Messy Reality Research Articles

‘Circling the Drain’: The Emotional ‘Dirty’ Work of Legal Aid Workers

Emotions have traditionally been seen as out of place in law. They are viewed in opposition to many of law’s central values such as efficiency and rationality. Despite this, legal work often involves brushing up against the messy, complex and emotional realities of people’s lives. Those who do this work must occupy a liminal space between the law’s prescribed rationality and decorum and the emotional lives of their clients. Drawing on 27 interviews from people working with the Legal Aid Board in Ireland, k, this article considers what the social consequences of this might be for the workers. It explores how emotions in this context can be understood as emotional dirt, how legal aid workers are tainted due to their proximity to this dirt and how they engage in practices to deal with the consequences of this. The article highlights how understanding legal aid work as emotionally dirty provides important insights into the role of emotions and stigma in this type of work.

Research as a Mangrove: Emancipatory Science and the Messy Reality of Transdisciplinarity

This study explores the challenges of realizing the emancipatory potential of transdisciplinary research and methodology through a case study involving researchers from the Federal University of Bahia and the community of Siribinha Brazil. The project aimed to prioritize community perspectives, critical reflexivity, and dialogue between diverse knowledge systems to address social-environmental challenges. However, three core challenges emerged: 1) Power inequities often persist despite calls for participation and collaboration; 2) critical theoretical reflections do not always translate into practical actions that challenge these inequities; and 3) bridging theory and practice necessitates developing interpersonal skills and fostering care. This research highlights the fragility of transdisciplinary methodologies and emphasizes the need to address power imbalances, bridge theory and practice, and cultivate interpersonal skills and care. It contributes to discussions on implementing transdisciplinary approaches that not only address epistemic challenges but also fulfill the political ambition of benefiting disenfranchised communities.

Manos Unidas: Humanitarianism, Catholic Third Worldism, and Metropolitan Cultures of Decolonization in Spain, c. 1960-1980

Given the centrality of African empire to Spain’s history in the first half of the twentieth century, the process of decolonization which followed appeared to have little impact on the Spanish metropole. This article argues that humanitarianism, particularly Catholic humanitarianism, was one of the few ways in which the impact of decolonization was felt within Spain. A new generation of international humanitarian NGOs emerged at the end of the 1950s and grew rapidly throughout the 60s and 70s, including the organisation that came to be known as Manos Unidas. These NGOs sought to place the decolonized world at the heart of Spanish society. But Spanish humanitarians avoided, as far as possible, both Spain’s contested domestic politics and the messy contemporary realities of Spanish decolonization. Instead, Catholic humanitarianism offered a vision of the world, and Spain’s place within it, which could appeal across the political spectrum. It promoted a positive vision of Spain as a modern, developed country by contrasting the consumerist abundance of domestic society with the poverty of the Third World. No longer a semi-peripheral country or a recipient of aid, now Spain could define itself against the Third World; as modern, developed, and humane.

Positioning action research as a critical means of understanding coaching: considerations from the field

ABSTRACT This paper shines light upon the methodological value of action research as a critical means of studying coaching practice. Described as an opportunity for bridging the gap between practice and research, the application of action research to sports coaching aims to explicitly and intentionally advance practice. However, far from the enduring depictions of action research as a linear cyclical process, contemporary action research has begun to appreciate its ambiguity; much like the problematic nature of sports coaching itself. Despite this ambiguity, we contend that action research can better harness the messy realities and complexities that coaches encounter within their everyday practice. Through the provision of critical reflections the overarching aim of the paper was not only to make the case for action research as a means of cultivating critical scholarship in sports coaching but to go further, problematising some complex realities of life as an action researcher.

