This project explores the post-separation needs of Chinese women in Hong Kong who have left their abusive partners and how they might be addressed The project aims to provide insights for improving ...the local domestic violence service, whose main focus is on crisis intervention. Cooperative Grounded Inquiry (CGI) was developed as a novel participatory action research methodology (PAR) for fostering collaboration between social work practitioner-researchers and women service users. Its purpose is to generate useful knowledge and provide support for abused women and their children. The project involved 7 Hong Kong Chinese women as participant-researchers. The inquiry group met at least once a week for 6 months to explore the post-separation needs of the women and their children, and to implement and evaluate the practices/services developed through this project together in a participatory manner. Women participants identified the problems of doing either ‘victim’ or ‘survivor’ that respectively underpin the ‘safeguarding’ and the ‘empowerment’ models; and they developed practices for ‘doing being oneself’ beyond the victim-survivor dichotomy. This paper presents the changing self-narratives of women participants over the research project, from victimhood to survivorhood and from survivorhood to survivor-becoming. These narratives demonstrate the importance of safeguarding women’s space for undertaking symbolic action and of empowering them through using volcabulary that can help them describe themselves/their experiences differently from mainstream discourses. Women’s narratives highlight the existing ‘planetary difference’ between the safeguarding model, which treats women as helpless and vulnerable and in need of external support, and the empowerment model which treats them as powerful, resilient and with resources and solutions to problems. The study transcends the victim-survivor dichotomy and service models by proposing an alternative relational model that emphasises power sharing in making sense of abusive experiences and finding one’s own voice in a supportive community.
Abstract
After more than a year living with COVID-19 restrictions, the UK Governments have now published their ‘recovery strategies’ in which social care has been considered as key to plans for ...post-COVID-19 recovery in England and the devolved nations. Emerging literature has already explored the ethical and practical challenges facing social workers during COVID-19 and how social work practice has been re-created to embrace hybrid ways of working. To add to this discussion, a secondary qualitative data analysis was performed on a subset of data (280 responses submitted by 176 social workers) collected from the British Association of Social Workers’ (BASW) survey on social work during COVID-19, to explore how social workers’ sensual bodies had been responding to challenges arising from the pandemic. Drawing on sociology of senses and social work literature on tacit knowing and practice wisdom, we will present how social workers’ sensual bodies have been suspended, displaced and re-constituted during the first UK national lockdown, leading to sensual compensation and sensual overload that impacted on social workers’ practice. In striving towards a ‘better normal’, we offer key insights to implement hybrid social work practice and protect against the shortfalls that it might bring to the profession.
Abstract
The current child-protection and women-protection frameworks tend to polarise the well-being of women and children. Abused mothers are often considered ‘inadequate’ or ‘incompetent’ if their ...children fail to achieve socially desirable outcomes. Conversely, children are seen as a burden on abused women in cases where women are ambivalent with respect to their mothering experience. Yet abused women need extra care and support to be competent again in the post-separation context, while children can serve a protective role for their abused mothers. This study employs Cooperative Grounded Inquiry (CGI) for working with abused Chinese women in Hong Kong and their teenage children in order to nurture a community of practice for transforming mothering into a mutual care project. Through partnering with teenage participants for setting care goals and care plans, abused women became aware of how they had monopolised the care work at home while teenage participants recognised how they could contribute to designing and accomplishing care plans. The findings shed light on the cultural fit of ‘community of practice’ in Chinese familial societies, and demonstrate the potential of ‘doing family’ for expanding post-separation protection for abused women and their children. In this article, ‘community of practice’ is proposed as an approach for helping to narrow the gap between child-protection and women-protection systems.
Social movement researchers have investigated how personal relationships and emotional attachments are implicated in activism, but less attention has been given to the ways in which activism affects ...personal lives. This article addresses this issue, drawing on interviews and focus groups with Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement’s active participants, bystanders and opponents to explore its consequences for family life. While those who were not involved in the movement articulated an acceptance of hierarchical family structures and their imposed silences, movement activists saw their experience of the occupation as enabling them to find a voice within their families. The Umbrella Movement, we suggest, has opened up a space for the reflexive exploration of personal life and raised the possibility of modifying Hong Kong family practices.
There is a notable ethical, epistemological and practical need to recognize formerly abused women’s central role in developing domestic violence services and related knowledge. For achieving social ...work professional accountability, methodological innovations that facilitate participation of different stakeholders in domestic violence services are required. Instead of polarizing domestic violence service providers and users, this article aims at providing deeper thoughts on methodological innovation that can facilitate coparticipation and partnership in domestic violence social work practice research. I propose a rigorous merging of Cooperative Inquiry and Grounded Theory Methodology to produce a Cooperative Grounded Inquiry which can cast light onto the promotion of participation and knowledge making in domestic violence social work services. This methodology was applied in working with formerly abused women in Hong Kong and has generated useful working principles for further application of the methodology.
