Reclaiming the 'Social' in Social Work

Dr Carlene Firmin is Professor of Social Work at Durham University. Carlene has researched young people’s experiences of community and group-based violence since 2008 and has advocated for comprehensive approaches that keep them safe in public places, schools, and peer groups. Carlene coined the term Contextual Safeguarding in 2014 to describe a vision for improving safeguarding responses to young people at risk of harm beyond their family homes. In 2016 she published the Contextual Safeguarding framework: a framework that has since been used to reform safeguarding responses and policy frameworks concerned with extra-familial harm in the UK and internationally. Carlene is co-convener of a special interest group on Social Work and Adolescents for the European Social Work Research Association; she is a Global Ashoka Fellow, and also a member of the Churchill Fellowship Advisory Council. She has written in the national newspaper, the Guardian, since 2010, and is widely published in the area of child welfare including through two sole-authored books. In 2011 Carlene became the youngest black woman to receive an MBE for her seminal work on gang-affected young women in the UK.

Hári Sewell is founder and Director of HS Consultancy and is a former executive director of health and social care in the National Health Service in the UK. He has worked for the Department of Health in regulation and policy.

Hári is a writer and speaker in his specialist area of social justice, equalities and ethnicity, race and culture in mental health. Hári is honorary Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of Central Lancashire and Specialist Guest Lecturer at University of Bradford. Hári has had various books, articles and book chapters published, with new material emerging regularly.

Hári worked with another local campaigner to secure services for survivors of sexual violence and currently runs a campaign “Men Supporting Women’s Rights” including “Men Against Rape”. He is increasingly studying forms of masculinity and the possibilities in practice and employee relations to recognise the intersections between masculinity and other aspects of identity.

Contact Hári

• www.hsconsultancy.org.uk
• Linkedin
• Twitter

Presentation: The ‘Troubles’ with Social Work in Northern Ireland.

Davy Hayes is Professor of Child Protection and Safeguarding in the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work, Queen’s University Belfast. He worked as a social work practitioner in North and West Belfast for 15 years prior to entering academia in 2005. His research focuses on service user experiences of the child protection and criminal justice systems, the practice and experiences of professionals who operate the child protection system, and social work assessment and decision making in child welfare.

• d.hayes@qub.ac.uk