The “we” factor in improvisational statecraft: frontline repair of the state in Indonesia’s crisis response amidst resource constraints

Street-level bureaucrats, confined by meager discretion, often find themselves reconciling the challenging terrain of inflexible policies with messy frontline realities. With a phenomenological lens, we examine how Indonesia’s frontline healthcare workers exercise discretion and improvise informal practices to adapt policies and deliver care despite scarce resources during the COVID-19 crisis. As formal emergency protocols lie encumbered under conditions of austerity, a grassroots motivation for communal action occurs from exchanges between peers mired in resource quandaries, encapsulating an improvisational “we” cohering frontline allies. Manifesting through focused responses drawing on unwritten collegial knowledge, these collaborative efforts embody the relational essence and defining contours of frontline policy repair, as opposed to isolated discretion. Probing further into these repair processes surfaces how shared struggles have the power to ignite collective capacity, empowering bureaucrats to govern complexity in concert, construct agency despite constraints, and promote equity in times of scarcity. Our findings champion tending to institutional receptivity and solidarity-anchored creative frontline initiatives, endorsing agile, adaptive processes finely tuned to situational realities that contests paradigms fixated solely on compliance.

RIFNET. A new agenda for the Irish family: messy realities & messier lives

ABSTRACT This special issue introduces new research on historical approaches to the Irish family. The articles in this collection have grown out of the Reconstituting the Irish Family Research Network (RIFNET), an interdisciplinary research cluster of scholars working on the Irish family. Covering families and family life from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, the issue explores several themes, including marriage, divorce, and separation; queer families and queer approaches to the family; pets, kinship, and non-human families; sibling relationships and migrating families. The publication of this special issue provides a timely reassessment of meanings and experiences of family in Ireland, coinciding with the March 2024 referendum on the Irish Constitution. The articles in this collection stand testament to the rich diversity of family forms and family experiences in Ireland, both past and present, and chart new pathways to guide future research.

Tino Rangatiratanga- Indigenous (MĀORI) Sovereignty and the messy realities of reconciliation efforts at the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup

Organisers of the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup event made explicit their aim to ‘be and do better’ regarding the inclusion and representation of Indigenous peoples. This was particularly important because in seeking to jointly secure the right to host the event, both Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia made much of including and showcasing Indigenous cultures in their respective countries. Subsequently, organisers incorporated Indigenous flags, language, and rituals throughout the event. FIFA appointed cultural advisors to enhance cultural understanding among teams. However, the Spanish national team, “La Roja”, sparked controversy by posting a video mocking the haka, ‘Ka Mate,’ a cultural treasure to Māori, the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand. This led to public outcry, calls for apology, and efforts to reconcile relations. In this commentary, we explore this incident, critiquing FIFA and the current state of event management regarding the inclusion of Indigeneity and engagement with Indigenous Peoples.

A Bottom-Up Analysis of Societal Belief in Judicial Independence in Russia

The study represents a first effort to explore societal sources of support for judicial independence under authoritarianism. Contemporary Russia, which is characterized by legal dualism, under which judges pay close attention to the governing law when resolving mundane cases but routinely twist this law beyond recognition in politicized cases, presents an ideal case study. Drawing primarily on two national representative surveys, fielded in 2008 and 2018, the author finds that a majority of Russians believe their judges to be under the control of political officials. Higher education and prior court experience are key predictors of skepticism. The study complicates the relationship among these factors by singling out Russians with legal education. Despite their high levels of knowledge and experience, law graduates are more likely to believe in judicial independence than other university graduates. This suggests the importance of drawing a contrast between those with profound knowledge, such as lawyers, and those with superficial knowledge. Thanks to their educational socialization and deeper understanding of the messy reality of courts, Russian lawyers are more forgiving of the courts’ shortcomings.

“Dialogue is, thus, an existential necessity.” Paulo Freire

Institutions of education are spaces in which broader issues show up and replicate themselves; they are also spaces where intentional deliberation transforms not only schools, but the communities in which schools are embedded. Many factors contribute to the messy reality of education and many remedies are necessary for schools to fulfill their liberatory potential. In this journal, we cultivate space for one of the most powerful tools for educational transformation: dialogue/diálogo. K-16 educational partners are constantly negotiating social forces and caught amidst school’s dual aims of inculcation and liberation. Yet, much of the discourse regarding issues of justice and equity in education happens in silos. This journal upends that practice and, instead, cultivates an authentic dialogue towards a tranforming of our realities amongst myriad people invested in education, including pre-service and in-service teachers and administrators, school counselors, staff, community members, faculty, and researchers. 
 Our intentions for In Dialogue/En Diálago are to put K-16 educational partners in conversation with each other about critical issues in education, and to cultivate collective critical consciousness amongst educators in the greater Los Angeles region. Fostering community dialogue is integral to the process of advocating for more just schooling. As such, we feature voices not typically included in traditional academic journals but that are essential in the discourse toward equity and justice. In this editors dialogue, we offer some insight into how each piece in this inagural issue is critical to our community dialogue, in this case, about our transformed realities due to the global pandemic we all experienced.