It was a great honour to be invited to review the June 2017 special issue of Qualitative Research examining democratic research practices. As social work scholars focusing on issues of gender, ...sexuality and intimacy, we have long been interested in how power and hierarchy in knowledge production serve to marginalise service users, practitioners and research participants. Here, we draw on our personal experience to consider what is at stake in attempting to democratise qualitative research methodologies in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The special issue usefully categorises participatory qualitative studies into five approaches: ‘transformative’, ‘inclusive’, ‘co-produced, ‘indigenous’ and ‘care’ful’ (feminist) research. This categorisation serves as a good starting point for examining the extent to which our own studies achieve the goal of democratic knowledge production. What do the five categories mean – and how are the approaches they entail practised – in the social and political contexts of Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China? In addressing that question, we reflect upon what we have learnt from both our own collaboration and that with the participants of our studies on the 2014 Umbrella Movement to explore the personal consequences of social movement participation for Hong Kong families (Ho et al., 2017b), Hong Kong men (Ho et al., 2018) and young female activists (Ho et al., 2017a) and to initiate a dialogue with the issue’s contributors. We discuss some of the opportunities and challenges of confronting the western/northern dominance of academia, from western theoretical hegemony and the valorisation of science to the constraints of knowledge production and dissemination within an authoritarian regime. We propose that democratic knowledge production does not simply require a shift in ethical (recognising how knowledge-making often disadvantages the less powerful), epistemological (recognising how knowledge is produced from the standpoint of those in power) and practical (seeing how knowledge can be used to improve policy) practices, but is also political: it constitutes a political statement, set of political practices and form of social activism, particularly in politically turbulent times when public opinion, civic education and participatory social science all find themselves in jeopardy.
End-of-life care studies on the nature of personhood are bourgeoning; however, the practices utilized for achieving personhood in end-of-life care, particularly in a cultural context in which ...interdependent being and collectivism prevail, remain underexplored. This study seeks to examine and conceptualize good practices for achieving the personhood of the dying elderly in residential care homes in a Chinese context. Twelve interviews were conducted with both medical and social care practitioners in four care homes to collect narratives of practitioners’ practices. Those narratives were utilized to develop an “end-of-life case graph.” Constant comparative analysis led to an understanding of the practice processes, giving rise to a process model of “solving the personhood jigsaw puzzle” that includes “understanding the person-in-relationship and person-in-time,” “identifying the personhood-inhibiting experiences,” and “enabling personalized care for enhanced psychosocial outcomes.” Findings show how the “relational personhood” of the elderly can be maintained when physical deterioration and even death are inevitable.
Abstract Developing culturally appropriate end-of-life care for Chinese elderly and families is not an endemic challenge for Hong Kong, but that of the Western countries with a noticeable trend of ...rising Chinese population. The particular development of Hong Kong healthcare system, which is currently the major provider of end-of-life care, makes Hong Kong a fruitful case for understanding the confluence of the West and the East cultures in end-of-life care practices. This study therefore aims at building our best practice to enhance the capacity of residential care homes in providing culturally appropriate end-of-life care. We conducted two phases of research, a questionnaire survey and a qualitative study, which respectively aims at (1) understanding the EoL care service demand and provision in RCHEs, including death facts and perceived barriers and challenges in providing quality end-of-life care in care homes, and (2) identifying the necessary organizational capacities for the ‘relational personhood’ to be sustained in the process of ageing and dying in residential care homes. Findings shed light on how to empower residential care homes with necessary environmental, structural and cultural-resource-related capacity for providing quality end-of-life care for Chinese elders and their families.
Hong Kong women activists’ understanding of love and justice has shaped, and been shaped, by their political engagement under changing circumstances through two phases of mass protest: in 2014 and ...2019. This article is focused on the sentiments of love and justice and how they evolved over time, from the peaceful protest of the Umbrella Movement in 2014 to the violent confrontations of 2019 in the context of the rise of ethno-nationalism. This shift reflects a changed understanding of justice – revenge against China – and a specific version of passionate love for Hong Kong and protective love for their comrades. Women activists’ experiences offer insights into how a social movement has engaged women’s emotional energies in particular gendered ways, while persistently marginalising gender issues. In the aftermath of the movement, when protest was effectively banned by both COVID-19 restrictions and the 2020 National Security Law, these women’s emotions have found a new object of their fierce love for Hong Kong: the boy band Mirror, which has come to symbolise Hongkonger pride, belonging and resistance.
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