Empty space or sacred place? Place and belief in social work training

Working social assemblages: Towards a new geography of social work

“…As part of the associated research endeavour, over recent decades, social work scholarship has drawn on, and deployed, various social science disciplinary perspectives, the closest engagement being with sociology (e.g., Heraud, ), but with political science (e.g., Gray & Webb, ), social psychology (e.g., Radey & Figley, ), economics (e.g., Gordon, ), and others being utilised to different extents, and in various ways. Despite this broad social science grounding, only occasionally however have there been explicit discussions of human geography in social work research and/or occasions where the discipline's ideas and conceptualisations have clearly been used (specifically—Carbone & McMillin, ; Galloway, Wilkinson, & Bissell, ; Hillier, ; Jeyasingham, , ; Schmidt, ; Wilkinson & Bissell, , , ; Zapf, , , , ), although, as we shall see, quite a lot of social work research is implicitly/loosely “geographical” in orientation.…”

Place and the uncanny in child protection social work: Exploring findings from an ethnographic study

“…The spiritual significance of place has also started to be explored in social work literature, particularly in relation to 'traditional' or 'indigenous' forms of knowledge (e.g. Galloway et al, 2008;Zapf, 2005). A third approach to space and place can be found in Ferguson's work, which develops a phenomenological discussion of social workers' experiences of spaces and foregrounds the central significance of mobility in child protection work (Ferguson, 2004(Ferguson, , 2009a(Ferguson, , 2009b(Ferguson, , 2010a.…”