How are accountability and organisational learning related? A study of German bilateral development cooperation

We analyse qualitative data collected from employees at Germany’s two main international development organisations, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW) Development Bank, to study how upward accountability and organisational learning interact in the world’s second largest foreign aid system. Goffman’s ‘staging’ heuristic is applied to unpack social practices in these two organisations. We find that employees navigate two separate domains, a frontstage and a backstage. They consider the federal bureaucracy an audience expecting a coherent storyline despite the messy realities of foreign aid. In response, they engage in impression management on a frontstage while shielding their backstages from scrutiny to maximise autonomy. As a result, organisational learning at GIZ and KfW in Goffman’s terms focuses on collective efficacy at satisfying accountability expectations through staged performances. We relate these insights to the hierarchical structure of Germany’s foreign aid system, the role of organisational interests and prevailing professional norms.

Putting the auto in ethnography: The embodied process of reflexivity on positionality

This article describes an unexpected methodological shift made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic during doctoral research, and exemplifies reflexivity in action whilst negotiating my complex positionality as both a researcher and a social worker. The first UK national lockdown was announced after I had conducted 3 months of ethnographic data collection in a local authority adult social work team, thus halting my research. As society shut down, face-to-face research was paused overnight, however, the local authority continued to provide essential services and support. Forging a path forward, I successfully gained a job practising as a social worker within the team and completed a supplementary ethics application to include auto-ethnographic data which would complement the existing ethnography. Although practicing reflexivity and analysing positionality are established and encouraged parts of ethnographic research, how a researcher actively conducts them varies and usually remains unseen. Methodologies are often presented in a sanitised and polished manner, depriving the reader of the messy yet informative reality of research. This article draws upon fieldnotes to practically illustrate and bring this reflexivity on positionality to the fore. As I move from participant-observer to complete-participant, the findings zoom in on my experience of navigating positionality, revealing a micro picture of the details and subtleties of this process. This unexpected research journey enhanced my level of intimacy with the phenomenon, the research site, and the participants. Overall, this example of enacting reflexivity helps to bridge the gap between how positionality is theorised and how it actively practiced. Finally, this article is a call for more open, deeper, and continual reflexivity on our positionality as researchers.

Who has naming rights? The framing of children's mental health issues in discursive therapy with their caregivers

AbstractChildren in Western countries are being referred for therapy at increased rates. There is, however, a lack of research that explores how social workers, in the role of therapist, engage children and their caregivers to determine the ‘presenting concerns’ for therapy. This study uses a Critical Discourse analysis of therapy transcripts to investigate if and how children are afforded the right to name the issues they may face. The study examines the politics of knowledge production in the therapeutic triad between the therapist, child and caregiver. The messy realities of child‐centred practice are shown. The findings reveal the complex operations of power in therapy interactions and the influence of behavioural discourses in framing children's mental health issues, positioning children as therapeutic subjects. Findings underscore the need for social workers to find socio‐political ways to conceptualize, with children, the issues that impact on their lives, using externalizing practices and therapeutic resources.

From “screen time” to screen times: Measuring the temporality of media use in the messy reality of family life

Abstract The discrepancy between children’s actual amount of viewing time and parents’ accounts of their concerns, rules, and parental mediation choices has been documented in empirical research, and typically interpreted through the lens of the Uses and Gratifications theory – showing how parents change their attitudes towards screen media in order to satisfy their own needs. Based on a qualitative longitudinal research project, including app-based media diaries, with 20 families with at least one child aged eight or younger, we aim to make two contributions to the literature. With regard to theory, we aim to highlight the heterogeneous and contingent ways of balancing the place of digital media in children’s lives that arise from parents navigating screen time discourses, social pressures, and daily schedules. With regard to methods, we argue for the combination of qualitative data and app-based media diaries to contextualise and interpret potential discrepancies between reported screen time and parental anxieties or hopes about digital media.

