Abstract
Introduction
Research relating to social work and poverty indicates that whilst poverty is neither a necessary nor sufficient factor in child abuse and neglect, it is perhaps the most significant contributory causal factor (Bywaters et al., 2016, 2020). Social work practice has however failed to adequately engage with poverty (Morris et al., 2018), despite there being a social gradient to child welfare intervention whereby those who are poorer are more likely to be subject to such intervention (Bywaters et al., 2016). Three metaphors are prevalent in social work discourse on poverty and its relation to practice: the Invisibility of Poverty (Cummins, 2018); the Elephant in the Room (Gupta, 2017b; Hyslop and Keddell, 2018); and the Wallpaper of Practice (Mccartan et al., 2018; Morris et al., 2018). Metaphors can be powerful in framing public understanding and debate of social and political issues (Lakoff, 2014). These three metaphors articulate particular understandings of the relationship between poverty and social work practice and in doing so have a valuable role in advocating for how social work practice should change, including the need for more ‘poverty-aware’ practice (Krumer-Nevo, 2020).
Nevertheless, it is important to subject such metaphors to scrutiny. Within this autoethnography, I use these metaphors as prompts to stimulate recall of professional and personal experience (Bolen, 2018; Taber, 2010), making visible a process of critical reflexivity in relation to both the metaphors, and the conventional approach to social work reflective writing (Butz and Besio, 2009). Reflection in social work is about ‘exploration, understanding, questioning, probing discrepancies…’ (Boud, 1999: 127). Social work reflective writing conventionally involves the integration of narrative, reflective, and analytical writing, including a critical evaluation of one’s own practice through experiential and theoretical analysis in which the authorial ‘narrative-I’ is central (Rai, 2014). Unreflexively transposing objectified knowledge into reflections on the situated reality of practice may foreclose the potential for alternative ways of understanding social work practice and possibilities for change. Whilst models of critical reflection popular in social work emphasise emotion, learning, and development (e.g. Brown and Rutter, 2006; Gibbs, 1988; Kolb, 1984; Rolfe et al., 2001), my contention is that by not considering more creative approaches to representing experience, they miss an opportunity for deeper and more liberated critical reflection.
I use the narrative-analytical-reflective approach in Part 1 of this article and juxtapose this with a poetic approach in Part 2, and a post-humanist approach in Part 3, enabling comparisons to be drawn between the respective approaches. In doing so, my aim is to illustrate the limitations of conventional approaches to reflective writing and argue for the value of using creative and evocative writing techniques when reflecting on and from social work practice. The particular examples are not intended to constrain consideration of other creative approaches for use in critical reflection such as art, songwriting, role-playing, and performance arts (e.g. Carless, 2018; Spry, 2021), and particularly for those who may face a variety of barriers to expressing themselves through writing.
Autoethnography
Ellis et al. (2011: 273) define autoethnography as ‘an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyse (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno)’. Autoethnography seeks to engage scholarly literature and be impactful without the situated complexity of lived experience being lost through processes of analytical abstraction typical of most social research. In autoethnography, knowledge is embodied within experience (Pelias, 2005). The use of creative approaches enables the problematising of the nature of experience and concepts of the self.
Two autoethnographic QSW articles consider poverty and social work practice. Krumer-Nevo (2009) employs a theatrical narrative structure and Gupta (2017a) positions her piece as an analytic authoethnography applying a critical reflection framework to three composite stories. Whilst these produce valuable insights, I believe their adoption of the narrative-reflective-analytical approach illustrates some limitations of such approaches in troubling and disrupting existing knowledge (c.f. Jackson and Mazzei, 2008). Through adopting autoethnographic methods that experiment with form and strategies to de-centre and unsettle the ‘narrative-I’ and its relation to experience (Jackson and Mazzei, 2008; Spry, 2016), and disrupt the subject/object boundary (Butz and Besio, 2009), I aim to engage with the three metaphors in ways which evoke a response and open up possibilities for (re)interpretation and debate (Ellis et al., 2011; Holman Jones et al., 2013: 22). This includes reflection on the respective approaches and consideration of how well each metaphor fits with experience (Beckett, 2003).
