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The COVID-19 pandemic changed dramatically the ways social workers engaged with children and families. This article presents findings from our research into the effects of COVID-19 on social work and child protection in England during the first nine months of the pandemic. Our aim is to provide new knowledge to enable realistic expectations of what it was possible for social workers to achieve and particularly the limits to child protection. Such perspective has become more important than ever due to knowledge of children who died tragically from abuse despite social work involvement during the pandemic. Our research findings show how some practitioners got physically close to some children, whilst being distanced from others. We examine the dynamics that shaped closeness and distance and identify seven influences that created limits to child protection and the problem of ‘the unheld child’. The article provides new understandings of child protection as embodied, multi-sensorial practices and the ways anxiety and experiences of bodily self-alienation limit practitioners’ capacities to think about and get close to children. Whilst social workers creatively improvised to achieve their goals, coronavirus and social distancing imposed limits to child protection that no amount of innovative practice could overcome in all cases.

The distribution and properties of the first galaxies and quasars are critical pieces of the puzzle in understanding galaxy evolution and cosmic reionization. Previous studies have often excluded unresolved sources as potential low redshift interlopers. We combine broadband color and photometric redshift analysis with morphological selections to identify a robust sample of candidates consistent with unresolved point sources at redshift $z\sim8$ using deep Hubble Space Telescope images. We also examine G141 grism spectroscopic data to identify and eliminate dwarf star contaminants. From these analyses, we identify three, bright ($M_{UV}\lesssim-22$ ABmag) dropout point sources at $7.5, Comment: 21 pages. 10 figures

The Covid-19 pandemic presented social workers and managers in child protection with complex practical and moral dilemmas about how to respond to children and families while social distancing This paper draws on our research into practice during the pandemic to show some of the ways social workers changed their practice and to provide theories and concepts that can help to account for how such change occurs Drawing on anthropological uses of the concepts of ‘contingency’ and ‘improvisation’ and Hartmut Rosa’s sociological work on ‘adaptive transformation’ and ‘resonance’ we show how social workers creatively ‘re-made’ key aspects of their practice, by recognising inequalities and providing material help, through digital casework, movement and walking encounters, and by going into homes and taking risks by getting close to children and parents It is vital that such improvisation and remaking are learned from and sustained post-pandemic as this can renew practice and enable social workers to better enhance the lives of service users [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Social Work Practice is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use This abstract may be abridged No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract (Copyright applies to all Abstracts )

While the use of digital media and technologies has impacted social work for several years, the Covid-19 pandemic and need for physical distancing dramatically accelerated the systematic use of video calls and other digital practices to interact with service users. This article draws from our research into child protection to show how digital social work was used during the pandemic, critically analyse the policy responses, and make new concepts drawn from digital and design anthropology available to the profession to help it make sense of these developments. While policy responses downgraded digital practices to at best a last resort, we argue that the digital is now an inevitable and necessary element of social work practice, which must be understood as a hybrid practice that integrates digital practices such as video calls and face-to-face interactions. Moving forward, hybrid digital social work should be a future-ready element of practice, designed to accommodate uncertainties as they arise and sensitive to the improvisatory practice of social workers.

This article brings together digital anthropology and social work scholarship to create an applied anthropology of everyday digital intimacy. Child protection social work involves home visits in the intimate spaces of others, where modes of sensorial and affective engagement combine with professional awareness and standards to constitute sensitive understandings of children’s well-being and family relationships. In the COVID-19 pandemic, social work practice has shifted, partly, to distance work where social workers engage digitally with service users in their homes while seeking to constitute similarly effective modes of intimacy and understanding. We bring practice examples from our study of social work and child protection during COVID-19 together with anthropologies of digital intimacy to examine implications for new modes of digital social work practice.

Relationship-based practice has become a dominant theory through which what goes on between social workers and service users is understood. However, the presence of a relationship explains little and much more critical attention needs to be given to the kinds of relationships involved in social work. This paper is based on an ethnographic study of long-term social work that spent 15 months observing practice and organisational life, a key aim of which was to find out how social workers establish and sustain long-term relationships with children and parents in child protection cases. The paper introduces into the social work literature the concept of a ‘holding relationship’, which was present in several of the cases we studied, especially where therapeutic change occurred. It shows in detail how a ‘holding relationship’ involved social workers being reliable, immersing themselves in the service user’s day-to-day existence, getting physically and emotionally close to them, and practicing critically by taking account of power and inequalities and using good authority. The concept of a ‘holding relationship’ draws on psycho-dynamic and sociological theory to provide new ways of thinking that can help make sense of the practical and emotional relating involved in social work and promote the development of such helpful relationships.