Transfer State: The Idea of a Guaranteed Income and the Politics of Redistribution in Modern Britain, by Peter Sloman

In contemporary Britain, the idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) is associated with the left’s response to the precarity and automation of the early twenty-first century. Peter Sloman disrupts this understanding by illuminating both the century-long history of the concept and the ways in which it has been proposed by thinkers of the left and the right. In doing so, Sloman shows the multiple guises in which a guaranteed minimum income can be manifested and challenges the sense of it as inherently radical or redistributive. This is a comprehensive and highly technical account which brings together a history of ideas approach with social policy analysis. Sloman argues that his mixed methodology is important because it pays due attention to ‘the messy realities of policy design and implementation’ (p. 12) which can otherwise be overlooked. The approach also chimes with recent innovative work by historians such as Guy Ortolano which sees the value in considering policies that failed or were not fully implemented as well as those that were introduced. Sloman details, for example, the wranglings over the possible introduction of a Negative Income Tax (a form of guaranteed income imported from the American right) during the 1960s, and argues that its ultimate failure was a factor in Labour’s long-term difficulties and Thatcher’s ascension to power (p. 124). The structure of the monograph takes its cues from the two-pronged approach: primarily moving chronologically through from proposals such as the ‘vagabond’s wage’ in the 1910s to the UBI of the 2010s, but placing different emphasis at various points on ideas versus policy and thus overlapping time periods.

Glamour or sham? Residents' perceptions of city branding in a superdiverse city: The case of Rotterdam

This study focused on the reconstruction of residents' city imaginaries in a superdiverse context, and on the question how residents relate to official city branding. This is an important question, as there is great gap in the literature on how residents perceive brands. Eight focus groups were conducted in the city of Rotterdam, which is considered a typical superdiverse city. The focus groups have shown the complexity of developing a city brand that fits residents' experiences, as the daily encounters and memories of residents go much deeper than most branding communications, in which ‘superficial’ assets of the city are put to the front. The raw, messy and multi-faced reality of residents is harshly in line with the ‘picture perfect’ brand image. Especially in a superdiverse city, as Rotterdam, where this ‘messy’ reality on the level of the streets is felt as home for many residents. The focus groups have hence captured a strong sense of belonging to the city, whereas the branding of the municipality raises frustration and feelings of exclusion with residents. The overall feeling of disapproval of the city brand goes beyond individual characteristics of residents, such as age, education level and cultural background.

In Relation or Nah? A Review of Black Trans Feminism by Marquis Bey

In Relation or Nah? A Review of <i>Black Trans Feminism</i> by Marquis Bey

Post-structural pedagogy in a coach development curriculum

ABSTRACT Given the need for post-modern education, and likewise, coach development to better prepare coaches for messy and complex realities, the purpose of this study was to explore the use of coach developers’ post-structural pedagogical practices. Using post-structural assumptions as a lens for analysing two coach developer’s pedagogies in a higher education master’s degree coaching programme, such practices aimed to open-up multiple realities (e.g. debunking singular truth regimes strategies), power as relational (e.g. social constructions of knowledge strategies) and an ever-evolving self (e.g. encouraging errors and false starts). These themes encompassed 19 pedagogical practices, which are discussed in relation to the need for coaches’ post-structural understandings, coach developers’ implementation of post-structural pedagogies, and overcoming practical realities of producing docile coach learners.

