More Than Place-Based: Viewing Geography on a Continuum and the Implications for Social Work Practice

Abstract

Communities play an important role within the field of social work as the context within which specific social work activities occur. To date, much of the social work literature divides communities into the mutually exclusive, dichotomous categories of geographic and functional communities. The authors propose a new method for defining community that views geography on a continuum and suggests that membership within a community is moderated by place. The concept of place-moderated communities is applied to specific examples, and the application to social work practice is discussed within the context of community membership, community engagement, community rights, and community development efforts.

Empowering local leaders in flood inundation mapping in Bagelen, Purworejo, Central Java

“…Geography brings together people, places and communication to solve risk or vulnerability to disaster through a variety of practical approaches, that is, participatory mapping. This was confirmed by previous authors who proposed a new method for defining community that views geography on a continuum and suggest that membership within a community is moderated by place (Carbone & McMillin 2018 :121–133). This kind of disaster management is the anticipation or preparedness and earlier thematic planning of flooding and solutions for the long run in the future.…”

Constelación espacial de conceptos para Trabajo Social: ambiente, lugar, territorio y paisaje

“…Jack (2015Jack ( , 2010 emplea el término de apego al lugar (place attachment) para evidenciar la importancia del vínculo con los lugares en el bienestar de niños y niñas, y la relevancia que tiene la consideración de aquellos en el Trabajo Social con la niñez. Se ha utilizado también para referirse a las experiencias de pérdida que van más allá de los aspectos tangibles, asociadas a los desastres socionaturales (Alston, Hargreaves y Hazeleger 2018), para analizar cómo las trayectorias de vida de trabajadores sociales están fuertemente marcadas por los lugares en los que estas se desplegaron (Carlton-LaNey 2015), para diferenciar distintas comunidades, según su vinculación con los lugares (Carbone y McMillin 2018), o analizar la relevancia de los espacios de trabajo de trabajadoras y trabajadores sociales en el ámbito de infancia (Stanley, Larkins, Austerberry et al 2016;Jeyasingham 2016).…”

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.…”