I do not have any prior experience of creative writing but from January to April 2022 I took a postgraduate course ‘Autoethnography in the Social Sciences’. Fifteen minutes was provided each class for students to write in response to a prompt based upon an autoethnographic approach we had been learning about in that week’s teaching (e.g. Alexander, 2013; Jackson and Mazzei, 2008). In pairs, we would then discuss the experience of writing and share our writing if happy to do so. As such, the methods used have arisen through processes of experimentation and inspiration from engagement with autoethnographic literature. I am happy to provide further details on the prompts for use in reflection, supervision, teaching, and research if anybody wishes to contact me via e-mail.
Ethical considerations
Writing from experience raises important ethical issues. Why should I assume – as I sit surrounded by markers of my middle-class status; re-covered antique dining chairs, handmade oak shelves, graduation photos, John Lewis Wedding Gift List kitchenware – that I have anything valuable to say about poverty?
Social workers have definitional privilege to write about the lives of others (Taylor and White, 2000), authorised and obligated by statute to provide reports to courts and Children’s Hearings. 1 I am trained in the prescriptive forms of such writing. I have also seen the impact of poverty upon the children and families with whom I have worked. As a matter of social justice, I have a duty to bear witness to their experience and to use my privilege to challenge false or distorted narratives about poverty and those who experience it (Gupta, 2017a; Krumer-Nevo, 2009). Whether I can effectively represent the lives of other people is a moot point. One could argue that rather than you reading my words, I should direct you towards accounts of people who have experienced, or still experience, poverty (e.g. Fourth, 2019; McGarvey, 2017). I am not positing that my experiences and reflections are of any greater value than anybody else’s. But they are of some value. In understanding the role of social workers in relation to poverty, there is a need to know about their experiences, challenges and dilemmas (Holman Jones et al., 2013: 33; Krumer-Nevo, 2009).
Writing about experience inevitably entails writing about others. There is a great responsibility, both as a researcher and a social worker, to do no harm to the people who feature in these accounts, to avoid perpetuating their ‘othering’ (Krumer-Nevo and Benjamin, 2010), or damage any ongoing relationships (Ellis et al., 2011), particularly when I am unable to request their consent. I have therefore changed some details and left others out (Adams et al., 2015). I have hesitated over the attribution of words or actions, knowing that memory is imperfect and not wishing to misrepresent or stereotype. The stories have however required me to produce versions of real people with voices, and I have tried to do so ethically. Trying to de-centre the ‘narrative-I’ is also an attempt to write
Writing from experience also highlights my own vulnerability. As a social worker turned researcher, haunted by the ghosts of practice-past, there is recurring anxiety of exposing my practice experiences to the public, that someone from the audience will stand up and yell ‘That is not how
Part I – The Invisibility of Poverty
Within social work literature, the idea of poverty being rendered invisible is portrayed as a consequence of neo-liberalism (Cummins, 2018). Not so much a conscious attempt to suppress poverty by practitioners, as a side-effect of deficit-focussed practice, a narrow conception of risk, and discourses of parental failure and blame within a context of shrinking support from the state for families and high caseloads for practitioners (Featherstone et al., 2014). The invisibility of poverty is negatively framed.
Social workers typically avoid mentioning poverty within Children’s Hearings, or their reports. It is often viewed as a distal factor (Ghate and Hazel, 2002) not relevant to the Hearing. Some fear intrusive questioning about poverty from Children’s Hearing panel members – a ‘poverty safari’ (McGarvey, 2017). This provides an alternative framing of invisibility as protective. Like Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak, it can offer safety and inconspicuousness. Social workers, they argue, protect children and families with whom they work from shaming experiences by not talking about poverty (c.f. Blumhardt and Gupta, 2017; Gupta and Blumhardt, 2016, 2018).
As an experienced social worker, I would sometimes be asked to undertake parenting capacity assessments (PCA) for other social workers. These are reports whose purpose is to determine whether the parents can meet the needs of their child, and what supports or changes they need to do so. Completing a PCA entails collecting information from records and reports and other professionals, speaking to the parents and child depending upon their age, and observing them together. Given my familiarity with the guidance on poverty-aware/anti-poverty practice (e.g. British Association of Social Workers, 2019; Department of, 2018), I felt competent in undertaking such assessments with a poverty-aware approach.
