human nature. That’s how we create moral judgments and ethical positions, norms, belongings, and identities – by narrating we ascribe meaning to our very existence. Storytelling is thus an activity with profound existential meaning. Stories give structure to our experiences. Fragments are put together, chaos turned into order, and the elusiveness of life rendered somewhat more comprehensible.

Departing from a broad, conceptual discussion on the meaning of narrative for human life and the applicability of narrative research within social sciences, this paper is an exploration of the author's pathway into academia and social work. The author's journey is closely intertwined with his discovery of language as a powerful tool for crafting social realities and cannot be separated from it. The author's interest in life stories, as well as solidarity with people in underprivileged and disadvantaged life circumstances, goes back to early childhood. Growing up in Bosnia and Herzegovina, experiencing war and coming to Sweden as an 11-year-old refugee, becoming a writer of fiction in his early twenties, studying political science and childhood studies at the university, doing a PhD on youth in societal care and their life stories, and currently conducting research on youth participation in urban areas of Europe – these are all personal and professional experiences that fit the topical framework that is examined in this chapter.

Zulmir Bečević is a Lecturer in Social Work at the Department of Social Work, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His research is about children and young people’s living conditions with specific focus on welfare issues, vulnerability, power, participation, and social exclusion/inclusion. He has conducted research on young people in institutional care and youth participation in European cities.

Chapter 8: Intercultural competence in international social work: my experiences by Somita Sabeti

In this chapter, the author shares her experiences of working with migrants, asylum-seekers, and host populations on both micro-, meso-, and macro levels. The chapter attempts to explain more exactly the perspectives that have inspired the author in her work as a social worker and the challenges of maintaining that identity the work became more global and macro-oriented. The author takes the reader on a rather unconventional social work journey that opens up new perspectives on the profession: from her childhood and adolescent years as a third-culture kid; leading to her interest in working with migration and intercultural relations; her undergraduate studies in Social Work at the University of Gothenburg; her early experiences of working with migrants, asylum seekers, and locals by using arts and storytelling as tools; working with intercultural practices at the offices of the European Commission; and lastly her interdisciplinary master’s studies in Euro-Mediterranean relations in five different countries within the space of two years. Throughout this chapter, some valuable insights, reflections, and observations are presented that have shaped the author in the richest ways. At its core, the focus lies on the profession and our practice and its power to effect change, whether it is at an individual level, community level, or societal level, or all three. At the same time, the shared experiences in this chapter raise questions of how macro-focused social work could be de facto in order to still be considered as social work. The chapter is divided into three main parts: inter-culturalism on a national level, inter-culturalism on a European level, and inter-culturalism on a Euro-Mediterranean level. It is the author's hope that in writing this chapter, her reflections help current and future social work students to gain some insights into the importance of cultural self-awareness for both personal and professional growth as well as to guide them in the fields of global social work and macro practice.

Somita Sabeti is a social work graduate from the University of Gothenburg and has over six years of experience in the field of migration and integration, including work within the non-profit sector, public services, research institutes, and European Union institutions. She is currently enrolled in the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master's program Crossing the Mediterranean – towards investment and integration (MIM) focused on the European cooperation with North Africa and the MENA region within the migration and diversity field, jointly offered by four universities in Italy, Spain, Tunisia, and France. As of February 2019, she is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Migration Research Center (MiReKoc) at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey. Her research interests include migration studies, integration, inclusion and diversity practices, as well as liminality, and belonging of undocumented minors and youth.

Chapter 9: Turning points by Ing-Marie Johansson

This chapter aims to discuss how identity and professionalism are constantly constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed in relation to time and place. The point of departure is the author's memories of specific and turbulent periods in her life, where she was forced to reconsider who she was and what she wanted. The author's intention is also to deconstruct these memories in order to understand what was really happening and how they affected the author's professional life as a social worker. Looking back, the author can see that there are several turning points with many possible outcomes to the incidents described in this chapter. In the author's understanding, class, gender, and ethnicity in relation to time and place have always played a major role, regardless.

Ing-Marie Johansson is senior lecturer and PhD of Social Work, Department of Social Work, University of Gothenburg and a qualified social worker. She has a particular interest in international social work in academia as well as in social work practice with a focus on child protection and immigration.

