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This article takes an ecological approach to examine the legacies of austerity for local authority welfare systems in England and the implications for families seeking to use these services. Programmes of Early Intervention or Early Help that promote ‘resilience’ amongst marginalised families and reduce future dependency upon state services have been advocated consistently in the UK, currently intensifying with a period of welfare retrenchment and restructuring. Many programmes and approaches being promoted prioritise a discourse of individual or familial responsibility and seek to deflect attention away from structural and environmental changes that have taken place. We explore local authority family and child support services as relational care practices that have been fundamentally reshaped through austerity, and in doing so we seek to shift the conversation from individual responsibility to systemic and collective vulnerabilities. Drawing on the concept of ‘care ecology’ to conceptualise local authority Early Help services as ‘carescapes’, we focus specifically on the changing context of ‘Family Hubs’, and the fragmented nature of service provision. As with any ecosystem, care ecologies are constituted by interconnected and interdependent actors, processes and systems. Damage to them produces unintended consequences which exacerbate underlying ‘vulnerabilities’. We explore this as a legacy of austerity, noting that this has resulted in forms of socio‐spatial distancing from care provision for families, disrupting protective networks and support systems. We argue that local authority support services would be better focused on systemic and collective vulnerabilities rather than individual responsibilities in order to provide meaningful support to families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of current and historic cases of child abuse across the globe has, in recent years, dominated the news, political agendas and popular discourse surrounding children. From serious case reviews to exploitation in post‐conflict zones, from sexual abuse of children by groups to trafficking of drugs across countries, the importance of protecting children is an increasing concern in many countries. Key to, and inherent in, all of these processes and phenomena are child protection systems, working in varying degrees of effectiveness. While geographic interest has touched upon many of these areas, the role of child protection systems, and the practitioners that work within these, do not explicitly feature within this work. In this article, we seek to develop an introduction to geographies of child protection, producing an initial critical review which points to future research avenues in this field. We adopt a Foucauldian approach and review four themes to illustrate the ways in which geographical approaches might yield important insights. Drawing primarily on England as a context, we consider the historical geographies and origins of child protection, relational practices in contemporary child protection, the impact of austerity and finally we consider what future directions might require a geographical approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social work in the United Kingdom is preoccupied with what social workers cannot do due to having limited time to spend with service users. Yet remarkably little research has examined what social workers actually do, especially in long‐term relationships. This paper draws from an ethnographic study of two social work departments in England that spent 15 months observing practice and organizational life. Our findings show that social work some of the time has a significant amount of involvement with some service users and the dominant view that relationship‐based practice is rarely achieved is in need of some revision. However, families at one research site received a much more substantial, reliable overall service due to the additional input of family support workers and having a stable workforce who had their own desks and were co‐located with managers in small team offices. This generated a much more supportive, reflective culture for social workers and service users than at the second site, a large open plan "hot‐desking" office. Drawing on relational, systemic, and complexity theories, the paper shows how the nature of what social workers do and culture of practice are shaped by the interaction between available services, office designs, and practitioners', managers', and service users' experiences of relating together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutions have troubled us for decades. Although the history of this engagement has been noted as somewhat "fragmented" (Billo & Mountz, 2015, Progress in Human Geography, 40, p. 199), geographers have engaged in detailed discussion on how to research institutions (Flowerdew, 1982, Institutions and geographical patterns, Croom Helm, London, UK), and noted their multifaceted and heterogeneous nature. In a special issue in 2000, Philo and Parr initiated a discussion on an emerging and wide ranging literature of institutional geographies and their epistemological frames. This collection seeks to invigorate institutional geographies in thinking through trouble and moving to develop "geographies of trouble." This special section on "Troubling Institutions at the Nexus of Care and Control" has emerged from three sessions at the annual conference of the RGS‐IBG in 2016. The papers reflect a diverse engagement with the institutional in geography and provide novel insights around the nature of trouble. We believe geographers could develop trouble, scaling up to map the interconnected circuits of trouble interventions but also to move forward and consider how these networks and institutions are changing, adapting and increasingly troubled themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]