The notion of 'haunted futures' (Ferreday & Kuntsman, 2011) can provoke new understandings of the experiences of birth mothers living apart from their children as a result of state-ordered court removal. As 'abject figures' (Tyler, 2013), the mothers are silenced through the stigma and shame of being judged to be a deeply flawed mother, the justifiable fear of future children being removed, and court-ordered reporting restrictions. In this paper, I depict how these mothers exist in a state of haunted motherhood: they are paralysed in anticipation of an imagined future of reunification with their children. The mothers are painfully aware that any future pregnancy will also be subject to child protection procedures; thus even their future motherhood continues to be stigmatised by the past. However, while the ghosts of removed children signify a traumatic loss, they also simultaneously represent hope and future possibilities of transformation through re-narrativization (Gordon, 2011). The creation of spaces for the mothers to speak about their experiences can foster a 'maternal commons'. This ending of enforced silencing can be a political act, countering the stigma caused by pathologising individual mothers and making visible how structural inequalities and governmental policies impact on the lives of the most vulnerable families in the UK.

This paper outlines the use of visual methodologies in international social work research over the past ten years. It presents a narrative overview of the types and range of visual methodologies that have been used, explores the benefits of employing visual methodologies in social work research and outlines some considerations for researchers thinking of working with the visual. The review is not intended to be an exhaustive overview of the field but rather highlights important issues and concerns when using visual methodologies. A deeper, reflexive engagement with complexities (practical as well as methodological and epistemic) of undertaking visual research is required. By necessity, this will be situated within a specific research project, but importantly, engaging in the issues we raise will enable social work research to make valuable contributions to the wider field of visual researching.

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The paper is a discussion of my attempt to move beyond familiarity by using ethnomethodologyand the emotional impact of doing so; namely, the feeling of having a 'dirty secret'. As a social work group member interviewing social workers, the process of fieldwork was all too familiar. However, during transcription and analysis, what I had considered to be 'business as usual' was revealed as something more complex. The paper describes how the ethnomethodological notions of being a member, the unique adequacy requirement of methods, and breaching worked to make the familiar strange and became key to my understanding.

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