I was once asked to undertake a PCA because my supervisor and the child’s allocated social worker felt they had exhausted options to support the parents to care for their baby, who had been in foster care for a year. Given the lack of options for kinship care, it looked likely that the baby would be registered for adoption. Before pursuing this, my supervisor sought a second opinion from someone not directly involved in the baby’s care planning.
The parents were separated and for present purposes I will focus upon the father. He was young and had come to the United Kingdom as a child, living with family before becoming homeless shortly after his baby’s birth. He had a regular income from a low-paying job and was intelligent and articulate with good social skills and aspirations for the future. There were no concerns about the common risks encountered in social work such as offending, problematic substance use, or mental health problems. The allocated social worker had concerns about his commitment to his child. He missed appointments to see his baby and provided reasons that were contradicted by other evidence. His accommodation was unstable; he moved around between friends, taking spare rooms when available and for as long as he could. The social worker offered him money for a deposit and first month’s rent, and help with Housing Department appointments and searching for accommodation, but the young man never took him up on these offers. It appeared the social worker had done what he could to support the young man but without him securing suitable accommodation he would be unable to care for his baby.
My assessment concluded that although there were no imminent risk factors for the child in his father’s care, he had the opportunity to progress a plan for looking after his child but had not done so, raising significant concerns whether he could prioritise his child’s needs. This was delaying securing permanent care arrangements for the baby, and there was little indication of this being likely to change. My view was that continuing with a rehabilitation plan would delay decision-making for the child with no more likelihood of successful rehabilitation than previous attempts. The father disagreed and had the opportunity to state his case to a Children’s Hearing.
Children’s Hearings are typically tense affairs. Recent changes in rules extending Legal Aid to parents for Children’s Hearings made it more common for parents to be represented by lawyers. The Hearing Centre had changed the layout of its rooms to make it more child and family-friendly, and less adversarial. I felt my report had taken account of the young man’s socio-economic circumstances and adverse experiences; however, he had not taken up the support he had been offered. Within the Hearing, his lawyer relied on my report as evidence that his capacity to make a commitment was undermined by his housing situation. The lawyer did not acknowledge what I felt was the balance and nuance of the assessment, and it annoyed me that the evidence from this was being used to undermine the recommendation. This was perhaps naïve on my part, given the lawyer’s role to represent their client’s views. The panel ultimately deferred making a decision due to the mother’s absence from the Hearing.
This challenges the idea that poverty is not relevant to Children’s Hearings or cannot be dealt with sensitively, or that parents will not want it raised given that the father’s lawyer cited socio-economic barriers in support of the father’s views. It does however illustrate one way in which making poverty more visible within decision-making forums risks diluting a focus on the child’s needs, and that it is used to excuse parents from fulfilling their responsibilities (c.f. Wilkins and Whittaker, 2018). This may create a perverse incentive against holistic and poverty-aware assessments.
This account has been written with the narrative-reflective-analytical approach typical of how reflective accounts and case studies are written by social workers. It is more analytic than evocative (Anderson, 2010), combining my experience of the situation with descriptions and interpretations of the actions of others (Bolen, 2018; Poulous, 2013). It has the appearance of realism (Chang, 2016), but positions the father and myself in particular unexamined ways, taking for granted concepts such as experience, and the ability of a self to relate that experience unproblematically to a reader. The formal style fails to fully convey the emotional temperature of the Hearing, and the pressures and dilemmas involved. It writes against the invisibility metaphor but in a linear fashion, failing to challenge my role as the teller, or push boundaries in terms of evocation or aesthetics. In this respect, the approach has limited potential to do other than re-produce what I, as the author, already had learnt from the experience (Jackson and Mazzei, 2008), rather than the reflective writing process challenging that knowledge. The Elephant in the Room by Harry Venning (Mccartan et al., 2018).
Part II – The Elephant in the Room
Figure 1 I feel compelled to provide a commentary on this poem rather than allow it to stand by itself, lest you interpret it in ways I haven’t intended. Perhaps this is part of my identity as a social worker, needing to articulate my views without being seen as judgemental about people and their circumstances. It feels professionally dangerous (incompetent?) to stop at the level of impressions without going on to explain (justify?) what I have written. Whilst poetry opens up interpretive possibilities, this urge to explain seeks to foreclose and control your options (Ellis et al., 2011; Sparkes, 2018).