We present and analyze a series of synthetic galaxy survey fields based on the IllustrisTNG Simulation suite. With the Illustris public data release and JupyterLab service, we generated a set of twelve lightcone catalogs covering areas from 5 to 365 square arcminutes, similar to several JWST Cycle 1 programs, including JADES, CEERS, PRIMER, and NGDEEP. From these catalogs, we queried the public API to generate simple mock images in a series of broadband filters used by JWST-NIRCam and the Hubble Space Telescope cameras. This procedure generates wide-area simulated mosaic images that can support investigating the predicted evolution of galaxies alongside real data. Using these mocks, we demonstrate a few simple science cases, including morphological evolution and close pair selection. We publicly release the catalogs and mock images through MAST, along with the code used to generate these projects, so that the astrophysics community can make use of these products in their scientific analyses of JWST deep field observations., Comment: Accepted to MNRAS

Supervision is a core component of professional support and development in social work. In many settings, and perhaps particularly in children’s services, it is valued as crucial in safe decision-making, practice reflection, professional development and staff support. Research has demonstrated that supervision and staff support also contribute to social worker retention in child welfare services. Drawing on data gathered in a 15-month ethnographic, longitudinal study of child protection work that included observations of supervision, we were able to observe the impact of supportive supervisory relationships on social workers’ decision-making about staying in their current workplace. This article presents a single case that demonstrates the potential impact of effective relationship-based supervision on retention and calls for a more humane approach to social work supervision against dominant managerial themes that have increasingly burdened the profession.

We present the results from a new search for candidate galaxies at z ~ 8.5-11 discovered over the 850 arcmin^2 area probed by the Cosmic Assembly Near-Infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS). We use a photometric redshift selection including both Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescope photometry to robustly identify galaxies in this epoch at F160W < 26.6. We use a detailed vetting procedure, including screening for persistence, stellar contamination, inclusion of ground-based imaging, and followup space-based imaging to build a robust sample of 11 candidate galaxies, three presented here for the first time. The inclusion of Spitzer/IRAC photometry in the selection process reduces contamination, and yields more robust redshift estimates than Hubble alone. We constrain the evolution of the rest-frame ultraviolet luminosity function via a new method of calculating the observed number densities without choosing a prior magnitude bin size. We find that the abundance at our brightest probed luminosities (M_UV=-22.3) is consistent with predictions from simulations which assume that galaxies in this epoch have gas depletion times at least as short as those in nearby starburst galaxies. Due to large Poisson and cosmic variance uncertainties we cannot conclusively rule out either a smooth evolution of the luminosity function continued from z=4-8, or an accelerate decline at z > 8. We calculate that the presence of seven galaxies in a single field (EGS) is an outlier at the 2-sigma significance level, implying the discovery of a significant overdensity. These scenarios will be imminently testable to high confidence within the first year of observations of the James Webb Space Telescope., 47 figures, 25 pages, 10 tables, Accepted to the Astrophysical Journal. Photometric catalogs available via email request to lead author

Research into social work and child protection has begun to observe practice to find out what social workers actually do, however, no such ethnographic research has been done into long-term practice. This article outlines and analyses the methods used in a study of long-term social work and child protection practice. Researchers spent fifteen months embedded in two social work departments observing organisational practices, culture and staff supervision. We also regularly observed social worker’s encounters with children and families in a sample of thirty cases for up to a year, doing up to twenty-one observations of practice in the same cases. Family members were also interviewed up to 3 times during that time. This article argues that a methodology that gets as close as possible to practitioners and managers as they are doing the work and that takes a longitudinal approach can provide deep insights into what social work practice is, how helpful relationships with service users are established and sustained over time, or not, and the influence of organisations. The challenges and ethical dilemmas involved in doing long-term research that gets so close to social work teams, casework and service users for up to a year are considered.

This article draws from a 15-month participant observation study of social work and child protection practices in England to illustrate how social workers used Facebook to gain another view of serv...

