School of Social Work and Education

The aim of this study was to find out more about the lives of young people in the category ‘not in education, employment or training’ (NEET). We worked intensively with 26 young people in four smaller groups, spending three days with each group. During our time with them we engaged in a variety of creative and artistic activities designed to help them to construct accounts of their lives for us with the purpose of gaining an understanding of what it was like to be NEET. Three significant issues that emerged from these life stories are discussed in this paper. These are the problematic nature of the discourse of NEET sub-groups; the challenges of school-exclusion policies and practices; and the myth of low aspirations.

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The thesis examines the experiences and perceptions of wheelchair users living in different types and tenures of housing in the City of Dundee. The interrelationships between space, society and the body are examined in the empirical context of housing, ableism and the disabled body. The voices of wheelchair users, gleaned from in-depth, semi-structured interviews, are used throughout the thesis to illustrate how the geographies of people with disabilities are delineated and constrained by socio-cultural representations of disability. Conceptually the study has been guided by the social model of disability, but insights from postmodernism. and feminist literature are drawn on to add a further dimension to the interpretation of the data and the study's methodology. The social construction of difference, social exclusion and definitions of the normal and aberrant body emerge as key concepts linking analysis of the data at the spatial scales of the neighbourhood, home and the body. Spatial metaphors of 'out of place', 'marginalised' or 'socio-spati ally excluded' capture the essence of the impressions people with disabilities hold of their interactions with their living spaces and service providers. The study suggests that greater reciprocal dialogue is required between service users and service providers to broaden the knowledge base from which disability related housing decisions are made. iii Declaration I, Susan Louise Levy, hereby certify that this thesis, which is approximately 91,000 words in length, has been written by me, that it is the record of work carried out by me and that it has not been submitted in any previous application for a higher degree.

This paper discusses an innovative approach connecting service user and carer involvement (SUCI) in social work education to social work practice. The research team, comprised of service users, carers, social work students and module leader, worked collaboratively democratising the research process. At the University of Dundee a core social work module facilitates for students to spend 15 hours with a service user and/or carer (host) gaining a unique insight into their everyday lives. During this time hosts and students discuss two policy practice questions, responses to these questions are generating annual qualitative data, with study findings being disseminated at local and national level. The experiential learning students acquire from spending time with their host becomes the site of knowledge creation through involvement that is applied to practice. This paper reports on the narratives emerging from the longitudinal data (2012-15, n = 90) on the changing landscape of social care in Scotland and the dissemination of project findings. We explore the intersection where the voices of service users and carers, student learning and social work practice coalesce. A model of outcomes focused SUCI is introduced as a template for meaningful, sustainable and outcomes focused SUCI in social work education.

This paper uses personalisation and the capabilities approach to explore inclusive music classes for children with disabilities in Scotland. It provides a unique insight into the impact of participation through the voices of the disabled young musicians, their parents and tutors. The study highlights the power of inclusive spaces to transform lives, to build confidence and intersectional identities. It engages in the spatial dynamic of opening up inclusive spaces, as well as exposing emerging tensions in the liminal space that is created through movement between safe and supported spaces and the antithesis, spaces that disempower and marginalise. The findings suggest good practice around personalisation, when conceived of from a social justice perspective, as a template for working with other marginalised groups and in other professional settings.

People with profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD) are some of the most marginalised in society and are perceived to lack agency. This paper contests such a narrative, presenting findings from an innovative project in Scotland, UK, exploring the impact of artists working collaboratively with people with PMLD and their formal carers. Art is conceived as a social practice, a process, an embodied aesthetic and sensory experience that takes place between individuals. Theoretically, the paper adopts an original approach, combining crip theory, the capability approach and social pedagogy to re-imagine and re-position people with PMLD. The year-long qualitative study used data from reflective diaries (n = 111) and semi-structured interviews (n = 9) with artists, carers and management of a day centre. An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of these shared experiences was used. The results reveal an unsettling of prevailing norms and creative ways of doing and experiencing social care that is relational.

The Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) has noted that a higher percentage of black and minority ethnic (BME) students fail or take longer to complete their social work degrees, compared with the white majority student population. In response to this and related evidence, a national study was carried out in 2013 to explore this phenomenon and ways to support BME students in social work education in Scotland. BME students from five Scottish universities were interviewed, along with lecturers from six Scottish Universities, and practice educators from around Scotland. The background to the study is discussed and a review of the literature on race, whiteness, diversity and a strengths-based perspective is provided. The methodology of the study is explained, followed by a presentation of some of the key findings covering the themes of cultural difference, discrimination and valuing student strengths. To prepare social work students to practice in a culturally diverse and culturally aware workforce the paper argues for framing of social work education within a strengths-based perspective, of valuing diversity and other knowledges and for this approach to be embedded within a critique of both race and whiteness.

Geographers have over the last two decades used spatial metaphors to illustrate the ways that social differences (based on gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age and class) are experienced and represented within and between spaces and places, and how they influence the spatial interactions of individuals. These social differences have been shown to impact on the way spaces are read and experienced as inclusionary or exclusionary.

Female students' retention rate in schools is a serious issue in Nepal, as in other countries. This paper reports on the findings of a qualitative study on the effect of educational factors on female students' retention rates in high schools in Nepal. Data gathering locations were chosen on the basis of female students' dropout rates published in the consolidated report of the Ministry of Education (2011). Face to face interviews were conducted with 96 participants. The findings showed that weakness in policy implementation resulted in low motivation in teachers and students, poor learning achievement and student dropout. The participants mentioned weaknesses such as inadequate scholarship quotas and amounts for female students, impractical scholarship criteria, inadequate teaching and untested methods of evaluation.

This article explores the power of rhetoric and representation, of marked bodies known to the hearing world as "the Deaf," and also an artifact branded as a cochlear implant (hereafter referred to as CI). The CI invokes a story of culture wars ostensibly about ontological disputation. The case study examines the conditions of the implant's production, the kinds of commitments invoked in product development and the processes of bandwagoning that led to the creation of a cochlear implant black box. Argument concludes that the normalization of the cochlear implant is due not just to the obtainment of inter-organizational networks of " relevant" social groups but was made possible through a deferment to negative ontologies of Deafness and the deployment of the inherent preferability of "hearing" as social capital. The study concludes that technologies of cochlear implantation, by being promoted as a technology of "treatability" in effect produce agreements and foreclose discussion on the contestability of the concepts of deafness, hearingness, aberrancy and normalcy.

Citation: (2005) Disability Studies Quarterly, Fall, 25(4). [Online version]

Abstract:
Medico-legal literature frequently refers to instances where people with disabilities in the process of undertaking injury related civil litigation acquire what has been rather crudely referred to as 'litigation neurosis'. Proponents of this pathology argue that the quest for compensation generates malingering. Litigants might remain ‘sick’ because of the ‘rewards’ they are given or are likely to obtain by remaining hyper-disabled by the compensation system. This article discusses the meanings given to such responses and suggests that an alternative reading of 'litigation neurosis’: as a highly rational act of resistance towards a system that views disablement in a reductionist way, a system that reinforces the notion of disability as personal tragedy. As part of negotiating welfare and legal systems that enumerate disability in terms of deficiency and pathology, tacit knowledges about responses to the government of disability, reveal that disabled people are highly skilled in ‘recripping’ or ‘decripping' themselves to satify eligibility criteria as well as the expected performances of ableism.  

Keywords:

Legal discourse, compensation neurosis, disabled identities, biomedicalism, injury management, disability resistance.