This study analyzes a community-based crisis response to the COVID-19 pandemic in a socioeconomically deprived area in Malmö, Sweden, where a gap regarding accessible information was perceived. It aims at furthering the understanding of how social capital may facilitate collective action, thereby contributing to the understanding of community resilience in the face of risks, uncertainty, and hardships. An ethnographic method based on observations and focus groups interviews was employed. By applying Dynes' elaboration of Coleman's outline of social capital, in a crisis context, as well as assuming bonding, bridging, and linking social capital as available mechanisms for mobilizing collective resources across a socially layered context, the study confirmed a capacity to respond in a timely way – a response facilitated by collective assets embedded in relationships and networks, that is, social capital. The result confirms the significance of having a pre-crisis capacity to meet existing needs effectively, and of having a normative basis of reciprocity that ensures an inclusive response, founded on an emergency consensus. This speaks for a complementary bottom-up model for a community-based crisis planning approach and has implications for the supportive roles that both public and civil sectors can play in recognizing the importance of social capital in building resilience. Support provided to local communities can enable them to develop emergent organizations countering social inequalities in disasters, and it could, if integrated into the contingency system, translate into more inclusive responses to future crises.

In 2023, we conducted a case study of the climate transition process in Malmö, Sweden. Just transition (cf. Paris Agreement) and climate justice underscored as constructs current disparities among neighbourhoods in Malmö, in terms of climate change consequences as well as of consumption-based greenhouse gas emissions.

Interviews, document analysis, observations and interactive workshops were used with a transdisciplinary explorative approach. To address phenomena and processes that transgress conventional social and nature-oriented divides, we adopted an ecosocial lens, which brought to the fore measures that integrate environmental solutions while also responding to human needs and social values. In our examination of cases, we identified ecosocial innovations and explored their transformative potentials. 

Our findings highlight the importance of place, or “topos” (in Latin). Places that provide residents and households with social encounters, knowledge sharing, services and practical functions (i.e. sharing of resources such as repairing skills, borrowing opportunities, community gardening, etc.) support changes in everyday practices and values involving relations, well-being, and use and distribution of resources. Each such place is a heterotopia, with Foucault a utopia that is real, in that it differs from and critically reflects other sites in which we live and positions that we occupy. 

Ecosocial heterotopias seem to have the potential to fundamentally support transitions at the individual and household level. Interpreting “human well-being” in a literal sense as being well situated – in a place as well as within ecological limits – we conclude that ecosocial heterotopias would constitute powerful tools for just transition in urban settings.

Children’s in-session involvement in child and family therapies correlates with both positive and negative treatment outcomes. Thus, it is important to gain a better understanding of the clinical practices that facilitate children’s involvement in therapy sessions so that practitioners can employ them with greater precision. To address this need, we conducted a study to answer the following question: What clinical practices facilitate children’s in-session involvement in child and family therapies? The data consisted of 16 extant audiovisual recordings of child and family therapy sessions and 24 stimulated-recall interviews with the participants in the recordings. Following constructivist grounded theory and incorporating storyline as an additional analytical technique, we have constructed a framework consisting of four involvement-enhancing practices: managing time, staying relevant, adjusting intensity, and facilitating inclusion. Furthermore, by detailing some of the complex processes that practitioners navigate when they facilitate children’s involvement, our study adds a multilayered and dynamic dimension to the list of already established involvement facilitators. It may be used to moderate an overstandardized work culture that continues to characterize services that address children’s needs. The results may be applied to other institutional encounters, providing resonance beyond the analyzed therapy sessions.

In the spring of 2022, in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, social work teachers and students in Lviv provided shelter support to internally displaced people (IDPs). This paper explores the challenges faced in setting up and providing shelter for IDPs, as well as adapting pedagogy to the crisis. An online transnational collaboration and retrospective analysis approach was employed, using the standards detailed in the SPHERE Handbook to gather information from the teachers and students. Through a descriptive analysis, informed by Honneth’s theory of recognition and service-learning model pedagogy, the results highlighted the complex challenges inherent in humanitarian assistance. This paper contributes to a heightened understanding of the role social work plays in armed conflicts.

Den här forsknings- och utvecklingsrapporten cirklar kring en fråga: Vad innebar covid-19-pandemin för det sociala arbetet i Malmö? I rapporten återges några svar på frågan. De är formulerade i möte med en rad personer verksamma inom socialt arbete som delade med sig av sina erfarenheter under pandemins första år. Svaren på frågan är viktiga eftersom de belyser vad en kris bär med sig för det sociala arbetet. Begreppet kris ger uttryck för att situationen i fråga präglas av osäkerhet och brådska och att den hotar centrala värden. Rapporten tar både upp hur det sociala arbetet var del av den omedelbara hanteringen av pandemin i staden och placerar in det i ett bredare perspektiv som låter det sociala arbetets roll i katastrofriskreducering framträda.

Aiming to explore how the ecosocial is imagined within social work research, this article engages with understandings of the relationship between the social and ecological realms when responding to the call for sustainability. A theoretical framework offering five possible imaginations of the ecosocial was developed: the holistic; the anthropocentric conflictual; the anthropocentric compatible; the ‘ecocentric’ conflictual; and the ‘ecocentric’ compatible. The material consists of international peer-reviewed articles referring to the ecosocial. The result reveals that the imagination of the ecosocial is heterogeneous. However, the holistic and anthropocentric compatible imaginations are common, while ‘ecocentric’ and conflictual understandings are rare, which confirms that nurturing social and ecological sustainability does not entail conflicting interests or rivalry but rather the opposite. This implies not only an ongoing widening of the notion of sustainability, in which the idea of limitations is re-installed, but also a possible re-definition of ‘the social’ so as to include the non-human. 

Comparative international studies show that about half of the deceased in the COVID-19 pandemic were persons living in institutional and residentialeldercare. As seniors are the most affected age group, we aim to study if and to what extent the eldercare services were included in theNational Pandemic Plans, and how they were included in the response during the first phase of the pandemic in Finland, Iceland, and Sweden. Weuse the CRISMART approach to crisis documentation and analysis in comparing national response to the pandemic for the eldercare sector. Themethod enables comparison of extraordinary crisis situations from the decision-making and policy-making perspective. We found that there wereboth similarities and differences in the preparedness of the three Nordic countries, as well as in how they responded to the pandemic. In all threecountries the focus of the national responses framed the problem as a health and healthcare services’ problem. We also found value conflicts in theresponse between the value of protection versus social contact and self-determination and hence relating to the quality of eldercare. Keeping in mindthe proportional increase of elderly people, care challenges, and future crises, we must strengthen the position of local social services within theemergency management systems to enhance disaster resilience and sustainability of our societies.

This research seeks to explore the experiences of social work educators and students working and learning from home. The findings, from an international survey sample of 166 educators and students, showed that the respondents faced issues with private and personal boundaries, felt the impact of working and learning from home on both physical and emotional levels, and experienced challenges to what was expected of them. The respondents primarily used two types of coping mechanisms to manage these challenges. These findings contribute to a broader discussion of the impact of working and learning from home and are relevant for education administrators responsible for their employees’ and students’ well-being.