Star-forming galaxies are considered the likeliest source of the H i ionizing Lyman continuum (LyC) photons that reionized the intergalactic medium at high redshifts. However, above z ≳ 6, the neutral intergalactic medium prevents direct observations of LyC. Therefore, recent years have seen the development of indirect indicators for LyC that can be calibrated at lower redshifts and applied in the epoch of reionization. Emission from the Mg ii λλ2796, 2803 doublet has been proposed as a promising LyC proxy. In this paper, we present new Hubble Space Telescope/Cosmic Origins Spectrograph observations for eight LyC emitter candidates, selected to have strong Mg ii emission lines. We securely detect LyC emission in 50% (4/8) of the galaxies with 2σ significance. This high detection rate suggests that strong Mg ii emitters might be more likely to leak LyC than similar galaxies without strong Mg ii. Using photoionization models, we constrain the escape fraction of Mg ii as ∼15%–60%. We confirm that the escape fraction of Mg ii correlates tightly with that of Lyα, which we interpret as an indication that the escape fraction of both species is controlled by resonant scattering in the same low column density gas. Furthermore, we show that the combination of the Mg ii emission and dust attenuation can be used to estimate the escape fraction of LyC statistically. These findings confirm that Mg ii emission can be adopted to estimate the escape fraction of Lyα and LyC in local star-forming galaxies and may serve as a useful indirect indicator at the epoch of reionization.

While recognition that some service users do not want social work involvement has grown in recent years, little research has explored what relationships between social workers and ‘involuntary clients’ look and feel like in practice and how they are conducted in real time. This paper draws from research that observed long-term social work practice in child protection and shows how relationships based on mutual suspicion and even hate were sustained over the course of a year, or broke down. Drawing on a range of psycho-social theories, the paper adds to the literature on relationship-based practice by developing the concept of a ‘hostile relationship’. The findings show how hostile relationships were enacted through conflict and resistance–especially on home visits–and how anxiety and other intense feelings were often avoided by individuals and organisations. Much more needs to be done to help social workers recognise and tolerate hostility and hate, to not retaliate and to enact compassion and care towards service users. © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

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.

Hospital sinks in the UK have recently been under scrutiny as possible reservoirs for Gram-negative bacteria, especially carbapenem resistant Enterobacterales (CRE). These strains have been found in intensive care wards across the country and can re-enter the clinical environment, representing a risk to vulnerable patients. Two sink waste traps known to be colonized with CRE were collected from a hospital and fitted to a vertical-draining and rear-draining handwash sink installed within a laboratory model sink system. Sinks were automatically flushed four times a day and, as per usual in the model, TSB was provided once daily to maintain microbial populations. Gram-negative bacteria were regularly monitored using selective culture, MALDI-TOF and antibiotic disk diffusion. The short-term effect of adding simulated IV fluids (5% glucose or 0.9% NaCl) and the impact of sink design on Gram-negative proliferation were investigated. Communities included Enterobacter asburiae; Klebsiella oxytoca; Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Citrobacter freundii, among others, including CRE. The addition of simulated IV fluids did not induce Gram-negative bacterial proliferation in the time frame of the experiment. Differences were observed in the fluctuation of Gram-negative levels after flushing between the different sink designs. Gram-negative numbers in vertical-draining sinks decreased immediately after the tap was flushed and subsequently increased between flushes. However, in rear-draining sinks, little fluctuation was observed. Hospital sink waste traps can harbour Gram-negative bacteria resistant to antibiotics. In our experimental conditions, the type of sink was the determining factor in the magnitude of fluctuation in Gram-negative populations while simulated IV fluids had little effect.

The need for professionals to use reflection to learn about and develop their practice is now a universally stated goal. In social work however there has been little research into whether and how r...

Social work is an inherently mobile and spatial profession; child protection social workers travel to meet families in diverse contexts, such as families' homes, schools, court and many more. However, rising bureaucracy, managerialism and workloads are all combining to push social workers to complete increasing volumes of work outside their working hours (Broadhurst et al., 2009, 2010; Unison, 2017). Such concerns lead to the perception that social workers are increasingly immobilised, finding themselves desk-bound and required to spend much of their working day navigating time-consuming computer systems. This immobilisation of social workers has considerable implications, restricting professionals' abilities to undertake the face-to-face work required to build relationships with families. However, until now, the actual movements of social workers, and how (lack of) movement affects ability to practice, remain unknown. In this paper we report on innovative research methods using GPS [Global Positioning System] devices that can trace social workers' mobilities and explore the use of office space, home working and visits to families in two English social work departments. This article presents unique findings that reveal how mobile working is shaping social care practitioner wellbeing and practice.