Jurisdictional games and decision making: The Belgian approach in dealing with migrant smuggling

AbstractThe article presents a case study focusing on the Belgian approach to deal with migrant smuggling and more broadly on the governance of migrants in transit on its territory. Drawing from the literature on jurisdiction and scales and combining it with the scholarship on bureaucrats' decision making, the article sheds light on the messy dynamics and realities of legal governance of migrants transiting through Belgium in their journey to the United Kingdom. By focusing on the multilayered nature of the issue, the distinct legal regimes and the various actors involved, the article argues that the jurisdictional separation of the realms of criminal and administrative law enables a decision to mobilize a set of law over or in combination with another. The article explores the situation at the local and national scales and, as jurisdictions overlap and competences are scattered between distinct entities and actors, specific attention is paid to “passing the buck” behaviors and discourses which have substantial consequences for the situation of migrants in transit in Belgium.

Dangerous or Goodly Passions: The Role of Emotion in Parliament and Politics

Dangerous or Goodly Passions: The Role of Emotion in Parliament and Politics

Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance

In Doodem and Council Fire, Heidi Bohaker examines the history of Anishinaabe law and governance from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. This book is a vital contribution to long-standing debates over the nature and structure of Indigenous societies and polities in the Great Lakes because of her commitment to examine the principles of Anishinaabe governance on their own terms.Critical to Bohaker’s approach is her use of Anishinaabe political categories and vocabulary, eschewing “analogies from other political and cultural traditions” (xxvii). The two most important Anishinaabe concepts that Bohaker employs are the doodem (plural doodemag) and council fire. Doodemag are Anishinaabe kinship categories in which members of the same doodem are considered to be closely related, sharing descent from an other-than-human being. Council fires are “specific and long-standing deliberative bodies that were constituted and recognized through and by other Anishinaabe councils to have responsibility for the lands, waters, and people of a particular territory” (xvi–xvii). Each council fire was composed of members of multiple doodemag, while each doodem contained members of multiple council fires and was connected to other doodemag through intermarriage. Council fires and kinship, structured by the doodem system, together formed the “decentralized, interconnected, and interdependent alliance networks that formed the governments of the Anishinaabe peoples” (xvii).Bohaker’s analysis provides numerous insights. By centering alliance in her analysis of Anishinaabe governance, Bohaker moves beyond the imported concepts of nation, tribe, and village to vividly describe a world of diverse people bound together by kinship and the reciprocal obligations of care that went along with it. By focusing on kinship-based alliances, she shows how governance was based in the everyday practices and philosophical principles that governed Anishinaabe life. Her introduction of the concept of the council fire is especially revelatory. While scholars have recognized the importance of kinship in shaping belonging and diplomacy among Native peoples, Bohaker’s examination of council fires as the sites of Anishinaabe governance—defined by their connections and recognition by other councils, and the direct participation of the people they claimed responsibility for—provides a much clearer explanation of how Anishinaabe polities functioned. She also traces how Anishinaabe people incorporated outsiders into the doodem system and how their polities adapted to change over the period of the study. Bohaker thus provides an account of Anishinaabe governance and history that is firmly rooted in their own categories and in which the diversity and dynamism of Native people is key.These are great strengths, based in careful examinations of treaty pictographs and the Anishinaabe language. However, Bohaker’s focus on grounding Anishinaabe law and governance in an absolute conception of alliance is occasionally in tension with her description of a system that, she argues, was defined by decentralization, plurality, and continual negotiation. Central to her analysis is the assertion that, for the Anishinaabek, “to be in an alliance relationship carried with it the responsibility to care for the other. The idea of a conditional gift or a partial relationship was an astonishing concept indeed” (8), and “the Anishinaabek did not deploy a separate semantic category for ally, trading partner, or friend. You were either inawemaagen [relatives] or you were not” (26). Such absolutes sit oddly alongside the messy reality vividly described by Bohaker herself when, for example, she examines marriages as microalliances that created the Anishinaabe political world. Such intergroup bonds were potentially fraught things that could not simply be called into being but rather, “like all alliance relationships, had to be requested, arranged and maintained” (78–79), and she notes that the creation of kin relationships did not prevent the outbreak of violence between the Dakota and Anishinaabek. Such contradictions suggest that there is still work to be done reconciling the principles of Anishinaabe governance and the lived reality. Despite that, Bohaker has written a book that is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the Indigenous peoples of North America or the Great Lakes.