Rebecca Soraya Field

Higher education is often framed as a pathway to opportunity and professional advancement, with employability and so-called ‘workplace readiness’ positioned as key outcomes of course completion. In...

In social work practice with forced migrants, such as with other people experiencing extreme marginalization, practitioners are constantly confronted with the question of how to act in light of restrictive and unethical policies. While professional resistance can offer an avenue for practice, it has not been sufficiently integrated and explored within the field of social work and forced migration. Moreover, the existing literature tends to favour macro/political resistance over micro/everyday resistance. This paper aims to fill this gap by providing practice examples of everyday resistance in social work with refugees. Building on the secondary analysis of data collected in two qualitative studies, which included in-depth interviews with social workers in Australia, Israel, and Germany, three main resistance strategies are presented: non-reporting, rule-bending/rule-breaking, and relationship-based resistance. Altogether, these examples of everyday acts to counter harmful policies, which take place outside the public sphere, contribute to the debate on the vital role of the small-scale and mundane aspects of resistance. We conclude by discussing the ethical and practical aspects of everyday resistance and its contribution to social work practice and education.

This is a reflexive account of the messiness experienced by a Persian-Australian doctoral researcher interviewing social work and human service practitioners and people seeking asylum in Germany. This data collection was part of a cross-national comparative study of the impacts of policy on the experiences and perceptions of people seeking asylum and social work and human service practitioners in Bavaria and Western Australia. Through interview stories and the work of others, this article offers a first person account of the complexities, ambiguities and dilemmas that can occur before, during and after data collection, how these were navigated through the use of Finlay's (2012) five lenses for the reflexive interviewer, and some of the lessons learnt.

This article explores the findings of a qualitative study comparing social work and human service practice with people who have sought asylum in Germany and Australia. Globally social workers are concerned with the record high of people forcibly displaced worldwide and the Global North host-nations' increasingly hostile, discriminatory and restrictive policies towards people seeking asylum. This policy context is antithetical to the professional values of social workers and human services practitioners. The findings of this study reveal how the policy directly impacts social work and human service practice, creates unique ethical challenges and dilemmas and, subsequently, diverse practice responses. The paper also suggests that the country of practice influences how practitioners perceive and respond to ethical challenges and dilemmas. Through doing so, the findings challenge traditional understandings of critical practice theories that suggest that practice focused solely on the individual level is inadequate for work with people seeking asylum. Due to the diversity of contexts and their influences, we encourage social work and human services to view practice on a personal-political continuum when working with people seeking asylum.