Although the home is the most common place where social work goes on, research has largely ignored the home visit. Drawing on a participant observation study of child protection work, this article reveals the complex hidden practices of social work on home visits. It is argued that home visits do not simply involve an extension of the social work organisation, policies and procedures into the domestic domain but the home constitutes a distinct sphere of practice and experience in its own right. Home visiting is shown to be a deeply embodied practice in which all the senses and emotions come into play and movement is central. Through the use of creativity, craft and improvisation practitioners ‘make’ home visits by skilfully enacting a series of transitions from the office to the doorstep, and into the house, where complex interactions with service users and their domestic space and other objects occur. Looking around houses and working with children alone in their bedrooms were common. Drawing upon sensory and mobile methods and a material culture studies approach, the article shows how effective practice was sometimes blocked and also how the home was skilfully negotiated, moved around and creatively used by social workers to ensure parents were engaged with and children seen, held and kept safe.

Research into child and family social work has largely stopped short of getting close enough to practice to produce understandings of what goes on between social workers and service users. This is despite the known problems in social worker engagement with children in cases where they have died. This paper outlines and analyses the methods used in a study of social work encounters with children and families on home visits where there were child protection concerns. It illustrates how mobile methods of walking and driving interviews were conducted with social workers on the way to and from home visits, and how the ethnography involved participant observation and audio-recordings ofthe interactions between social workers, children and parents in the home, re¬vealing the talk, actions and experiences that occurred. Social workers often moved around the home, especially to interview children on their own in their bedrooms, and the paper shows how ways were found to stay close enough to observe these sensitive encounters within families’ most intimate spaces, while ensuring the research remained ethical. Ethnographic and mobile methods produce vital data that advance new understandings of everyday social work practices and service users’ experiences and of dynamics that are similar to breakdowns in practice that have occurred in child death cases.

Little research has been done into what social workers do in everyday child protection practice. This paper outlines the broad findings from an ethnographic study of face-to-face encounters between social workers, children and families, especially on home visits. The social work practice was found to be deeply investigative. Children's bedrooms were routinely inspected and were the most common place where they were seen alone. A high proportion of children were not seen on their own because they were too young and the majority of the time was spent working with parents and children together. Small amounts of time were spent with children on their own and some first encounters were so rushed that social workers did not even introduce themselves to the child. This arose from two key factors: firstly, organisational pressures from high workloads and the short timescales that social workers were expected to adhere to by managers and Government; secondly, practitioners had varying levels of communication skills, playfulness and comfort with getting close to children and skills at family work. Where these skills and relational capacities were present, social workers were found to have developed deep and meaningful relationships with some children and families, for whom it was apparent that therapeutic change had occurred.

The delivery of welfare and professional helping, such as in medicine, nursing and social work is largely treated as though it is achieved through static and immobile practices. Research has been dominated by a focus on the sedentary as studies have stayed rooted in places like hospitals and offices, failing to follow practitioners when they go out to see their service users in their communities and homes. This paper explores the mobile character of professional helping through a focus on social work by examining what its practices look like through the lens of movement based social science. The paper draws on empirical data from my mobile and sensory ethnography of child protection work, where I went along with social workers and interviewed them in the car and observed them on home visits to families. It is argued that attention to movement gets to the heart of what these practices are, as shown in the multiple meanings of car journeys, and how keeping children safe relies on worker’s capacities to move their bodies when in the home by walking, playing with and staying close to the child. Professional help goes on through what Jenson calls “negotiation in motion”. Fundamentally, social work is work on the move.