Chapter 10: “When tragedy strikes -- social work response to The Gothenburg Fire” by Rehema Prick

In this chapter, the author discusses her journey to social work beginning with her arrival in Sweden as a newlywed from Tanzania. When the author needed to make a new career choice, her experiences of learning a new language and adapting to a new culture were all a part of life experiences that prompted her to choose social work. The author's aim is to explore how her experiences as an immigrant became interwoven with her work as a social work counsellor with refugees and young people from a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds. In everyday life, people do not need a deep knowledge of a language to express their views, but when tragedy strikes people need to express their deepest feelings and anxieties. In this chapter, the author's journey in social work and her various experiences as a social worker and counsellor prepared her for the challenges of working with traumatized families and children following the devastation of the Gothenburg fire, where 65 young people lost their lives. The author discusses her role as an intermediary between social work agencies and families and victims of the Gothenburg fire. Her goal is to discuss the role of social work theory and practice and how this knowledge empowered her as a social worker to support families and victims of the Gothenburg fire. The author feels that her inside knowledge and experiences can serve as a source of strength and support to students with non-native ethnic backgrounds entering the field of social work.

Rehema Prick is a social work graduate from the University of Gothenburg. After graduation, she spent most of her career as a guidance counsellor working with refugees and young people with non-Swedish backgrounds. Rehema also holds a MSc in social work and is a certified family therapist.

Afterword/Epilogue: “Social work moving forward” by Linda Lane & Michael Wallengren-Lynch

The purpose of the Afterword/Epilogue is to briefly summarize the preceding chapters and identify the various threads that have emerged in the texts. The authors then discuss what these narratives tell us about the state of social work and social work practice at present and the challenges for the profession in the future.

References

Index

Linda Lane, PhD, is a senior lecturer and researcher at the Department of Social Work at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, where she completed her doctorate in Economic History in 2004. Her research focuses on international studies of work and family life, gender empowerment, disability in higher education and sexual harassment in the work place. Since 2011, she has studied gender empowerment and poverty in India. Her latest publication with colleague Birgitta Jordansson is Conceptualizing work in the Swedish gender equality debate (2019). Dr. Lane has more than 15 years of teaching experience in Social Work in Sweden and India.

Michael Wallengren-Lynch, DSW, is a senior lecturer and researcher at the University of Malmö in Sweden. He practised social work from 2004 to 2015 and completed his doctorate in Social Work at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom in 2015. His current research interests focus on social work interventions in school settings, internationalization within social work, and social work education. His latest publication with colleagues Anna R. Bengtsson and Katarina Hollertz is Applying a 'signature pedagogy' in the teaching of critical social work theory and practice (2018), which won the award for 'Best Pedagogical Article' in Social Work Education: The International Journal. Dr Wallengren-Lynch has over 12 years of experience in Social Work practice from Ireland, New Zealand, Pakistan, and Sweden.

This book brings a novel approach to issues of connecting social work practice to theory and the personal life narrative. The authors each find their own unique way of integrating the self, theory, and practice, in different social work practice and education settings. Contributors use the methodology of narrative to tell their story about their social work journey, be that in research, teaching, or practice.

The backdrop for this book is Sweden. The country’s rich heritage of welfare provision but also recent cultural diversity offers a unique Nordic context to the subject matter. The contributors engage with these new conditions for Swedish social work through an intersectional lens. Topics explored include:

Digging in the present: A day in the life of a school counsellor
We live in a political world: Between needs and money
The problematic labour market situation of immigrants to Sweden: Consequences and causes
Tackling the contradictory nature of social work
Using anti-oppressive practice to promote social inclusion in social work education

The result is a book that is personal and reflexive, and positions the contributors' narratives as a window to understand and address social problems.

Narratives of Social Work Practice and Education in Sweden should engage those interested in the Swedish welfare state, and who want to learn about how social work is taught and practised in this country. Intended to be a general introduction, the book provides guidance to those considering working in the field and for those newly qualified. It also provides examples for students of social work to connect personal narratives to social work settings.

Uses personal narratives as a way to understand social work practice
Shares views of Swedish society and the welfare state via the stories of those involved in social work
Features narratives from people who have moved to Sweden and gives the reader insight to integration to a new country

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