I have used poetry to evoke the feelings and sensations of
There is a risk of being overwhelmed by stimuli, so I focus upon a narrower range of topics. An elephant in the room is neither invisible nor too familiar to notice. It’s big and overwhelming; hence, why nobody wants to acknowledge it even when it causes anxiety. This contrasts with the invisibility of poverty metaphor. Poverty can be one of many significant adversities in the life of a child and their family yet will rarely be amongst the ‘proximal’ factors triggering social work involvement (Ghate and Hazel, 2002), and upon which social workers will prioritise their focus.
Writing this poem evoked other feelings than being overwhelmed, which I tried to incorporate but ultimately cut for the sake of aesthetics. The poem evokes disgust, which sits uneasily with a social worker’s duty to be non-judgemental (c.f. Johnson et al., 2016; Schnall et al., 2008). However, I remember the visit evoking two other memories. These recur as I write, read, re-write, and edit the poem, reading it out aloud to my wife who chides me for sitting in my dressing gown writing poetry, whilst she cooks, cleans, does laundry, and makes phone calls.
The smells evoke memories of my granddad’s ex-council house. My family visited about twice a year when I was a child growing up in the 1980s. The living room was mostly brown with an old TV that brings to mind Ceefax and the BBC test-screen. Two armchairs flanked a gas fireplace. Granddad sat to the left, closest to the TV, and Grandma on the right. I would sit on her knee sipping teaspoons of sweet tea from her mug. She died in her 50s before I was school-age. Subsequently my Granddad would spend most of his time sitting in his chair, drinking cans of beer or large whiskies, my brother and I playing on the carpet trying to avoid his attention. It seemed all adults smoked then – my Granddad preferred a pipe. When his kitchen was re-decorated, the nicotine stains had penetrated through layers of paint and paper. This stays with me – the smoke hanging in the air to settle on my skin and hair – but is punctuated by the smell of takeaway curries, fish suppers, ketchup, salt and sauce, bread and butter, and memories of my family together. These memories evoke nostalgia in which my affection for happy family times is shot through with sadness at the loss of what for me was a more innocent and straightforward time of life.
I am also reminded of the final placement of my social work degree. I was making an initial home visit to parents whose children were allocated to another social worker whose concerns related to the dirtiness of the home and the children’s clothes, untreated head lice, and the mother begging in the city centre. The house was dirty but by no means the dirtiest I had seen.
During the visit, I sat on the sofa, placing my bag on the floor next to my feet. Before leaving I lifted my bag onto my lap to get my diary. I stood up and put the bag over my shoulder, and saw there was dirt on my trousers. I asked for some tissue to wipe it off, which I did, and then left with the social worker. Once outside I smelt something horrible and realised it was coming from the dirt on my trousers and on the bottom of my bag. It was clearly cat shit that had come from the carpet of the home. I cleaned up as best I could and got a lift from the social worker to the office where I tried to clean up, before getting the bus home still smelling of cat shit. On my final day of placement, I came into the office, pulled back my chair, and gave a start. Sitting on it was a lifelike toy cat thoughtfully placed there by my colleagues. What had been a fairly unpleasant experience had now become a rite-of-passage, a story from the mythological ‘front-line’ of social work (c.f. Beckett, 2003).
Alongside disgust then, there is also personal and professional reminiscence. Each sensation I feel in response to the poem, I have experienced before and often with positive associations. Retelling such stories of poverty contributes to the development of social work identity – to be able to say ‘I got my hands dirty and I dealt with it’. Whilst the poetic form helps make the account more evocative and aesthetic, and arguably increases my vulnerability in telling it, it has provoked a need for me to tell rather than rely on showing, with the risk that it has become overly sentimental. It begs the question of whether my commentary adds anything to the poem, or actually reduces its impact by my attempt to interpret it.
Should I have trusted the poem more in trying to convey my memory of that home visit in all its rawness rather than risk stultifying its impact? What the writing of, and reflection upon, the poem however achieved for me in terms of critical reflection and learning is the surfacing of associations between this experience of poverty and other personal and professional experiences of mine. This adds to my ‘poverty self-awareness’ the need to resist sentimentalising poverty or self-ennobling my work with people experiencing poverty and thereby undermining my efforts to address it.