It is well known that in cases in which abused children have died, social workers and other professionals did not relate to them effectively—the phenomenon now known as the ‘invisible child’. Much less well understood is how often and why such invisibility occurs where there has not been a major inquiry or scandal and this paper draws on research which observed day-to-day encounters between social workers, children and families. In most of the practice, children were seen and related to but, in a small number of home visits, social workers were not child-focused. The paper provides a detailed analysis of those cases and shows how social workers were overcome by the emotional intensity of the work and complex interactions with angry, resistant parents and family friends. Workers were also affected by organisational culture, time limits on their work and insufficient support to enable them to contain their feelings and think clearly. The powerful impact of unbearable levels of complexity and anxiety on social workers requires much greater recognition. Sociological, psycho-dynamic and systemic theories are drawn upon to establish how workers need to be helped to think clearly about children and relate to them in the close, intimate ways that are required to keep them safe.

This paper argues that greater attention needs to be given to where social work goes on and the implications of particular contexts for how skilful work can be done. It does so by focusing on the car, arguing that it plays a vital but neglected role in child welfare practice. Some of the most profound life changes vulnerable children experience happen during ‘moves’ in the car, when vitally important opportunities for meaningful communication and therapeutic work arise. The same can be said for drives undertaken as part of ongoing casework. The paper traces the historical emergence and development of the car in social work and child welfare and shows how academic and practitioner accounts of work with children in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s gave prominence to experiences in cars. While such insights have mostly been lost today, the car is as important as ever in child welfare practice. The paper aims to rehabilitate – or perhaps recondition – the car in social care work, both as an object that is crucial t...

Research into social work practice and inquiries into cases in which practitioners are deemed to have failed to protect children and vulnerable adults are predominantly focused on examining and changing organisational systems and inter-professional communication. This leaves largely unaddressed practitioners' experiences of the work they have to do that goes on beyond the office, on the street and in doing the home visit. In providing such an analysis, the paper argues that we need to think about social work in terms of the walks and other bodily movements that are required on the streets and in the homes of service users and evoke the adventures and atmospheres that deeply influence how the work is carried out. The paper draws theoretically on the new ‘mobilities’ approach and on my research into social workers' experiences of doing the work, past and present. Analysis of the mobile, lived experience of practice enables deeper understandings of risk to emerge-what I call practice risks-which concern whether professionals meet the requirements of good practice by looking around homes, walking towards children to properly see, touch, hear and walk with them to ensure they are fully engaged with and safe, here and now, on this home visit, or in this clinic or hospital ward.

Social work and child protection literature, policy and practice discussions largely ignore the core experience of doing the work. Little attention is given to where it is performed, and in particular, the practice of home visiting and the emotions and challenges of accessing children it gives rise to. Although it is the methodology through which most child protection goes on, the home visit is virtually ignored, as the emphasis in policy and practice texts is increasingly on what happens in the office, at the computer and in inter-agency collaboration. Examining scenes from home visiting practices and child death inquiry reports – Baby Peter, Victoria Climbie and Jasmine Beckford – the paper identifies the core problem of contemporary child protection as being social workers (and other professionals) not moving in rooms or around houses to meaningfully engage with, touch or examine children. Analysing practice through the sociology of ‘mobilities’ and psychodynamic social work theory, the paper provides new ways of understanding social work experience as forms of embodied movement. It uses the concept of ‘containment’ to suggest ways in which practitioners can be supported to use their bodies to move more and better in performing child protection to the benefit of children, other service users and themselves.

Welfare practices are invariably represented in static and sedentary ways and their mobilities ignored. This paper corrects for this by examining the car and auto‐mobility in social work. ...

We have undertaken an ambitious program to visually classify all galaxies in the five CANDELS fields down to H, 15 pages, 14 figures, Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series For access to data tables prior to publication contact jeyhan@astro.rit.edu

This article argues that to provide adequate historical explanations for the maltreatment of children in institutional care it is necessary to ground the analysis fully in the context of the concept of child abuse and definition of childhood that existed at the time, something that many studies fail to do. Drawing primarily on the experience of the Irish industrial schools prior to the 1970s, while most commentators suggest that children were removed into care and treated cruelly because they were poor, there were also many children who entered the industrial schools who had been abused by their parents and welcomed being protected, and the community played a key role in supporting such actions. Children were treated harshly in the industrial schools not only due to their poverty but because they were victims of parental cruelty, which was perceived to have ‘contaminated’ their childhood ‘innocence’. They were treated as the moral dirt of a social order determined to prove its purity and subjected to ethnic cleansing. Prevention of such abuse today requires a radical reconstruction of the traditional status of children in care, while justice and healing for survivors necessitates full remembrance of the totality of the abuse they experienced, and that those responsible are made fully accountable.

