Social Work in an Ethnically Diverse Europe: The Shifting Challenges of Difference

This article addresses the inherently politicised context of social work practice located within the contested logics and values of national social policy and professional values and identities. Noting the key role of social work in delivering the state’s promise of social citizenship, it is argued that the increasing neo-nationalist sentiments and politics in European states generate significant pressures upon the universalist, inclusive, values of social work in a multiethnic Europe. The academic and policy debate around social cohesion is explored to illustrate how an assimilationist drift in multicultural state policies undermines the capacity of social work services to deliver appropriate, ethnically sensitive, services. It is further argued that the pervasive spread of populist counter-narratives to multiculturalism erode support for anti-racist and transcultural social work practice. In this context it is argued that social work must acknowledge its compromised situation and explicitly develop a political agenda committed to guaranteeing substantive equality in service delivery.

Some considerations on the potential contributions of intercultural social work...

Social work at global levels, and across international and intercultural divides, is probably more important now than ever before in our history. It may be that the very form our ideas about intercultural work take need to be re-examined in the light of recent global changes and uncertainties. In this short position paper I wish to offer some considerations about how we might approach the field of intercultural social work in order to gain new insights about how we practise at both local and global levels. For me, much of the promise of an intercultural social work (and for the purposes of this paper I see aspects of international social work in much the same light) lies in its focus on the way we categorise ourselves, our ideas and experiences in relation to others. The very notion of intercultural or international social work is based on assumptions about boundaries, differences, ways of differentiating and defining sets of experiences. Whether these are deemed "cultural" or "national" is of less importance. Once we are forced to examine these assumptions, about how and why we categorise ourselves in relation to other people in particular ways, the way is opened up for us to be much more critical about the bases of our own, often very deep-seated, thinking. This understanding, about how and why notions of "difference" operate in the way they do, can potentially open our understanding to all the other ways, besides cultural or national labelling, in which we categorise and create differences between ourselves and others. Intercultural social work, taken as a potential site for understanding the creation of difference then, has the potential to help us critically examine the bases of much of our practice in any setting, since most practice involves some kind of categorisation of phenomena.

Walter Lorenz – Wegbegleiter und Orientierungspunkt in der interkulturellen Sozialen Arbeit

First meeting, common interests and ways together The European Centre for Social Welfare, Training and Research situated in Vienna, was our first meeting place. W. Lorenz was interested in the international comparison of the different concepts and perspectives of social welfare problems in the European countries and the different developments in the training of social professions in Europe. The challenge of intercultural, antiracist social work in the context of Erasmus-Intensive Seminars To organize an intensive seminar with the aim to train students and colleagues for intercultural and antiracist competence in social professions, we formed an European network of European universities and schools of s.w. in Vienna (VIENNET), with the support of ECCE (European Centre of Community Education) in Koblenz. “The group discovered that working on these issues in an international context raises issues of ‘difference’ with renewed acuteness”(cit. W. Lorenz). We learned to cope with a variety of differences: biographical, language, theoretical and institutional backgrounds and discourse traditions. A Venue for an Intensive Seminar In choosing a venue for an Intensive Seminar we were relatively free. We locked for a place, “one dream about”, to support in the best way our seminar aims, to promote a base built on knowledge, skills and values particularly in the area of inner/outer borders, disadvantage, ignorance, minorities, majorities, vulnerable groups, racism and xenophobia. In a small village in Burgenland (Austria), very close to the Hungarian border, we thought to have found it. Future Prospect Are we only representatives of our background institutions or did we act and exposed ourselves as persons with a very specific biography and training experience. Can we sustain this created network, as a network of experts and friends in the field of intercultural, antiracist social work? This question is still open.

Integrating a traditional minority into a Nordic society: Elite discourse on the Finnish Roma

Contemporary citizenship studies have been more concerned with the theory and philosophy of citizenship than with empirical studies. The general objective of this contribution is to broaden the understanding of how notions of citizenship are constructed and re-valued in the social world. The study draws on a qualitative analysis of political elite discourse on Romani issues in the Finnish Parliament from 1989-2003. How issues concerning the Roma are debated elucidates the dilemmas of universal rights and duties within the Nordic welfare model, and the possibilities for cultural diversity within this framework. While the Finnish parliamentary debate accentuated tolerance and the acceptance of difference as strengthening factors for Finnish social citizenship, it was not before the new millennium that the political discourse changed to increasingly stress notions of discrimination and structural inequalities in relation to the incapability to provide for a full an inclusive citizenship as regards the Romani minority.

Language Learning in 3D Virtual World

Second Life (SL) is an ideal platform for language learning. It is called a Multi-User Virtual Environment, where users can have varieties of learning experiences in life-like environments. Numerous attempts have been made to use SL as a platform for language teaching and the possibility of SL as a means to promote conversational interactions has been reported. However, the research so far has largely focused on simply using SL without further augmentations for communication between learners or between teachers and learners in a school-like environment. Conversely, not enough attention has been paid to its controllability which builds on the embedded functions in SL. This study, based on the latest theories of second language acquisition, especially on the Task Based Language Teaching and the Interaction Hypothesis, proposes to design and implement an automatized interactive task space (AITS) where robotic agents work as interlocutors of learners. This paper presents a design that incorporates the SLA theories into SL and the implementation method of the design to construct AITS, fulfilling the controllability of SL. It also presents the result of the evaluation experiment conducted on the constructed AITS.