Part III – The Wallpaper of Practice
Figure 2 The wallpaper was torn raggedly revealing the bare white wall beneath. Not so much as to indicate a concerted attempt to rip it from the wall, but more a persistent picking-at. Some of the wallpaper that had once stuck to the wall now hung wrinkled and silent. There was some energy remaining in those folds. Like a broken concertina, its shape held the memory of purposeful human action.
The wallpaper hung upon a wall which was an integral load-bearing part of this flat since the block had been built sometime in the 1930s. It was of a standard height for a flat of that era – neither low ceilinged like an old cottage, nor especially tall in the way characteristic of the Georgian-era flats elsewhere in the city. It was plain and ordinary, without adornments. There was no cornicing, nor pictures hanging from it. At its top, the wall bluntly met the ceiling, forming a right-angle. At the bottom of the wall was a plain white painted piece of skirting board, with a coating of grey dust running along its top. The locations of the nails which pinned the skirting board to the bottom of the wall appeared as dimples beneath the unevenly applied coat of white paint.
The wallpaper ran from the bottom to the top of the wall in standard-width strips, of which there were six covering the length of the wall. These ran from where the wall met the door into the living room, to the far end of the corridor where the bathroom was located. The bathroom door was always slightly ajar, either shining a strip of light into the corridor when the bathroom light was left on, or partially concealing the darkness behind it. The wallpaper was faced on the opposite wall by doors into the two bedrooms, which were always closed. At the opposite end of the corridor to the bathroom door was the front door of the property, a ground floor tenement flat. When the front door was shut, the corridor was enclosed in darkness. When the door was open on a sunny day, however, the wallpaper within the corridor would be bathed in light from outside the flat, pouring in like the sun through parting clouds. On a gloomy day, the main light came from a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling within the corridor, which would be switched on by the occupant when answering the door. This cast a bright yellow light upon the lightly textured wallpaper.
The wallpaper’s hue had perhaps once been white but had now darkened to a greyish/congealed cream. Its thickness was shown by the curling edges at the seams of the strips of wallpaper. It was at one of these seams where the paper had begun to curl that the young boy had searched with his fingers for some purchase, and managed to slide a nail between the wallpaper and the wall to begin picking them apart. Small piece by small piece he had begun to expose the bare white wall beneath. Two men now stood in the corridor facing the rip in the wallpaper created by the boy’s earnest fingers:
As the two men gaze at length at the wallpaper, the wallpaper gazes back at them. 3 This is their final visit. The first man asks the second man whether it’s okay, if they need help in the future, to call him. The second man agrees, says goodbye, turns away from the first man and the wallpaper, and leaves.
The poverty within this account is evident without the need for it to be explicitly named. The family was reliant on state benefits for their income. I provided financial assistance through section 12 of the Social Work (Scotland) Act 1968 to the family, information about a grant application to replace a broken bed, and visited them at home and locally to save them from the half-hour bus journey to my office. A question lurks within the sub-text as to whether this interaction would have been any different if the family had the financial means to easily re-decorate. I think not, although I’m not sure.
Rather than look at an epiphany as a prompt for writing, one can examine the mundane (Adams, Holman Jones, Ellis, 2015). The wallpaper metaphor would not work were it not for the mundanity of wallpaper. I began writing this story with the intention of making a thick description (Geertz, 1973) of the wall that I expected to be bland, evoking feelings of boredom and depression. However, what emerged, as I hunched over my journal putting pen to paper, and then tapped tentatively at the keyboard of my laptop, was instead something more aesthetic and evocative (Ellis et al., 2011). In describing the wallpaper in detail, I began to feel a relationship developing towards it. To me there is a sad dignity about the wallpaper, although perhaps my feelings for it are conflated with my feelings towards the father.
