Special Section: Community Approaches to Problems: Beyond Individual and Family Solutions

Abstract

I am delighted to introduce this special issue, which brings together a range of community approaches to problems which counselors and social workers might otherwise address through more conventional individual, family therapy, or social work interventions. Each of these articles proposes a direct inclusion of social or cultural engagements as part and parcel of work alongside clients. This kind of therapeutic and social work has implications for theory—for example, how to locate problems and alternatives to them—and implications for practice: how is community defined “on the ground?” In what arenas do “therapy” and social work take place? These articles share some theoretical legacies. Primarily, each paper critically questions long-standing assumptions within counseling and social work that locate problems and solutions within individuals. As Walters, Carter, Papp, and Silverstein (1988) first argued some time ago with reference to gender, even systems approaches which appear to transcend individuality can reinforce culturally dominant ideas about individual roles, responsibilities, or transactions. In contrast, the authors contributing to this special issue posit what Johnella Bird (2004) has called a relational “I”: an understanding of identity as intimately and ongoingly created within a matrix of collective and mutable meanings and practices. With this understanding, change occurs via transformational action in wider social contexts. As McNamee and Gergen (1999) suggest, problems and their alternatives exist in a social realm of relational responsibility. The authors here demonstrate a way of thinking and working that shares much with Winslade and Williams’s (2012) book Safe and Peaceful Schools, which addresses the problem of bullying. Rather than focus on individual change, Winslade and Williams aim to change bullying relations. Such a project of change engages peers and bystanders to help create and grow a preferred social reality in schools, guarding against the isolation and self-policing that can result from more conventional approaches to bullying. The contributors to this special issue document similar approaches to the particular problems they address. As Peggy Sax notes