Uisce Jordan

Devolution has offered Scotland the chance to reshape social security around the voices of those who use it. Drawing on findings from Changing Realities, this article examines how these devolved policies have affected low-income parents and carers, asking whether ambitious intentions have delivered real gains for families. This article shares diary entries from a long-running online participatory research project of parents living on low incomes in Scotland, collected between summer 2024 and summer 2025. The participant group includes lone parents, individuals unable to work due to disability or health conditions, and people seeking asylum, all of whom are directly affected by devolved and non-devolved social policies. The diaries offer vital insight into the everyday realities of families’ lives, allowing us to compare policy intentions with lived experience and to assess whether recent reforms have produced meaningful change. Drawing on these accounts, we explore the ‘dual reality’ of Scotland’s devolved welfare system: on one hand, recognition of valuable support through devolved initiatives; on the other, persistent material hardship and emotional strain that expose the limits of welfare reform in addressing structural inequality. We identify areas where Scottish policies are making a positive difference, as well as those where ambitions remain unmet. Finally, we present co-produced recommendations for change – developed with parents and carers, researchers, and policy partners at the Child Poverty Action Group – offering early insights into devolution’s potential to shape fairer social security systems.

This article presents a psychosocial study of men unable to work due to mental illness and their encounters with the UK’s social security system, using the Free Association Narrative Interview (FANI) method. Drawing on interviews with 17 men in North-West England, it highlights the central yet often overlooked role of women, particularly mothers and partners, in male participants’ narratives. It explores how these relationships serve as a form of relational legitimacy, offering emotional and practical support in the face of an increasingly punitive and neoliberal social security system. The analysis firstly locates the broader socio-political context before situating the relational dynamics, arguing in the context of declining community and mental health services, and increasingly punitive welfare reforms, those needing to claim benefits, specifically those with mental health difficulties, are becoming ever more reliant on the support of female family members, as a substitute for a welfare state which has been defunded and delegitimised. The article concludes by reflecting on how the FANI method served to both elicit the data and facilitated keeping in sight the psychic and social forces which interpenetrate, shaping the lives of the participants. This article foregrounds the importance of attending to unconscious processes and relational entanglements when analysing the impact of structural changes on individual lives. A psychosocial approach, it argues, reveals how structural reforms and personal lives are deeply intertwined in shaping experiences of mental illness and welfare ‘dependence’.

Drawing upon data from Changing Realities, an online participatory research project collected between September-October 2022 and March-April 2023, this article generates new knowledge on the lived experiences of low-income families in the UK during this turbulent political period and particularly through the (ongoing) cost-of-living crisis. Utilising the work of Wright and McIntosh, we articulate the ‘shared typical’ discernible of lived experiences of life on a low income during this tumultuous period. Findings provide new insights into how participants describe themselves as part of a collective, comprising parents and carers who shared similar experiences of life on a low income. However, in contrast they differentiated between themselves and those in positions of power and disconnected from their reality. In our discussion, we examine the implications of this and consider the broader understandings and realisations of poverty.

Sex work, encompassing the exchange of sexual services for material gain, presents a complex and sensitive research terrain, associated with stigma and entrenched debates within feminism. This evaluation's central objective was to engage in a community-based dialogue, eliciting perspectives from a diverse range of participants, including audience members, women with lived experience of sex work, users of addiction services, and expert commentators, in response to the themes explored in the play ‘Madame Geneva: A Tale of Gin and Prostitution’. This article delves into the study's findings, with a particular focus on the portrayal of sex work in contemporary Northern Irish society. The study demonstrates how the arts, particularly dramatic representations, serve as a potential catalyst for instigating essential and pragmatic policy discussions on issues that impact women and society at large. The findings shed light on the ongoing challenges faced by women in Northern Ireland within the context of sex work, revealing persistently high levels of oppression and discrimination. These issues often remain entangled within a male-dominated political discourse and structural frameworks, underscoring the urgent need for critical examination and reform.

Using a digitalized visual method—photo-elicitation—alongside an online qualitative survey, this study examines how social work students interpret the concept of resilience. The research focus was borne from the increased reference to resilience in social work practice and education, along with the aim for social work education to best prepare students for practice. Emergent themes from the qualitative survey included: resilience in transitions and the weight of resilience. The findings suggest that the social work curriculum should unpack the meaning of resilience when supporting students entering the profession, to succeed as ‘resilient individuals’, and subsequently, to become ‘resilient practitioners’. It recommends that further research is needed to establish the value of creative pedagogies for teaching and learning, as well as for the wellbeing of students. In this study, use of visual methodology to explore resilience allowed participants to understand and reflect on their experiences and potential in an engaging way.

Drawing upon findings from a psycho-social study employing biographical-narrative interviews, this article examines some challenges men unable to work due to mental illness face – such as intensified stigma – and how, despite this, they resiliently continue to seek belonging and purpose. This article offers some valuable insights into the instrumentalisation of volunteering for claimants of UK social security and how and why voluntary work is valued by those who autonomously perform it. It will explore how social connections provide a tool of resistance to help marginalised individuals legitimise their identity. It is argued participants’ engagement in socially valuable activities have become increasingly insecure due to continued conditional welfare reform and the detrimental impacts of austerity.