The account was a conscious attempt at post-humanism (Barad, 2003) by focussing upon the wallpaper, trying to get past its role as metaphor and see it in its concreteness. The wallpaper has more than just a passive role as a piece of the scenery. In some respects it organises the two men, not in a deterministic way, but by prompting the conversation and arranging the men’s body positions and gaze. I had considered leaving the account as a description of the wall, but chose to add in the men’s dialogue to draw attention to the ‘intra-action’ within the assemblage (Barad, 2003; Wyatt and Gale, 2016), and in order to resolve the ethical discomfort at leaving humanity
Despite an attempt to re-cast the wallpaper as ‘matterphor’ rather than metaphor, to include its performative materiality within this scene, the account cannot escape metaphor (Spry, 2021). The wallpaper in Figure 2 hangs upon a wall, a boundary. The two men are not just two men, and they are a father whose child has been referred to social work, and a social worker. As I looked at the wallpaper and engaged in the conversation I glimpsed an alternative ending, where I made an arrangement with the father to help him re-decorate that wall. However, I turned away literally and figuratively. I maintained the professional boundary. Social workers need to make boundary decisions throughout their practice and not stare too long into the abyss – What is my role? What is relevant? Whose responsibility is it? There is an inevitable need to make the ‘agential cut’ (Barad, 2003) both in practice and in autoethnography, to decide that we have done ‘enough’ rather than become consumed with further detail. This ending left me with a sense of emptiness which I now understand, through the writing of and reflection upon this account, as a desire to be able to do ‘something more’ for children and families experiencing poverty. Social work has the potential to make a positive difference in addressing poverty but there are limits to what can be achieved by individual social workers and the profession alone. Doing that ‘something more’ requires looking further than individual roles and towards partnerships and political action beyond direct work with children and families. The Wallpaper of Practice by Harry Venning (Mason, 2019).
Concluding thoughts
These accounts were assembled from fragments of memory, written, read, and re-written several times over. New meanings emerged through this dialogue between my present and past selves (Ellis et al., 2011; Holman Jones et al., 2013: 69). To complete each part was a time-consuming process that would not readily be available in practice for social workers. They were however built upon 15 min windows in response to specific prompts that I believe could be adapted for use by social work students and practitioners.
The accounts have written
There is a common theme underlying the three metaphors that poverty is not considered by social workers, but in a variety of different ways. If the problem of social work’s failure to address poverty is one of social workers simply not being aware of or not considering poverty, then making them more ‘poverty-aware’ is the obvious first step to social workers addressing poverty in practice. In my experience however, I’ve not yet met a social worker who is not aware that most of the families they work with are living in poverty, albeit they may have differing beliefs and attitudes towards that. Indeed, the Poverty-Aware Paradigm (Krumer-Nevo, 2020) goes much further than just raising awareness for social workers in addressing poverty. Each of these accounts engages with this common theme to explore the different ways in which poverty may come to be addressed or not, and how this links with moral ambiguities within practice. To me they pose the question of whether the common metaphors we have for thinking about social work’s relationship to poverty are adequate in representing the ways in which social workers contend with these moral ambiguities, particularly when it comes to social workers critically reflecting on practice.
Juxtaposing the three accounts and their respective approaches demonstrates ‘how much is left unsaid by any: in rendering an aspect of the world, it misses out on many others’ (Kiberd, 2000: xlvii). Despite this, and that each part tells a different story related to a different metaphor, the parts are open to evaluation in relation to the degree to which they open up social work practice to interpretation and critical reflection. The aim of this paper was to demonstrate the potential of more creative approaches to reflective writing to challenge existing knowledge. Part I was critiqued as reproducing in writing what I already knew and therefore limiting the potential of writing itself to be a reflective process. This was contrasted with Parts II and III, which by adopting more creative approaches to writing resulted in new knowledge which would not have otherwise been achieved by the conventional method.
Non-conventional approaches to autoethnography create opportunities to disrupt taken for granted assumptions about the self and experience (Jackson and Mazzei, 2008), enabling greater opportunity to explore, understand, question, and probe social work knowledge (Boud, 1999). Rather than providing answers that resolve tensions between and within the three metaphors and social work practice (Anderson and Glass-Coffin, 2016; Holman Jones et al., 2013), they expose practice to debate and (re)interpretation. Compared to conventional narrative-reflective-analytical social work writing, this has greater potential to foster critical engagement with practice, and ultimately promote more ethical engagement with the complexity of doing social work.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
Funding
ORCID iD