Summary This paper re-examines the nature of social work from the perspective of movement and ‘mobilities’. It shows that social work is at all times ‘on the move’, yet theory and analyses of policy and practice largely depict it as static, solid and sedentarist. The paper draws on the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006), through which a concern with flows and movements of people, objects, information, practices, speed and rhythm, with complexity, fluid images and liquid metaphors, is moving to the centre of social theory. An understanding of the ‘liquid’, mobile character of social work means producing accounts which are much closer to what its practices are, how and where they are performed and experienced by service users and professionals, and the opportunities and risks inherent to them. Three key domains of practice—the home visit, the car journey and the office/organization—are examined in terms of the movements that go on in them. Viewed through systemic and complexity theories, it is shown that social work interventions in late-modernity are best understood in terms of a flow of mobile practices between public and private worlds, organizations and the home, at the heart of which is the sensual body of the practitioner on the move.

In recent years, attention to the psychological and emotional aspects of doing child protection has been largely ignored in the literature and squeezed out of understandings of welfare practices. This paper argues for the establishment of a coherent psycho‐social perspective at the core of social work education and practice and in inter‐professional child protection work more generally. Central to this must be recognition of the complexities of service users, especially the challenges of working with resistant and often hostile ‘involuntary clients’ and the impact of violence and other health, safety and contamination fears on the capacities of workers and professional networks to protect children. These issues are grounded in a critical analysis of the Victoria Climbie case and the Laming report into her horrific death which, despite its strengths, presents rational and naive solutions to what must be understood as often irrational and inherently complex psycho‐social processes. A psycho‐social reading o...

This article seeks to lay the foundations for a new, more positive perspective on critical practice, research and learning in social work and social care. A 'critical best practice perspective' seeks to move the literature beyond a 'deficit approach' where the focus is on what does not get done (well), to create a perspective where learning occurs in terms of best practice which is set out as a model for developing systems and practice competencies. This requires a focus on the actual critical practices that are 'best' demonstrating the very practice through which positive outcomes were achieved. A detailed case-study is offered drawn from a large scale research study which typifies how a critical best practice perspective can provide for learning in key areas such as how to engage service users, advocate on their behalf, promote protection, establish empowering relationships and conduct longer-term therapeutic work in an anti oppressive manner. The research method uses critical theory as an interpretative framework for reaching an operational definition of 'excellence' and what is 'best', which is drawn from the perspectives of the range of stakeholders who construct practice. This requires a broadening of the concept of evidence-based practice to include qualitative research methods and the experience of professionals, service users and the production of 'practice-based evidence'.

This article is on the work of the European Research Network on Men in Europe project, “The Social Problem and Societal Problematization of Men and Masculinities” (2000-2003), funded by the European Commission. The Network comprises women and men researchers with a range of disciplinary backgrounds from Estonia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Norway, Poland, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom. The Network's initial focus is on men's relations to home and work, social exclusion, violence, and health. Some of the findings on the Network's fourth phase of work, namely the review of newspaper and media representations of men's practices in the ten countries, are presented. This is the last of four articles reviewing critical studies on men in the ten countries through different methods and approaches.

Questions concerning what it means to be a human agent and the capacities of those who receive welfare services to reflect upon and shape their lives, and the kinds of social conditions which create opportunities for such ‘reflexivity’, have begun to move to the centre of social policy and social work analysis. Using empirical evidence drawn from a study of child and woman protection, this paper argues that, contrary to claims that the concept of self-reflexivity as developed in the work of Beck and Giddens is of little relevance to marginalised citizens, in late-modernity the socially excluded are using social work and welfare services in creative ways to critically engage in life-planning, to find safety and healing. However, the data suggest that much greater specificity is needed in relation to the areas in which it is possible to act to change and develop the self and the social world in late-modernity. The paper argues for a complex theory of agency and reflexivity in welfare discourse which takes account of the intersection of structural disadvantage, intervention practices and personal biography and how people adjust to adversity and cope with toxic experiences and relationships in their lives. This helps to account for the limits to the capacities of agents to reflect and know why they act as they do and their capacities to act destructively, as well as providing for an appreciation of the creative, reflexive welfare subject.

