ABSTRACT The article situates key themes on holistic engagement practice (HEP) within the context of white neoliberal social work practice. Through a secondary analysis of qualitative data using a critical phenomenological framework, the authors analyze the narratives of social workers who completed a 2-day training on holistically engaged social work practice and reflected on the impacts of the training on their work and lives. The authors explore the role that neoliberal structures, along with social work culture, training and institutional expectations, play in the meaning participants assign to HEP, and their ability to engage such practices in their daily personal and professional lives. Findings reveal themes around the culture of busyness, self-care as a means to an end, the challenges of vulnerability, and importance of relational social work. These findings shed light on the structural and cultural changes needed in the profession to embody whole person practice. Implications focus on needed structural changes in organizations and in social work education, as well as the need for practitioners to have opportunities for longer- term immersion in holistic practices.

ABSTRACT Although much attention focuses on mental health recovery and stigma, less attention is paid to substance use especially in rural areas. This qualitative study draws on Foucauldian and intersectional approaches to examine the sociocultural processes by which stigmatized identities are constructed and rejected at micro and macro levels. A thematic analysis is applied to 40 interviews with people with substance use issues in two rural communities. Findings illustrate that stigma is constructed through binary identity categories and intersectional identities rooted in neoliberal contexts. Resistance is demonstrated at personal, peer, public, and structural levels, offering counter narratives of strength and resilience.

ABSTRACT Assertions that the social work profession is racist and has failed to fulfill its mission to advance racial justice are not new. Despite efforts to pursue racial justice as a profession, it appears very little progress has been made, resulting in renewed and more vigorous attention to examination of what it will take for social work to become truly antiracist. This paper presents the perspective of a black social work educator, who asserts that for the profession to become truly antiracist so that it dismantles racism, we must first deconstruct social work education. What we fail to achieve in practice is rooted in how we educate social workers. The paper identifies how social work education must be changed and reconceptualized in order to advance antiracist social work practice.

ABSTRACT The coronavirus pandemic has disproportionately affected immigrant and refugee communities, along with community-based ethnic organizations (CBEOs) serving these communities. Our study explored the impact of COVID-19 on immigrant and refugee communities and the CBEOs serving them by conducting in-depth interviews with CBEO leaders (N = 7). Six salient themes emerged: heightened organizational strain; COVID-19’s exacerbation of social issues; loss of community wealth; barriers to COVID-19 information; immigration policies, vulnerability, and structural barriers; and a path to better opportunities.

ABSTRACT The number of laws criminalizing homelessness is increasing in the United States. Simultaneously, more individuals are experiencing homelessness, and of those, an increasing number are experiencing vehicle homelessness. Safe parking lots, where people can legally shelter in their vehicles overnight, are one response to the criminalization of vehicle homelessness. Using a mixed-methods research design (n = 37), this study explores barriers to emergency shelters for people experiencing vehicle homelessness and the potential impact of safe parking lots. Our findings indicate that safety is a major concern for this population and safe parking lots have the potential to improve perceptions of safety.

ABSTRACT The study explores the experiences of microaggression by Black professionals in the social service field in Portugal. In depth interviews were conducted with seven participants and the data was analyzed thematically. Critical race theory and the conceptual framework of “microaggression” as a specific form of implicit racism is used to elucidate the everyday experiences and consequences of microaggression. The themes under experiences of microaggression in the workplace indicate how Black professionals are perceived as the racial Other, the triad of microaggression from the supervisor, subordinates and coworkers, white fragility, pressure to assimilate, ethno-racial matching, gendered racism and the organizational culture that perpetuates microaggression. The results indicate how “lusotropical” narratives of Portuguese national identity as a “good” colonizer led to the denial of racism which perpetuates microaggression. The research also highlights the consequences of microaggression, particularly the intergenerational trauma associated with racism and shaped by colonial systems of cultural oppression. This study recommends engaging in radical social work action that challenges oppression at both an individual and structural level through ideological critique and collective political movements for anti oppressive social policy changes.

ABSTRACT African-Canadians continue to bear the brunt of marginality and stereotyping in Canada even when various mitigating studies and programs have been initiated by the government at federal, state, and municipal levels. These stereotypes continue to affect them in informal settings and state institutions when seeking employment, housing or when in the streets, malls, schools, etc. While social justice advocates, social workers, and policy-makers focus on “Black-White” dynamics because other “racialized minorities” are also marginalized (though not equally) in Canada, it is important to note that “non-White” Canadians also contribute to the spread of historical stereotypes of African-Canadians within Canadian multiculturalism as noted in the emphasis of the city of Toronto’s mitigating strategies for “anti-Black racism.” Using social group position theory (SGPT) and asset-based model (ABCD), this paper argues that interrogating social group biases beyond “Black-White” binarism to encourage inter-group dialogs is important in making sure that different multicultural communities understand one another through favorable, activities-mediated, inter-group relations as opposed to having multicultural relations mediated by third parties, or not mediated at all. We also argue that African-Canadians should focus on internal strengths and only use external help to augment community initiatives to change the extant negative image.

ABSTRACT This article presents a subset of findings of a qualitative study, conducted with 33 Chinese female migrant massage parlor workers who were defendants of the Human Trafficking Intervention Courts (HTIC) in New York City. Data were collected through individual and focus group sessions and were analyzed for themes and subthemes using the interpretative phenomenological analysis. Themes of negative experiences from their interactions with law enforcement and the HTIC system emerged in the study and contextualized their lives as im/migrants who work in the underground economy, especially in unregulated, lucrative jobs that potentially involve morally sanctioned types of labor. This article concludes with an outline of implications for human service professionals whose work might impact the lives of others whose lives are similarly impacted by the Human Trafficking Intervention Courts – or other carceral mechanisms designed to end prostitution/sex work.

ABSTRACT This manuscript explores the unique construction of community that young, low-income, women create, based on the embodied internal and external spaces they occupy as lone mothers. Issues related to diverse women’s representation, voice, and power, within these socially constructed communities are examined. Attention is paid to how young low-income mothers experience and actively create their own supportive community within both geographic and social boundaries, in active resistance to dominant and oppressive assumptions. To explore these concepts in-depth, results are presented from an ethnographic study that examined the community participation of eleven young, low-income, racially diverse single mothers living in a small U.S. Midwestern city. Findings focus on the multiple ways that women’s lives embodied the idea of community through the prism of motherhood, race, class, and geographic/physical space. The use of qualitative participatory mapping techniques is also emphasized to examine these physically and socially constructed boundaries. Implications are discussed for ways that social workers can best advocate for social justice by using an intersectional lens to locate and partner with the organic communities of mothering that these women created.