This article is on the work of The European Research Network on Men in Europe project “The Social Problem and Societal Problematization of Men and Masculinities” (2000-2003), funded by the European Commission. The Network comprises women and men researchers with a range of disciplinary backgrounds from Estonia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Norway, Poland, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom. The Network's initial focus is on men's relations to home and work, social exclusion, violences, and health. Some of findings on the Network's second phase of work, namely the review of statistical sources on men's practices in the ten countries, are presented. This is the third of four articles reviewing critical studies on men in the ten countries through different methods and approaches. © 2002, Sage Publications. All rights reserved.

This paper presents a ‘best practice perspective’ on child and family work. This involves moving beyond the ‘deficit perspective’ which dominates how the literature examines practice negatively in terms of what is not being done well to one which sets out best practice positively as a model for learning and developing systems and practice competencies. The paper focuses specifically on the meanings and development of best practice in family support in the context of child protection work. This involves work that is not only sensitive to achieving child protection and empowering practice in the context of power differences, but which meets the challenges of engaging therapeutically with and ultimately helping (often resistant) service users. The paper argues that issues of trauma and healing, and self-actualization more broadly, need to move to the centre of how family support and child protection are theorized and done. The aim should be to promote child protec-tion, welfare and healing through the development of egalitarian relationships in what Giddens calls the ‘democratic family’.

This paper (re)conceptualizes the fundamental concerns of social work in late-modernity as 'life politics'. Drawing on theories of reflexive modernity and risk society, the emergence of life politics is placed in the context of processes of 'individualization', a transformation of intimacy, and a new kind of reflexivity and concern with risk which have moved to the centre of how both institutions and selfhood are constituted today. The paper aims to move understandings of the radical potential of social work beyond a one-dimensional view of power and risk which arises from an over-structural focus on 'emancipatory politics'. At the heart of late-modern life politics, it is argued, is a new relationship between the personal and the political, expertise and lay people, in which social work increasingly takes the form of being a methodology of 'life planning' for late-modern citizens. The paper aims to advance forms of practice which take the life political domain, emotionality and the depth of social relations as their primary focus, thus enhancing the capacities of (vulnerable) clients to practise effective life-planning, find healing and gain mastery over their lives. © 2001 Oxford University Press.

This paper examines the nature of late-modern child protection by placing it in the context of the paradigm of `risk society'. It traces out a structural transformation in the relationship between expertise and lay people that has occurred since the 1970s which resulted in the emergence of child abuse inquiries and new public disclosures of professional ‘failures’'. The dynamic and empowering features of social developments are identified in how institutions, professionals and lay people re-appropriate power, knowledge and reskill themselves. Traditionally repressed problems like child sexual abuse have gained recognition in a context where abused women and children – like all late-modern citizens – are reflexively engaged in constructing their own biographies and using expertise in the planning of their life projects. A radically new professional risk consciousness in child protection is traced to late-modern existential crises associated with death and sexuality and the emergence of manufactured risk, which is known and experienced by social workers as risk in the context of radically uncertain futures for children. Drawing on the work of sociologists of ‘reflexive modernity’, the paper aims to advance our understandings of social work and child protection beyond the one-dimensional focus of post-modernist critics on power, control and bureaucracy to recognize the new opportunities, as well as the dangers, involved in child protection in risk society.

A non-denaturing assay for the determination of potency of a recombinant bovine somatotropin (somidobove) formulated in oleaginous vehicles was developed. In this paper, the optimal conditions for extraction of somidobove from oleaginous vehicle were investigated. Results demonstrated that somidobove monomer, oligomers, and soluble aggregates were quantitatively extracted by borate - ethylenediaminetetraacetate (EDTA) pH 9.5 buffer solution in a VanKel dissolution system at 40°C for 3 hours. The extracted analytes, somidobove monomer, dimer, and soluble aggregates, were separated and determined by using a high performance size exclusion chromatographic system consisting of a TSK G3000SW column and a borate - EDTA buffer (pH 7.3) mobile phase. This method was validated for the effects of buffer type, extraction temperature, extraction time and stirring speed. The average CV of intra- and inter-day precision obtained in this method were 2.3%. The recovery of somidobove monomer was 93.7% with a coef...